I spit and chew and bite

[sovay]

This cat picture is not mine; it comes courtesy of of teenybuffalo, who found it on Tumblr:



I was prepared to love this image despite its likely origin as an outsider's sendup of the suffrage movement, but then it turned out to have been an actual suffragette Christmas card, which is even better. derspatchel says he can see "Hestia marching, festooned with violets, hoisting a banner aloft with her tail, ready to pounce on any police resistance." Mice and roses, they sing. Mice and roses.

(The actual song "Bread and Roses" causes me to tear up for reasons I do not entirely understand, because I cannot remember ever singing it as a child or communally, but it turned up as a spontaneous and formal expression of workers' solidarity in a scene in Pride (2014) and I disintegrated.)

Comments

[umadoshi]

Suffragette Christmas card.

*starry eyes*

off topic

[movingfinger]

nineweaving suggested I send this mask maker's Etsy page to you. I went to her open studio today. Mind blown, and possibly my disposable income budget for the foreseeable future if I ever dare...

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheArtOfTheMask/reviews

[kore]

MICE AND ROSES

[talia_et_alia]

In honor of your radical black cats, here is one of my prized possessions: direct action cat! I think it is the nicest design of this concept I have seen.

[movingfinger]

I think that in the cat-suffragette genre, the cute cats (like the famous adorable black and white LOLkitten saying "I want my vote!" and the famous super-adorable cat in the hat and shawl) are actually PRO suffragette, because they are cute positive images, and the ugly ones are the antis. In other words that there was no single meaning for cat suffragettes.

Nowadays at least this would be confounded by our recognition that cats are at the center of everything.

[akycha]

I ADORE the reclaiming of the "crying kitten" anti-suffragette image. :)

[robynbender]

"Bread and Roses" ran straight up my spine the first time I heard it (done by Judy Collins - recommended!). Still does it to me when I watch that scene in Pride, these 40 years later.

Thanks for the book link. I sometimes stare at a piece of suffrage ephemera, trying to decide if it came from the Pro's or the Anti's. Hard to be a tourist in Time - there are just subtleties about the landscape that you don't have access to.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Makes me tear up, too. (Bryn Mawr (college) sings it at thrice-yearly step sings, but I dissolved before that, too.)

[gwynnega]

I used to work at a now defunct women's bookstore called Bread and Roses. It was a wonderful bookshop.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

At my mother-out-law's retirement party, which had probably 150 people, after everyone said lovely things about her leadership of the Women's Studies and German departments, they brought out two baskets, one filled with long-stem roses and one with baguettes, and the entire crowd stood up and someone started to sing Bread and Roses, and the whole hall joined in.

It was one of the most effective and theatrical emotional tributes I've ever seen pulled off in person.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking Bird and Roses would be a better joke in one way, but not so quickly parsed, so maybe not.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I love that it's an actual suffragette card (love that cat memes have been a thing forever)--good on teenybuffalo for discovering it, and thank you for sharing it!

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

O yay, that's awesome! I have added the attribution and link to the Tumblr post.