Comic valentines were a form of 19th-century Valentine’s Day greetings widely circulated in England and America. With their satirical jibes at any one perceived as a “queer kind of folk” (to quote a major New York publisher) and with their blunt caricatures rendered in bold woodcuts or lithographs with splashes of primary colors, comic valentines seem to have little in common with cupids, hearts and flowers. Yet when comic and sentimental valentines portray women, both types may be considered representative of certain norms, each re-enforcing cultural ideals of female identity. Where the sentimental valentine idealized women as objects of romantic love, the comic valentine ruthlessly lampooned women who did not meet the century’s ideals of womanhood, whether in terms of beauty, desirability, modesty, or reticence. These were women who were stereotyped as old maids, flirts, gossips, women who wore extremes of fashionable clothing, and loud, assertive women or women otherwise viewed as transgressive of prescribed gender boundaries. Women who were perceived as uncontrollable were mocked in the misogynistic doggerel accompanying imagery that could depict women as snakes, as two-faced, or as deformed by ugliness that was the outer manifestation of their inner transgressiveness. It is no coincidence that the popularity of comic valentines militating against women increased in the late 1840s and 1850s, concurrent with the beginnings of the organized struggle for women’s rights in America. The texts for the comic valentines had their origins in late 18th- and early 19th-century books of verses published for people to use in making their own valentines. Although the poems were rather sharply worded, each writer gave as good as he or she got. An offensive missive “To a Lady” evoked a tart reply, the essence of which was “Look at yourself in the mirror.” This tone changed from the 1840s on, when comic valentines villifying women became increasingly prolific and developed a greater and more subtle range of misogynistic subjects. By the 1880s, however, comic valentines had somewhat tempered their address, although mock greetings were—and still are—an important part of the trade. Sentimental valentines, for their part, benefited from merchants marketing valentines to women and children, and feminizing and domesticating the holiday. By sentimentalizing a particular definition of womanhood, sentimental valentines daintily reinforced many of the same standards of femininity so forcefully insisted upon by comic valentines. Back to Choose an E-Postcard