These Postcards Salute Women's Suffrage and Help the USPS
Today, Aug. 18, 2020, marks 100 years since women won the right to vote in the U.S.
To celebrate, Maddy Kramer and Mica Gallino of The Woman Card project have launched an offshoot called The Woman Postcard, a collection of postcards celebrating suffragettes and women of our times, from Susan B. Anthony to Ava DuVernay.
The women, illustrated by artists from around the world, all appear dressed in white, a tribute to the suffragettes who marched in white to appropriate the codes of purity and virtue that defined appropriate women's attire at the time.
"We have to be grateful to all those feminists that, throughout history, have fought to achieve gender equality for all of us," Gallino says. "It's thanks to them that today we can vote, go to college, own property, marry who we want, decide about our bodies, and even run for office. Sharing and learning their stories is the very minimum we can do to keep up the fight."
Each pack of postcards ranges from $20 to $40, depending on how many you want, and comes with a set of stamps to support the embattled USPS.
As Gallino observes, this is indeed a fight. It happens to be for both suffrage (for everyone!) and the USPS, which receives no taxpayer funding. The current U.S. administration is opposing extra funding for the government agency—which is hemorrhaging money—specifically because the president would like to make voting by mail more difficult, by his own admission.
What historic times we're in! Who knew freedoms were so fragile?
The Woman Card project was born in 2016, when this same president pulled the so-called "woman card," saying it was all then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had going for her. In response, Kramer created a deck of 54 cards featuring important women throughout history. That deck is still for sale, with proceeds donated to gender equality organizations.
The deck helped earn Kramer global recognition as a creative with purpose. She went on to launch inVisible Creatives, an initiative that helps "invisible" creative talent advance to the forefront.
"Women fought for our right for years to have the chance to vote. If we don't like either candidate, the least we can do is go vote and honor their hard work to get us here today," Kramer says of her current project.
Hold those horses! Let's hope many of us get to vote at all. In the meantime, here's how in-mail voting works, what kind of people vote by mail, and a brief, fascinating history of political interference with the USPS.
