Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/13/anti-suffragette-postcards-war.html
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As with many moral panics, the underlying fear seems to be that the other will treat you like you treat them:
On the other hand, opposition to women’s suffrage wasn’t all male.
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I thought the same, imo the most weird postcard is this one - with reverted roles everything would be totally a-ok?
Your last posted one is excellent, too. “I want to vote but my wife wont let me”? dafuq, this is not even an argument without content but plain stupid
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Of course not. In a deeply unequal situation, there are always a few members of the oppressed group who are elevated above the other members of their group for the express purpose of keeping the rest down. Look at the remarkable career of Phyllis Schlafly or the whole Lean In crap.
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What fools we were! If only we had heeded these warnings!
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I’m remembering the comment in the Handmaid’s Tale that was pretty much directly targeted at Phyllis–“How angry she must be now, to have been taken at her word.”
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The first few times I saw Mary Poppins I was too young to understand that this had ever been controversial. And even now I don’t understand why.
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Needs a rimshot! Got a Henny Youngman tone to it.
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Ahhh, and a hundred years later the embodiment of the political attitude of “Any woman opposes me is an ugly, stupid, lonely person who is jealous of me/wants to fuck me” is now locked in battle for the title of leader of America with a woman who has weathered these abuses for decades. The war that was begun with these postcards will finally have its climactic battle in November. A fitting centenary, to be sure.
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I like your glass-half-full thinking. What comes to my mind is that women getting the vote was merely a battle that was won but the war rages on.
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People have forgotten about all that now, but at the time it was quite terrible. Society virtually ground to a halt. How could it not, with everybody breaking out in to song every ten minutes?
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I love how one of the main themes is that if women get to vote men end up looking after children.
THE HORROR!
But, you know, kudos to them for getting it right.
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Treating the other as you treat them…wow dood. that’s brilliant.
How have I never put it quite like that?
I wish I could double like your post
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Masculinity is so fragile. You don’t know the manly struggle. Women voting, driving cars, serving in the military… What’s next women in space?? OH THE HUMANITY
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From a century hence? How does this happen? We need to organize now, to make sure this retro-idiocy never comes to pass.
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Yeah, there’s so much male insecurity on display in these - not just that, but also the fear that perhaps men aren’t better suited to running government, that perhaps they are brutish, irrelevant, etc. and women would do at least as good a job. It reminds me of studies that show that if white people think about becoming a minority in the US, it makes them more racist - unless you point out that they are still likely to maintain their privilege. People with privilege recognize it and really don’t want to lose it, even when they claim they don’t have any.
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I think that given time and similar opportunities, women are quite capable of doing as bad a job of running government as men are. We’ll have to see how things work out in the UK and US over the next few years, I guess. 
But where there’s inequality and political power is only held by white men, it certainly doesn’t suggest that those in power will be the best or that they will have any motivation to represent everyone’s interests.
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