“The rough contests of the political world are not suited to the dignity and the delicacy of your sex.”-Daniel Webster (lawyer, congressperson, and statesperson)

“If woman enters politics, she will be sure to carry away on her some of the mud and dirt of political contact.”-Cardinal James Gibbons (Catholic archbishop and the youngest prelate at the First Vatican Council)

“Woman accepts the irrevocable decree which made her woman and not man. Something in between she cannot be.”-Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (celebrated clinician and neurologist)

These are just a few views of prominent anti-woman suffrage voices at the time when the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company produced a twelve-card set of color postcards opposing woman suffrage in 1909. During this “golden age of postcards”, both sides of  the woman suffrage controversy were documented. We found 7 of the 12 Dunston-Weiler postcards in the Smith College Archives and were immediately struck by the vivid colors and eye-catching titles. Though there is much anti-woman suffrage iconography, we have focused our project on the Dunston-Weiler collection to keep our work on the subject uniform.  The majority of research done on these postcards is by Catherine H. Palczewski. Her article “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards” was most helpful to us while we worked on this project. Learn more about our project here. View the postcard analyses here.

This project was put together by Kelsey Christenson, Rebecca Firkser, and Ashley Temple. We are not associated with Palczewski or her paper. We do not own any images featured on this site. All images are property of: Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA.