Before internet memes, postcards offered a popular, accessible, shareable means to combine image and word. Messages could be as simple as “wish you were here,” but in their “golden age” (circa 1898–1917), postcards provided a powerful way to promote political agendas, writes scholar Kenneth Florey. The golden age neatly coincided with the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and Britain. More than a thousand varieties of pro- and anti-suffrage-themed postcards were produced then, 200 of which are included in “Votes and Petticoats,” a Johns Hopkins University digital collection available on JSTOR. Of these, a significant number, curiously, depict cats—both as women’s pets and as women.
Associations between ladies, cats, and cat ladies—childless and otherwise—are rooted in a long, complicated cultural history. In Edwardian times, cats were linked to women as creatures of the domestic domain: woman was Angel of the House, the cat her companion, both of them sweet, warm, helpful, and cute. At the same time, animal lovers, “spinsters,” and suffragists represented overlapping, suspect categories of womanhood. It’s the perennial paradox in which women find themselves: somehow looked down upon while also placed on a pedestal.
I Want My Vote! Courtesy Votes and Petticoats: Postcards, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.
This postcard captures many of the themes that recur across the collection: it suggests that a woman demanding the vote is as silly as a kitten so doing, their protests as ineffective as the kitten’s mewls. The green, white, and purple stripes behind the kitten were the colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), one of the more militant British suffrage societies. Historian Krista Cowman interprets the sexism in this postcard as infantilizing though not especially cruel. Similarly, Florey describes the use of cats in suffrage postcards as softening a message that might otherwise seem harsh.