#63: "It says as plain as it can say, Old Fellow you'd best step away."

Vinegar Valentines: a Victorian tradition

By the time Valentine’s Day rolls around, I’m always worn out.

Each year I tell myself I’ll host a cute party, the kind we had as kids, slipping our valentines into friends’ shoeboxes decorated with hearts and lace, eating candy til our stomachs hurt. But instead, I usually find myself forgetting about the day entirely. Starting in October, my life becomes one revolving door of holiday spirit: Halloween, Thanksgiving¹, Christmas, NYE, my birthday, Rhody’s birthday… by the time Valentine’s Day arrives and I’m supposed to buy heart shaped things and make cute cards for friends, I just don’t have the brain power to throw myself behind another holiday.

This year, maybe it’s for the best. With my home country doing… what it’s doing, I feel mostly made of vinegar, anyway. But perhaps it’s the right time of year for words with a bite; after all, that vinegar’s part of a long tradition of mean-spirited valentines.

So with that grumpy energy coursing through our veins (loins, hearts) today, we’re diving into…

            💌 the Valentine's tradition of romance and sex                                     
               stretching back millennia,
            💌 some of history's saltiest Vinegar Valentines,
            💌 and one ominous valentine mailed to a suffragette.

Get your hearts ready, my friends - we’re getting mean!

Nothing says “I love you” like diary entries and embroidery and human hearts. A collaborative piece I did with Jessica Sundstrom last year <3.

😈 Roses are red, wish u were ded

Since Ancient Rome, February 14th has had romantic - or at least sexual - undertones. In those days, the Romans celebrated the festival of Lupercalia from the 13th to the 15th to promote fertility in young women and in crops². Priests would sacrifice a goat, then use its hide to gently slap the crops and the women in town. Then, the single people’s names would all be put in a pot and drawn out in pairs - the bachelors and bachelorettes would then be encouraged to go on dates, and some of them ended up getting hitched.

Over the centuries, animal sacrifices in a cave fell out of fashion (probably for the best), and by the Middle Ages, February 14th had evolved into the commonly accepted date when birds began mating³. And because birds are amazing I guess, since then, the day has carried a romantic bent. For hundreds of years now, folks have given cards and poems to lovers. And while we don’t whip young women or wheat stalk with the hide of a freshly sacrificed goat anymore, the day is still one people go nuts to celebrate.

But humans are salty, irreverent, undignified, and messy little weirdos. We always have been; just look at the letters from Ancient Mesopotamia. If we’re presented with something as serious as proclaiming romantic love, we’ll likely twist its arm and call it names. And by the late 1700s, a saucy few decided to take the sappy tradition of Valentine’s Day, spit on it - and send it in the mail.

Because what’s a girl to do if she wants to make it crystal clear she isn’t interested in a suitor?

Send a vinegar valentine, of course.

✋ Send the lovers packin’

Perhaps the most popular use of the vinegar valentine was to turn down suitors. And honestly? I kind of love it. With hundreds of years of romance and a Victorian obsession with politeness, sending a card that got the point across makes sense. Well over 150 years before texting, how else were people supposed to turn folks down - face to face?

Edwardian era rejection - when life gives you lemons, reject pretty ladies, I guess.

Some were less nice than others:

                   Here's a pretty cool reception,
                   At least you'll say there's no deception,
                   It says as plain as it can say,
                   Old fellow you'd best step away.

The oldest vinegar valentine I managed to find was from 1790, and it’s likely the meanest of all the rejections - but the art slaps:

                   Madam I've found a Beau for you,
                   So perfect match'd, I'm sure he'll do.
                   For he like you does take delight,
                   To make his form, a very fright.

Can you imagine receiving one of these? I don’t know if I’d laugh and pin it to the fridge or cry and never tell a soul that someone found me so repugnant, they had to send me a letter about it.

But rejecting suitors wasn’t the only reason folks sent each other vinegar valentines.

💀 Kill their confidence

Sometimes, the messages weren’t intended for suitors - they existed solely to take people down a peg. And while I liked the rejection ones, these are plain mean-spirited.

For instance, this vinegar valentine was sent to women suspected of lying about their age:

Are you still nineteen?

And some killjoys decided to poo poo on PDA:

From the BBC.

                   Are you too stupid and senseless to know
                   That this sort of thing makes a sickening show?
                   About spooning in private I've nothing to say
                   But to do it in public proclaims you a jay.

Others made fun of men’s bachelor status:

Late 19th century postcard.

They varied in meanness, but some - like the one below - seemed designed to hurt feelings without motive. It’s even addressed to a valentine specifically:

                   Your bright shining pate is seen at all shows
                   And invariably down in the bald-headed rows
                   Where you make conspicuous by your tender care
                   Your true ardent love for that one lonesome hair.

To add insult to injury, in the United States⁴ and England, you posted a letter for free; the cost of postage fell to the recipient. So unwitting people, buzzing with anticipation when they received an envelope on Valentine’s Day, would fork over the coins to see who fancied them, only to be destroyed via post.

But it wasn’t just looks people liked to insult…

🪚 your job sucks

For many people, a vinegar valentine was an opportunity to shit on the workers in their lives. One particularly hated job? The surgeon.

In the 1860s, about 2% of the U.S. population died in the Civil War - which meant a good deal of the U.S. at that point was well acquainted with death, disease… and surgery. So sometimes, the poor guy out there trying to keep folks alive got slapped with a vinegar valentine instead of a “thanks.”

                   Ho! ho! old saw bones, here you come,
                   Yes, when the rebels whack us,
                   You are always ready with your traps,
                   To mangle, saw, and hack us.

Even everyday professions weren’t immune. Take the milkman:

From about 1890, seen here. I guess the milkman watered down his goods?

