Tag: provenance

Penny Provocations

Beware! This is what the vote will do to husbands. Four cards from a strange 1909 anti-suffrage series.

Today, we’re looking at four rare postcards from a twelve-card series published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York in 1909. The complete set buffoons the women’s suffrage movement through role-reversal cartoons depicting men holding babies and scrubbing on washboards. The popular message was that women would be turned masculine, greedy, uncaring, and unfaithful once given the vote. Our grouping includes card numbers 1, 3, 4, and 10. The most emblematic is Suffragette Madonna, which has been the focus of substantial scholarship.

A man stands in three-quarter view, dark hair combed back, a thin mustache. He cradles an infant against his shoulder with one arm. He wears a white pinstriped shirt, cuffs fastened with round studs, a red necktie, and a wide red sash draped diagonally across his chest. The infant, dressed in a white slip with pink ribboned booties, drinks from a small bottle held in the man's free hand. Behind his head sits a circular gold medallion ringed with a laurel wreath, forming a halo. A blue paneled backdrop holds two dark ceramic vessels on a shelf, one on either side of the halo.
A man in a floral red-and-white patterned robe, cinched with a tasseled cord belt, holds two crying infants in white gowns against his chest. His brow is drawn, his expression strained. In the upper left corner, a circular inset vignette shows a woman addressing a crowd from a bunting-draped stage under the caption "Let the Women Run the Government," with an American flag and a pitcher and glass on the speaker's table.
A young woman stands facing forward, dark hair pinned beneath an oversized straw hat banded in yellow with a large red bow at the crown. She wears a puff-sleeved white blouse tucked into blue denim overalls, hands in the front pockets. Red-and-white polka-dot stockings show above black heeled shoes trimmed with small red bows. A ruled vertical-line pattern fills the background panel behind her.
A couple seen from behind, mid-embrace. The man wears a brown suit; his bowler hat falls from his head and his walking stick drops from his hand in a gesture of surprise. The woman wears a long red coat-dress with a row of covered buttons down the back and an oversized black hat trimmed in pink roses. Her skirt has swept up with the motion, showing a white ruffled petticoat and a stockinged leg above a black heeled shoe.

Each card colorfully illustrates the presumed ill-effects of role reversal in a domestic or civic scene. Men feed infants, wash clothes, or otherwise occupy the era-assigned roles for women. Meanwhile, women take on masculine dress, public authority, and open flirtation.

In the first card, a father poses as a religious icon, complete with laurel leaves and halo, while nursing a baby with a bottle. Another card repeats the theme with a father annoyed by two crying infants. A tiny inset shows his wife commanding a political rally and calling for women to run government. The next card puts a young woman in coveralls under an enormous flopping hat, garments that speak to independence, work, and whimsy unbecoming of a lady. The last card shows a couple mid-embrace, with a headline suggesting sexual favors as an easy vote-getting behavior.

Across all four postcards, the palette includes saturated reds, blues, and golds, with exaggerated Edwardian dress rendered in the exacting art of lithographic printing. Though intentionally brusque, the cards were considered beautiful and humorous for obvious and covert reasons. Captions run along the bottom border in bold sans-serif type, and do as much comic work as the illustrations themselves.

All four cards are chromolithographs published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York, copyrighted 1909. Three of these cards carry a gold-toned outer border created with the bronzing technique described in Gilded Goods. The fourth uses a plain blue-ruled border with no metallic finish. Each card includes a series number, a title band, and a copyright line naming the publisher.

These cards are unused and uncancelled, double-matted and handsomely framed, with only minor softening of corners. Each card alone is considered rare and small sets in presentation format are uncommon in the marketplace. Several complete sets are held in public and private collections. Catherine Palczewski’s 2005 academic essay in Quarterly Journal of Speech increases demand and value for these items compared to similar postcards of the era.

Four antique postcards displayed together in an ornate gilt wood frame with a wide cream mat, arranged left to right: Suffragette Madonna, Where Oh Where Is My Wandering Wife Tonight, Pantalette Suffragette in the Sweet Bye and Bye, and Suffragette Vote-Getting the Easiest Way. Each card sits in its own beveled mat opening within a scalloped, floral-carved gold frame.

Subject, scarcity, provenance, and condition are the top variables that govern the market value for vintage postcards, but serious academic attention changes the equation. Once Palczewski examined this set and published an article, they went from cultural detritus to a documented contribution to the historical record. Palczewski identified the visual tropes (a male Madonna and feminized Uncle Sam), connected them to the verbal rhetoric of the anti-suffrage movement, and lent theory and vocabulary for later researchers and collectors to better interpret the materials.

Provenance, in this instance, is not just about who created or owned an object. It is also about who has looked at it seriously and left notes. A card with a known scholarly citation carries a paper trail that an anonymous postcard never gets. It brings it out of obscurity and into a realm of the studied object. From there, new analysis has a footing and further creative work may be inspired, too.

None of this changes the material object, a piece of lithographed cardstock, printed and mailed for a penny in 1909. What scholarship changes is the frame around it and what we can make of it today. Out of the thousands of anti-suffrage postcards produced in that era, these ones are still worth examining more than a century later.

