DownWithTyranny!: Doonesbury Watch: When Joanie Caucus applied to law school

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Doonesbury Watch: When Joanie Caucus applied to law school

DOONESBURY -- Way back when

DOONESBURY -- Friday, February 8, 2013

Top: When last we left "historic" Joanie, she'd entered the day-care industry at Walden commune. Bottom: Latter-day Joanie is feeling the pressure of her new job -- as by far the oldest member of Elizabeth Warren's Senate staff. Here, even much-loved granddaughter Alex has trouble getting through. (Alex has since given birth to twins, making Joanie a great-grandmother.) [Click on either strip to enlarge.]

by Ken

It didn't occur to me until I began sifting through these voluminous "flashbacks" Garry Trudeau has been ~~dumping on~~ sharing with us that Joanie Caucus may be my favorite Doonesbury character. My goodness, she has just been through so much.

In March ("Our own Doonesbury flashback: When Joanie Caucus joined Elizabeth Warren's Senate staff") we caught up with Joanie starting and then getting the hang of her new job. Then in April we were able to go back almost all the way to the beginning: "When the young(er) Joanie Caucus met up with the Doonesbury gang," having just left her husband Clinton. This week Garry T took us back to the time when Joanie made the fateful decision to go to law school. The initial returns, as we see, were not encouraging.

Here's the portion of Joanie's Wikipedia bio we need to bring us up to date (note that the links for Mike and Mark are to their real Wikipedia bios):

Joanie Caucus is a fictional character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.

She first appeared in September 1972 in which she has a fight with her husband, Clinton, over her rights as a woman. She finds that her recently acquired feminist beliefs clash with his idea of how a wife should behave, and she promptly walks out on him. She catches a ride with Mike Doonesbury and Mark Slackmeyer, who happen to be traveling cross-country on motorcycle at the time, and travels with them back to Walden Commune.

There she spends several years living with the other characters while running a day-care service for local children (whose parents often aren't too thrilled when their little girls came home talking about Women's Rights). While running Walden Day Care, Caucus sends off applications to several real-life law schools (whose actual students petitioned the schools to accept her as a student).