                   Dear Mr. Simpson, I think you oughter,
                   Give us much more milk, and a deal less water:
                   I’m afraid that truth and honesty,
                   With the trade of a Milkman will never agree.

Salesladies were fair game, too:

Circa 1910.

                   As you wait upon the women
                   with disgust upon your face,
                   the way you snap and bark at them
                   one would think you owned the place.

And it was open season on artists, as in this 1905 postcard:

                   He’s the real thing, first notice his hair;
                   His careless “impressionist” air,
                   He paints awful trash
                   With a great deal of dash,
                   But if he can sell them, why care?

But perhaps the biggest slap of them all were the vinegar valentines addressed to, yes, the mailman himself:

                   Hurry up! Hurry up! with that Post Card.
                   Your pay is not quite princely, your work is
                   somewhat hard.
                   To wed a penny postman is not my fate.
                   For that you'll find I'm posted much too late.

👒 A woman’s place…

Although a lot of vinegar valentines were silly in nature - if cruel - there was a special sort of malice reserved for women who dared fight for the right to vote.

Very popular cards liked to mock men whose wives were independent, insinuating the men weren’t “real” men if they did something as terrible as take care of their children, like this postcard:

                   A married man's delights are doubled
                   His life's so smooth he's never troubled,
                   She never scolds - Oh never,
                   But wears a smiling aspect ever.

Most anti-suffragette messaging, however, cut right to the quick. Rather than pretending to be about something else, they mocked women for wanting to vote, often portraying the cause as childish:

Also this gay, gay warning, apparently inspired by women “taking men’s jobs” during World War I - in the U.S., (white) women’s right to vote wasn’t embedded in the constitution until 1920⁵, and women in the U.K. didn’t have the same voting rights as men until 1928.

But other vinegar valentines against suffragettes were far more horrific, calling for outright violence:

                   To stop your tongue from wagging
                   There seems no mortal Law,
                   So we are glad, there's one thing left,
                   That can make you HOLD YOUR JAW!

When I think about the women who received these likely anonymous messages, sent by cowards, women who hated themselves, and impotent men shaming them for demanding equality, I obviously think of this Mary Poppins gem:

You know Mrs. Banks must’ve received a Vinegar Valentine or two in her day - probably a sign she was doing things right.

From all these examples, you may notice few to none have writing on them. In general, it’s difficult to find a vinegar valentine that was actually sent to someone - most copies we have today are from unsold stock or saved by collectors. It’s understandable; would you keep a card someone sent you just to be a dick?

There was one, however, that I found - and it is by far the most impactful because of it:

Notice that the word “disobedience” is written in just to the right of the woman’s head, as if “disobedience” comes from lies - to me, a clear anti-suffragist reference. Notice also, that the vinegar valentine has a hole through the top, as if the recipient found it hilarious and pinned it on her wall.

The sender wrote a personalized note on the back:

You are OK

I don’t think you are almost as two faced as the women you stay with everybody is next

An ominous, insulting letter about women who chose to live together instead of following whatever “obedience” the sender saw fit. Naturally, it was unsigned, but I imagine the recipient had a good idea who sent it.

Who do you think the recipient was? And what was going through the sender’s head when mailing this? I imagine the blind rage the author felt as they scribbled on the back, that flaming righteous fury over a woman’s liberty. But instead of feeling sad about our history, I look at the pin hole in the top of the vinegar valentine and have to laugh: this recipient, whoever she was, wasn’t intimidated by a dumb little note. She and the women she lived with hung it up somewhere for them all to see - and, I hope, it served as an inspiration to keep on fighting.

💝 The Vinegar Valentine to Snarky Hallmark Pipeline

Most records I found online reference how the vinegar valentine more or less disappeared around the 1950s, but as I combed through the newspapers available via the Library of Congress⁶, I found an article from the February 8, 1959 edition of The Evening Star that renamed vinegar valentines “studios.” The paper included this example:

Immediately, they reminded me of the old lady in greeting card aisles across the states today⁷:

I took this from the WalMart website. They’ll survive. Also, did you know her name was Maxine? I sure didn’t.

And while our cards have gotten less mean, it seems like we’ve just moved our human urge for pettiness online, where it’s free and (relatively) anonymous - just like our ancestors’ vinegar valentines.

See you next week!

The world is crazy; send a love letter to someone, kiss someone new… or burn it all to the ground and print one of these vinegar valentines to send in the mail!

All my most backhanded love into eternity,

Nikita, Your Snail Mail Sweetheart

1. I may live in France, but I will never turn down an opportunity for stuffing and pecan pie.

2. Am I insulted that women and crops are seen as equal in value? I can’t tell.

3. As told in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1375 poem “Parliament of Fowls” here.

4. Til 1840.

5. Black men and women faced barriers to voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because the Jim Crow South wielded poll taxes and literary tests to inhibit voters who, recovering from generations of slavery, had lower literacy rates and couldn’t always afford the voting tax compared to white counterparts of the time.

6. An incredible resource. I know every newsletter, article, social media post, text written by U.S. Americans is coated in pure political panic, but I assure you, it’s warranted, y’all. With the richest man in the world (whose company paid $0 in taxes last year) gutting essential functions of the government left and right, let me remind you all that we need these systems in place, including the Library of Congress. Their “Chronicling America” catalogue of all our newspapers for 200 years is a fundamental way to track truth and obtain original sources about the things that shape our past and present. Without it, who’s to stop people from inventing “alternative facts” when there are no original sources free for the public to review and cite?

7. Honestly I haven’t been back in nearly 2 years and even before then I couldn’t tell you the last time I browsed a supermarket card aisle??? Please someone confirm Maxine’s continued existence.