Tag: Rare Postcards

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.

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Navarro Tomorrow

In 1943, director Emilio Fernández was filming a scene much like this one on the flower canals of Xochimilco in Mexico City. His film, María Candelaria, would win the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year and launch the golden age of Mexican cinema, introducing a spare and stylized visual landscape that rested in reverence for the country’s Purépecha past.

This flower boat image is another to emerge from an album of old black and white photographs from mid-century in the Michoacán region of Mexico. The photos may or may not belong to the same set. Only a few spare clues suggest any connection at all.

Tomorrow, I head down to the National Archives Reading Room at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC, to finally open Folder 7 in Box 9, the trove of Navarro materials that I hope may reveal more about our enigmatic photographer.

I’ve order an additional five boxes of materials from the Foshag archives, correspondence and comparative images that may give us more context for the post-war decade that brought intense global attention to an otherwise quiet region of the world.

Political foment, modern artistic aspirations, scientific discovery, and the earth itself churning below. Let’s follow where Navarro goes next.

Petley Postcards

A stash of Petley postcards shows Arizona at its mid-century most.

Bob Petley launched Petley Studios in 1945 with twelve comic postcards. Then, he spent the next four decades photographing the mid-century Southwest from behind a windshield. As I catalogue our Arizona collection, it seems every other card is a Petley production.

Bob Petley was born in 1912 in Akron, Ohio. His father developed products for Goodrich Tire and Rubber, including an early balloon tire. Bob drew posters, threw javelin, and boxed. Arthritis brought him to Arizona in 1943. He took a job in display advertising at the Arizona Republic and left it two years later. In 1945, with wartime travel restrictions lifting, he launched Petley Studios, Inc. from his home.

The first cards sold fast, and Petley had wanderlust. He loaded a station wagon with camera equipment and stopped at hotels, restaurants, motor lodges, civic buildings, desert overlooks, and canyon rims. He met people and made deals along the way. He later traded the wagon for a Lincoln Continental, but the method stayed the same: one man, a camera, every road in Arizona.

Petley Studios and mid-century Arizona grew up together. Bob started shooting in 1945. Over the next four decades, Arizona’s population tripled. New hotels opened in Phoenix and Scottsdale. Civic buildings went up in Tucson. Motor courts lined the highway approaches to every city. Petley photographed all of it. At its peak, the company sold more than 25,000,000 cards annually through roughly 3,500 dealers across Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, southwestern Colorado, and eastern California. The catalog reached more than 1,100 known designs for Arizona alone.

Petley was the first postcard publisher to use a Kodak Kodachrome negative for production. Those burnt oranges, deep turquoises, and brilliant blues are not retouched. Kodachrome produced them. A Petley scenic held next to a competing card from the same decade is warmer and more saturated.

The small set here is just the beginning of the sorting and sifting ahead. It’s a short stack by Arizona city. Indian Pipe Cactus National Monument visitor center shows a a flat-roofed brick federal building with breeze-block detailing and 1960s cars in the lot. A Tucson pool scene with the saturated horizontals of a resort afternoon. A Slo-Motion golf cart, straight from the promotional playbook of Sunbelt leisure culture. Hotels, restaurants, and scenic views fill the rest.

Petley sold the business in 1984. He died in Scottsdale in 2006 at 93. Several of his original comic cards are now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Individual cards regularly trade for their enduring content and collectible nature, but no single institution holds a comprehensive set. In 1994, the Tucson Post Card Exchange Club arrived at just over 160 designs, but never the definitive collection.

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