My PhD research focusses on several themes that emerge in ‘comic’ anti-suffrage / anti-women postcards produced by private companies between 1900 and 1930, and also examines the handwritten messages on the back of the postcards to add insight into societal attitudes at the time.
There is a lot to say! As well as providing the context for such a widespread public appetite for these postcards (millions were posted and collected during this time), I’ve structured my main chapters to cover: Gender Violence, Domestic Chaos, Women at Work, and Fashion / Dress. Throughout, there are common tropes: the ridiculing of women; the caricaturing of suffrage activists as old, conventionally unattractive and aggressive, and the misogynistic vilification of women who are considered to have too much to say – women’s tongues are grossly oversized, serpent-like, or subject to extreme violent acts, and the notion of ‘nagging’ is a repeated theme across the postcards.
Even Valentine’s Day provided a commercial opportunity for postcard manufacturers to repeat this recurring theme and send the message that women’s mouths – what they represent, what they say, and their demands (such as they stray from normative expectations) – are a problem (especially as far as men are concerned) that can and must be silenced. There is an irony here that, on one hand, these unruly mouths of women must be violently forced shut if / in case they spout words that need to be stopped, but on the other hand, when these mouths refuse food as part of the suffragettes’ hunger strike strategy, they must be violently forced open.
Love and courtship also feature, and we see contemporary events reflected. The two postcards below were produced during World War One, a time when women stepped into work roles traditionally held by men who were now fighting. A frisson, perhaps, of lesbian romance, but a suggestion too of the momentary ridiculousness of that notion. I am intrigued by the message written on the back of the postcard on the right, ‘Dear Dora, Just a line to let you know I am thinking of you at Blackburn. How is it weaving. All the engine tenters are on strike here. I wonder if yours are. With love, Nellie’. I know nothing more of the lives of Dora or Nellie, but Nellie signs off with an abundant 18 kisses to Dora on the bottom of the card. Now, I think that’s romantic.
Published by Bamforth & Co. Ltd. Artist: Douglas Tempest. From the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library
