I know you were yearning to see the next installment of my list of presidential conspiracies, but I didn’t plan to fill this space with that until we got through thirty or forty presidents. Anyhow, I can’t quite get my head around the James Madison theory yet. We’ll come back to the list next Wednesday. In the meantime, I have been puzzling over women and tennis in the postcard world.
My inventory is not all-encompassing, of course, but I do think it should be considered a decent cross-section of the history of postcards. And I noticed in passing that I have not a single postcard which shows men playing tennis. When a man IS present, he and a woman are engaged in a match. In the postcards I have lying around, tennis is all but inseparable from the female player.
One or two other people who talk about this online lean toward a theory that at the turn of the twentieth century, women who went outdoors and did outdoor things were considered sexier than the old-fashioned Victorian female who stayed indoors, minding the house and taking care of the children. They cast back to a medieval picture of the world in which the husband was the master of the fields and barns and everything OUTSIDE the house, while the wife was in charge of everything INSIDE.
I’m not sure I can buy the whole package. For one thing, I have plenty of postcards with women outdoors: milkmaids, for example, have a whole postcard literature all their own. While charming shepherdesses can be found on postcards and n porcelain, practically already a cliché by the time the century turned. Was it just that going outside to play games meant the lady WORE less? (After all, your average milkmaid not only wrote the full outfit of dress and petticoats but an apron over them. AND a bonnet.)
Yet, although it isn’t something we discuss when we consider fashion, look at this couple. SHE could have gone dancing or shopping in that outfit, but HE is underdressed. While this was all right for tennis, a man who went out in public without a jacket, or “in his shirtsleeves” as it was called, would have been considered either shockingly shabby or simply a working class chap who couldn’t wear a jacket while wielding a pick or shovel.
I had another theory about women on tennis courts, but that had to be dropped as well. Do you know I don’t have a single postcard with the fine old joke “Love Means Nothing to a Tennis Player”? Are people just trying to keep me from using that joke? Well, THAT didn’t work, did it?
Golf is another matter. People dress MORE to play golf. The polka dot jacket and striped pants are not obligatory, nor is a bright sea green dress shirt. (Note to self: check on the possibility that golfers dress like that so they won’t be shot by deer hunters when their ball went into the woods.)
Women are no exception. Maybe the postcards were all part of a belief that a woman who was physically fit was especially alluring. The golf postcards tend to bear this out: female golfers are trim, fit, and not really in any position to, intentionally or accidentally, expose more of themselves while competing than anywhere else in public.
Oh, pshaw. I’m going back to figuring out what stories they were telling about James Madison. Maybe a Dolley Madison doughnut or two will help.
Blogsy Babbles 