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.
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.
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
- Palczewski, Catherine H., “The Male Madonna And The Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards” (2005). https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/2905
- Catherine H. Palczewski Postcard Archive, at the University of Northern Iowa, includes a dedicated Dunston-Weiler section with most of the twelve cards digitized front and back.
- Votes & Petticoats, at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, features a curated exhibit of anti-suffrage postcard sets.
- A Purrrrfect Political Storm, JSTOR Daily’s essay on the cat-and-dog symbolism running through related anti-suffrage postcards.
- Ann Lewis Women’s Suffrage Collection is a large private collection with more than 200 entries on feminist and anti-feminist postcards.
- Carpe Librum Books, a rare-book dealer’s listing for a complete set of twelve Dunston-Weiler cards.
