Vintage Anti-Suffragette Postcards

Sociological Images has posted some interesting postcards that were campaigning against women’s suffrage.

I find it fascinating that the implicit argument in these images is something like, “We can’t give women the same rights and privileges that we have, because then they might try to do to us what we have been doing to them, and that is just INHUMANE.”

I know the last bit doesn’t follow unless you have an essentialized view of gender where somehow it is natural and proper for women to wash clothes and babysit, but it is improper and dehumanizing for men to do it.

I just find it funny, especially with the postcard of the three women sitting around a table play cards, smoking and complaining about their lazy husbands.  There is an admission here of, “Yes, we men sit on our asses while our wives do all the work, but that is our RIGHT as men and husbands.  When THEY do it, it’s NOT FAIR and UNNATURAL.”

It’s amusing (in a sad way) to realize that the whole “equality for everyone!” slogan is so easily amended by the exception: “well, not for those people whose natural place is somewhere lower on the hierarchy.”  Or nowadays, it’s more “Equality for everyone–except for those who haven’t really earned it.”

Shameless on the AGO’s unibrow stunt

To promote its special exhibit on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario has been handing out stick-on unibrows and photographing patrons wearing them. Here is a nicely trenchant response from the awesome feminist youth mag, Shameless. (It really is awesome, by the way. Consider buying subscriptions for the youths in your life!)

Here’s a taste:

I hate to be a joykill, here, AGO, but since when did celebrating an artist who challenged our ideas of feminine beauty by refusing to change the way she looked involve breaking her down through the implicit public ridicule of her appearance? Over the course of her lifetime and afterwards, Frida Kahlo’s unibrow was viewed as many things–striking, daring, odd, challenging, coy, studied, bold, memorable, and the reason why so many men fell love with her–but never as a city-wide joke. Why start now?

Thanks, LD!

Reader query: women and sport

A reader writes:

I’m teaching a “Sport and Gender” course for Women’s and Gender Studies in the spring semester and am gathering suggestions for readings. Any help you could offer would be great.