Advertising Cards

The advertising or trade card was a small piece of thin cardboard, generally slightly larger than an index card, that was extremely popular in America from the late 1870’s to the early 1890’s. They were given away free by merchants and manufacturers, and advertised both products and services, generally in an appealing, graphic manner and usually in color. Sometimes the cards simply showed the product in question, at other times artists showed that product in context with a graphic scene, often comic, of life in America as they saw it.

Suffragists were at times depicted, often quite neutrally, casting their ballot for a product rather than for a candidate, suggesting that a woman’s true interest was focused on household matters rather than on politics. At times the harridan or the grotesque was to appear, but advertisers had to be careful lest they offended the woman who might have otherwise wished to purchase their products. The set pictured in the accompanying images of the future possibilities for both boys and girls may seem tinged with irony today, but probably at the time was intended to be serious.