He May Be President I

Even though women were beginning to take on a role in the marketplace as consumers, especially for household products, and even though advertisers saw the need to appeal specifically to them, most businesses took a dim view of suffrage. At best they depicted women's desire to vote in terms of a choice of what soap or sewing machine to buy.
Advertising or trade cards were small pieces of colorful cardboard that were handed out by merchants in the 1880's, and were highly collectible, families pasting them in albums along with other "scraps." As you can see by these example illustrated here as well as by several pictured to the right, trade cards tended to illustrate scenes that were highly reductive in terms of both women's right to vote and their ability to serve successfully in office.
In other examples here in this exhibit, women are casting their votes for such products as soap, cooking stoves, and sewing machines. What is especially interesting to see is an ad for “Woman Suffrage Stove Polish.”