The Victorians were very romantic as seen in the wide variety of romantic postcards - sweet, sexy and humorous - available. Some love-and-romance images were real photo postcards, some printed from photographs and some artist-drawn. The sentiments were sometimes intense - more romantic than anything Hallmark has to offer today. However, when it came to marriage, our grandparents and their parents were more practical - and more ambivalent.
In this post, we look at the man's side of things...above are two postcards pointing out what a man was desperately seeking in a wife - domestic services - in addition to sex and romance.
Men pictured doing laundry and attempting to cook for themselves were common illustrations of why a wife was needed. These postcards are plentiful.
However, even getting married didn't guarantee a fellow got the level of services he wanted, as witness the above postcard. Not only is he still trying to cook for himself, he has undarned socks and a baby to care for. That last burden appears in many disgruntled-husband postcards, sometimes with a suffragette theme about the poor husband/father being henpecked by a dominant spouse, being left home by his newly liberated wife or their roles being switched.
This caption above says Puzzle: Find his Mother. Other anti-suffrage postcards ask, Where is my wife?
This harried father wishes he was safely at work. The father-of-six below seems unsure of how he ended up that way.
All in all, the trials of marriage and fatherhood could leave a fellow longing for his single days as shown in the postcard below. Interesting that the image shows him not carousing, but drinking at a bar alone.
PRICE ESTIMATES: Marriage related postcards cost just a few dollars each and they are plentiful. Those that include suffrage or women's rights themes can cost more - up to $20 each. In our next post, we will examine the married state from the woman's point of view. These estimates are for postcards in EXCELLENT condition, and they are only estimates.
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