Butterfly Ladies

Aren’t they beautiful? At first it dampened the fun for me to learn that these ladies were from cards that came in cigarette packages in the 1920s. Flappers as butterflies, one tucked into each pack, with the common and Latin names of each species. There were 50 in the collection.

The Red Admiral, George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library, public domain.

I thought (rather sourly) at first, well, that’s a nice way for men to “collect” women, maybe they could even pin them to the walls! But then I thought about lady smokers, women enjoying a new and wild (albeit unwise) freedom. It was an exciting decade of change for women, both politically and socially. The 1920s was when women got the right to vote and it’s when they began wearing short hair. If you think about it, it’s not hard to see the metaphor of women going from caterpillar to butterfly! I concluded that these ladies, and their non-smoking lady friends, probably loved collecting these cards far more than the men.

—Sandra Knauf