To Read More

People Past

Last week, buildings emerged and oil derricks erupted. Evidence accumulated, context implied. An unknown town takes shape and we surmise. Now, people stare across a century and time flies.

Seven adults carefully arranged on a rocky outcrop. Three men, four women. Two children in white dresses seated in front. Twins? Cousins? Someone operated the camera.

We see the composition and relational questions arise. Are they family? Kin? Friends on an outing? Do the poses suggest occasion, or documentation?

Evidence ends and story begins. We fill in by reading subtle cues in how they stand, who touches whom, which faces seem to fit together. Clues come quietly and mistakes, too. Always, we’re revealing ourselves.

Here we see one girl, three moments, and years passing. The baby stares out with solemn intensity. Then she’s older, on a throne in white dress, commanding the frame. Finally she’s the eldest of four, and her protective gaze tells all.

The postcards show her time moving, roles shifting. She grows and gains presence. She becomes a big sister, then a bigger sister still.

The postcards show the sequence and the story intrudes. We can safely assume the scenario, the kinship, the birth order. But then we imagine her. She and her siblings stand as evidence. We provide the narrative.

Now nine men, perched around a large rock on uneven ground in a forest, maybe a park. Hats, a variety of ties, white shirts in sunlight. Ages range. Some engage the camera. Others look away.

Compare this to the first photograph. Similar outdoor setting and careful arrangement. Same paper stock, same photographic quality. Do any faces repeat? That man in the center looking off to the distance—could he be the man on the back left of the family group?

We squint. The shape of a jaw, the set of shoulders, the tilt of a head. Errors lead us toward other observations. Misreads become clues. We’re searching, and trying out plausible connections.

A different girl and a similar progression (maybe). The baby carriage can be dated within a range, 1915-1925. Fashions shift slowly in some places, rapidly in others, but period details do show. Those bows!

However, uncertainties hover. Is this the eldest girl growing up? Or, are we forcing connection where none exists? The bobbed hairstyles might give it away. Or they might mislead entirely.

A particular stare, a nose ridge, an anomaly at the jawline, and we are on the pursuit again. The faces echo. Three generations, or two. We assign roles: son, mother, daughter. Sisters?

The oval portrait shows four women arranged in a formal cluster. Elaborate hairstyles, high collars, cameo brooch visible on the seated figure. More prosperous, perhaps. Different family entirely, or different branch? Is she at the center the same as the older woman below? We cannot know.

In between the guesses, a different story emerges entirely. Our own families, and that we belonged. Or, that we confidently walked on. In either case, we are humming with history.

We’re deep in assumption now. Building genealogies from facial features, paper stock, and similar poses. The archives encourage it. These cards traveled together. Someone kept them together. The connections existed, however disassembled.

Another baby carriage, different from the first. And on the back of the card, handwriting: this is Irene with Willie’s baby, sent to Aunt Fannie. We know Irene from when she was four, seated with Uncle Rufus Dale, 84.

What satisfaction, when a storyline clings together. Names accumulate. Groups delineate. Relationships clarify. The archive speaks back, and the story begins to imitate fact.

The search becomes research. The archive rewards our attention and budding accuracy. But, who doesn’t love Aunt Fannie? Even if we’ve never seen her.

Now, here is Irene amid two new figures who appear to have a strong bond. Sisters? Friends?

As we might expect, there is more to reveal. Next week, we’ll look at pairings in quite a variety, and even more merry misleads. Then portraits, and finally, a grave.

Places Past

One enigmatic postcard album is my companion for the next three weeks. Pages of rare black & white photos tell of people, places, and property, but with scant details of who they are, where they are, or what is happening. The past is present in these images, but not at all reliable.

It may seem too obvious to point out, but postcards move around over time. Cherished memories first organized in a new, handsome album sit in the front room for a decade or more before migrating to a study drawer, a garage, or a dusty attic.

If the album is later unearthed or given away, a collector might save it as an artifact of a bygone time. Or, they could pull it apart (mercilessly) to be sorted again into categories by geography or historical era.

After one collector is gone, the sifting and sorting can be nonsensical and misleading. Storylines get separated, and suddenly history relies on little more than a few questionable clues.

Landscapes get lost first, along with the creatures that inhabit them. The wolf, the moose, the fawn, and the prairie dogs in the snow were known only briefly to the soul who got the shot. To us, they are familiar ghosts.

And, what about the trees, the lakes, the frozen road, and the sandstone tunnel? I know they were likely loved in their day. Still there? Maybe. The tunnel could elicit some belabored guesswork. But, why?

I’ll be walking in the trees quite a bit in the next three weeks, taking pictures that I will share liberally on social media and won’t label properly. I doubt it would bother you. After a century or so, we can live with anonymous scenery and abstract wildlife. A picture can lose its place.

But, there is a certain creative tension ahead when it comes to people and property. The desire for a real story gets stronger, to find the ‘where’ there. Who are they, and what can they say about us now? Despite the lack of evidence, we can’t help searching. Stay tuned.