http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/war-on-women-waged-in-postcards-memes-from-the-suffragist-era/

War on Women, Waged in Postcards: Memes From the Suffragist Era

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Suffragettes were drawn as conniving coquettes, ugly, mean spinsters or, worse, ugly, mean wives who left their families helpless as they attended town-hall meetings. Scenes of women politicians showed them hatching diabolical plots to undermine and emasculate men further. In England, particularly offensive cards took sadomasochistic delight in the force-feeding, while sympathetic cards depicted women as beat-up cats, referring to the Cat and Mouse Act.

“Married Suffragettes were depicted as nagging wives, that was a common one, and the wife was always big, and the husband tiny and puny,” Purvis says. “Or, if they were single, Suffragettes were depicted as very ugly women with big feet, protruding teeth, hair pulled back in a bun, and glasses. They were depicted as quite mannish and unattractive so that no man would want to marry them.”

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At least, five motto postcards issued by the NAWSA talk about working women paying the same taxes as men, and therefore, deserving the same rights. But Palczewski says that in the United States, working-class women were not as much part of the movement as middle-class white women.

“What women are we talking about?” Palczewski says. “Slaves always worked, without pay. Poor women worked in factories. But the proof of a white man’s manliness was that his wife didn’t have to work. So in the U.S., suffrage was framed as a middle- and upper-class white woman’s struggle. What woman would see she could have been a captain of industry, lawyer, or politician if she were a man? White, privileged women saw that sex was the thing that was keeping them back. For women of color, poor women, immigrant women, it was a constellation of things that impacted their standing in society.”

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