Digital Transgender Archive

[Egg]

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Inscription: "Addressed to Mademoiselle A. Lefort; signed on recto of each card: five signed G.M.; one signed Germaine. Brief message on lower right corner of recto of each card, two in English, the rest in French. Message on lastmailed card indicates “Merci, c’est la dernière.” Complete series of six postcards showing an enormous egg in front of a painted backdrop of a bucolic landscape. Over the series, the egg opens into left and right halves to reveal a woman dressed as an 18th-century male aristocrat who pays court to a woman dressed as a female aristocrat. The couple remains ensconced in the egg, using it as a place to sit once its fully open. Postmarks show the cards were mailed successively during the course of two months, with a message on the final one in the photo-narrative stating, “Thanks, this is the last one.” The dates and inscription suggest how such series were sometimes used to sustain interest in a friendly correspondence over time. Postage stamp and postmark on one corner on verso of each card. Curved impression to corners of cards indicating the set was once place in a die-cut postcard holder.

Item Information:

Identifier
3b591884d
Collection
Postcards of Female and Male Impersonators and Cross-dressing
Institution
Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University
Date Created
1903
Genre
Ephemera
Places
France
Topic(s)
Male impersonators
Resource Type
Still Image
Analog Format
13.9 x 9.2 (centimeters)
Language
French
Rights
No known copyright
This image is believed to be in the public domain in the United States by virtue of publication date, and is presented by Cornell University Library under the Guidelines for Using Text, Images, Audio, and Video from Cornell University Library Collections, http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/CULCopyright. This collection was digitized by Cornell University Library in 2019 from materials held in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, with funding from a Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences Grant to Professor Durba Ghosh and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection. For more information about this image, please contact the Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.
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