A Purrrrfect Political Storm

Long before memes, the picture postcard was how people mixed images with a quick message and passed it along. During the format’s heyday, roughly the two decades before World War I, it also became a vehicle for political persuasion, as scholar Kenneth Florey showsJ.

That boom overlapped with the peak of the suffrage campaigns in Britain and the United States. Of the many cards made on both sides of the question, a striking number feature cats, cast either as women’s companions or as stand-ins for women themselves.

The pairing of women and cats has a long and tangled history. In the Edwardian imagination, both belonged to the home: gentle, decorative, comforting. Yet animal lovers, unmarried women, and suffragists were also lumped together as suspect figures, admired and dismissed at once.

Many cards treat a woman asking for the ballot as no more serious than a kitten mewing, set against the colors of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, a reading historian Krista Cowman offersJ.

Other images are harder to pin down. A well-fed cat in WSPU colors and an extravagant hat may have been meant to mock suffragists as pamperedJ, but its steady gaze and raised paw carry a dignity that supporters could just as easily have claimed.

Editor’s note: The kittens in the voting-line photograph were live animals photographed by Harry Whittier Frees, not taxidermy. The text has been updated to reflect this.