Postcards and the New York Suffrage Movement

Abstract

Postcards and the New York Suffrage Movement Kenneth Florey (bio) In the decade or so that preceded the adoption of the Woman Suffrage Amendment in 1920, there was a surge in the number of suffrage-themed postcards that appeared nationally, with New York publishers leading the charge. The popularity of suffrage cards was consistent with the desire of many suffragists to develop new means of communicating with the public beyond speeches and tracts. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, for example, focus on the developing efforts of Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party (NWP) to introduce "visual rhetoric" into the campaign through various forms of "street theatre," including parades, hunger strikes, and picketing,1 activities that could be supplemented by depicting them on postcards. Margaret Finnegan has studied the way many suffragists, attempting to make their messages more effective, also incorporated modern methods of advertising and mass marketing to appeal to an audience now influenced by "consumer capitalism." This appeal partially involved the merchandising of commodities, including badges, pins, and postcards. While postcards and other memorabilia could convey diverse meanings to different people, "postcards showing a long brigade of women marching in unity for suffrage deliver an impressive message of political commitment and courage."2 Postcards were "texts" whose illustrations, sometimes highly artistic, sometimes crudely amateurish, elicited emotive responses from suffragists and anti-suffragists alike. They also conveyed in Ian McDonald's words, "a contemporary commentary on many of the events of the campaign for women's votes."3 They were published by both suffragists and commercial [End Page 441] firms as well, although the productions of the latter often were extremely unflattering to the movement, portraying activists as dowdy harridans or naïve ingénues. More than other types of period memorabilia such as buttons, sashes, ribbons, and china, postcards convey the complexity of both suffragist demands and public responses. They contain "critical sub-texts that seldom found voice in argument and debate."4 To gain a more thorough understanding of the movement during this period, it is helpful to "read" and evaluate these alternative texts, a task that has been made difficult in the past because of their lack of general availability to the suffrage scholar. This situation has been alleviated somewhat recently by the appearance of several books and on-line sites picturing representative collections of suffrage cards,5 although their general significance still remains a rich topic for discussion and analysis. In publishing postcards, suffragists were cleverly exploiting a popular phenomenon, one that impacted American culture in a far more profound way than other suffrage memorabilia. New York publishers were not appreciably different from out-of-state firms in the way they depicted the themes, images, and arguments of suffrage. Their large number, though, and their proximity to several major suffrage organizations in the State helped place them in the forefront of a popular new way to disseminate both pro- and anti-suffragist ideology. Deltiologists refer to the period lasting from 1898–1917 as the "Golden Age of Postcards," when the sending, receiving, and collecting of all types of cards, suffrage related or not, became an international phenomenon.6 The "Golden Age" began at slightly different times in different countries, and its inception was precipitated by a variety of factors. These included [End Page 442] the introduction of cheaper postal rates for privately printed cards; developments in the printing process that made it possible for illustrations to become more attractive and colorful;7 and changes in postal regulations that created additional space on cards for both personal and printed messages.8 The total number of postcards that was produced both nationally and internationally during this period is staggering. Susan Brown Nicholson suggests that "billions" were mailed throughout the world prior to 1918; Frederick T. Corkett in 1907 posited that more than one billion cards prior to 1903 had been processed through the German Post Office alone; and Howard Woody noted that in 1909 the British Post Office had sold 833 million stamps for postcards, or the equivalent of 20 cards for every man, woman, and child living in the United Kingdom.9 The printing of cards declined considerably in Europe in 1914 with...