There’s an interesting piece over on Collectors Weekly about those anti-Suffragette postcards I sometimes use to illustrate my posts here. (Thanks to Jezebel for the link; I’m not exactly a regular reader of Collectors Weekly.) Lisa Hix puts the cards in context, offering a sort of mini-history of the suffragette movement in the process, and notes that the cards present some of the often contradictory “arguments” still used against feminism today.
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. …
“Married Suffragettes were depicted as nagging wives, that was a common one, and the wife was always big, and the husband tiny and puny,” [historian June] 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.”
That all sounds a bit familiar, huh?
Here’s are some classic portrayals of Suffragettes as ugly spinsters:
And one depicting Suffragettes as attractive women using their sexual wiles to control men:
Other postcards depicted Suffragettes as children, often whiny babies:
Manosphere dudes are similarly fond of depicting feminists, and women in general, as flighty, irresponsible children.
For more anti-Suffragette postcards, see:
Catherine H. Palczewski’s Suffrage Postcard Archive
June Purvis’ BBC History slideshow
The Woman Suffrage Memorabilia site
This feature on Brain Pickings
And this giant gallery assembled by the misogynistic antifeminist who calls himself Patriactionary.
Thanks, Mr. Patriactionary, for reminding us how completely backwards you guys are. Not that we really needed reminding.
That second postcard – women are “things” – misogyny doesn’t change, does it?
What a cry-baby, wanting to vote. Mature people are willing to accept the benevolent yoke of despotism.
So feminists are both hideous eyesores and sexy temptresses? Truly these are the spiritual forefathers of the MRM.
The more things change…
The ones with the cats are the best.
Although that “We don’t care if we never have a vote” one reminds me of Meller. *shudder*
Also, I note that Patriactionary’s definition of “shrieking” appears to be “a woman writing and/or saying something.”
It’s baldly untrue, but you must forgive him—his irrational, testerical man-brain prevents him from discerning anything in more than one or two gradations between black and white.
The last postcard in that column I find very engaging. (It’s a little girl sneaking into a little boy’s room as the boy sleeps, and stealing his pants. It’s captioned, “What a chance!”)
Despite the message of the card (If you give women the vote, next they’ll want to wear pants! Horror!), the artwork is appealing, the young girl is not a snaggle-toothed hag like in the rest of the cards, and I find myself rooting for her — Go! Go! No one can stop you!
It’s quite an odd duck, in comparison to the others. Its message seems to be mixed, rather than ambivalent (like the woman being carried off by the PC).
Jesus!
You must check out AVFM’s newest poster designs:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/activism/on-posters-and-red-pills/
Feminism as represented by a unicorn, a box of tissues, a box cutter, and a cupcake.
At least the anti-suffragists were intelligible.
That’s the problem with a group that discourages people from thinking outside their website. You get all kinds of in-jokes and references that outgroup people won’t get, and then you get an incomprehensible poster that the average person is going to look at and wonder what the boxcutter has to do with the cupcake.
Some of those which the boob known as Patriactionary has collected together are great, I would quite like a poster of the Suffragette Madonna. Or The Wild Rose Which Requires Careful Handling. Although it’s weird that I’m finding those amusing from a “look how far we’ve come” ironic angle and he’s finding it amusing because his sense of humor is an heirloom from his great great grandfather and he’s careful to keep it fastidiously maintained in its original condition.
Of course some of the images he’s collected would not make for fun posters, because they are simply depictions of women being tortured like it’s something awesome. It’s just par for the course for MRAs to take pleasure in that. Because they’re not a hate movement, they just play one on the internet.
Oh God.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/portal/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Drivers_Wanted_final.pdf
You get one guess what the QR code says. I had to scan it just to make sure, and now I can’t stop laughing.
What is it with the ducks around here lately?!!???!??
AlexB, tell us, my phone’s dead!
It is kind of sad to look back and see that many people haven’t changed at all. The art and typography seems largely much better than what the MRM puts out now a days though.
And at least the anti-suffragettes seem to easily admit that the woman’s job at home is A LOT of hard work (as the men depicted can’t handle it at all). Guess the bon bon thing is a new one.
The House That Man Built ones seem particularly akin to MRA talking points.
My fave: http://patriactionary.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/54.jpg
They’re also putting it down as unworthy of men – only weaklings and feeble men actually allow themselves to be degraded by doing “women’s work”.
Oh, it’s just the same URL they printed several hundred times on the poster. It’s only funny from the perspective where they have 3/4 of a whole POSTER that just says avoiceformen.com over and over and over and over and over and you finally see the high-tech squiggle in the bottom right and you’re sort of expecting that surely they might have done something more with that than just writing avoiceformen,com one last time, but you know they didn’t. And then they didn’t.
Oh yeah its definitely depicted as the most awful and degrading thing ever for a man to feed a baby or do laundry, I can”t help but laugh at the silliness though.
But in a way they were right. After women became more equal in society men and women started sharing household and child rearing and women could wear pants and work in politics. Difference is, its not the end of the world! (I promise MRAs. It’s not).
They’re the new mascots of feminism! AVfM missed the boat on that poster. They should have put a mallard in that one quarter instead of the unicorn.
We have already established that the MRM has no good graphic designers. Manboobzers, however, are amazing graphic designers.
😀
Why are the suffragette’s noses red?
MizDarwin, I tried to go look at AVfM’s drop–offerings but my browser killed itself rather than load them. Seriously.
(Perhaps this means be cautious loading the site if there’s malware or something. Or maybe they can just detect feminist invaders now.)
It really says something about the antifeminist “movement” when they are still using er…arguments and viewpoints from their grandparents era. Is novelty frowned on in MRA circles?
“Is novelty frowned on in MRA circles?”
They are conservative reactionaries, at least on this particular issue, so I’d assume so.
@long time lurker
I’ve no idea, particularly seeing as the suffragettes and the temperance movement in the USA had quite a substantial overlap.
Most things are.
@cloudiah
Well, we do have Quackers and lowquacks here in this feminist stronghold. Granted, “lowquacks” is a Joyce/cassowary reference, and I haven’t seen Quackers around for a bit (I miss her 🙁 ), but still.