The media plays a critical role in the symbolic (re)presentation of women and the (re)production of gender identities, roles and stereotypes. Hitherto, extant research has tended to focus on news in the print media whereas political cartoons have received much less scholarly attention. In this paper we examine the ways in which female politicians who were the first women to hold top political offices are portrayed in political cartoons provides. More specifically, we ask: To what extent do women’s breakthroughs in public office merit attention by cartoonists? How are such events constructed symbolically in the cartoons, that is, which meanings do they seek to condense and evoke? Which are the framing devices used by cartoonists in the (re)presentation of women’s political firsts? In addressing these questions we focus on political cartoons representing national and sub-national female political firsts in Spain. Our results show that, although the irruption of female firsts in politics is generally captured by the cartoons, a significant amount of the satirical vignettes rests on women’s physical appearance and private decisions affecting their family life that very often do not comply with traditional gender expectations. While the satirization of such social gendered norms can be themselves positively evaluated, the symbolic construction of politics may still perpetuate a public perception of this arena being constitutively male, with women’s political gains entailing a transgression of gendered behavior. Overall, political cartoons dramatically fail to expand the social meaning of women in politics and of gender and politics.
