Greetings from Perimenopauseville

Wish you were here!

Mar 28, 2025

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture at our local museum on the history of postcards. Other than picking up a few while on vacation to send or keep, I hadn’t given much thought to postcards. This event was just something to do to get out of the house on a Friday night.

I had no idea that a lecture about postcards could be so funny, entertaining, and educational all at the same time.

This museum was gifted about 2.5 million postcards and postcard materials in 1982 from the Curt Teich Company, a Chicago-based printing company that made postcards for its customers between 1898 and 1978.

Their customers were companies that wanted to promote their businesses, individuals who wanted to document a significant event like a wedding, or cities and towns that wanted to feature their locations.

However, the postcard craze ran out of steam in the 1970s, and they were forced to close up shop. Instead of throwing out the entire lot of their collection as originally planned, one of the descendants of the owners realized the historical significance and contacted the museum.

The lecturer, Katherine Hamilton-Smith, who worked for the museum at the time and became the founding curator of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, explained they had no idea the scope of the project they were undertaking until TWO semi-trailer trucks (full-sized trucks) filled with postcards arrived.

They didn’t have enough room for all of these postcards, but they started sorting and cataloging them. Ultimately, in 2016, they donated the entire collection to The Newberry Library in Chicago, a public humanities library. In a future article, I’ll tell you about my trip to The Newberry to see the postcards in person and what I discovered there about menopause.

I won’t go into the history of postcards here, but suffice it to say they are more important to the history of America than one would think. They were original works of art or photographs that document a place, a time, or an event in our history.

If you’d like to learn more about this postcard collection history, please read this short article from the Library Journal.

What does this have to do with perimenopause?

Through the lecture, Katherine shared with us some of her favorite postcards that she found while combing through the collection. Some postcards in the collection had not been used, and some were mailed but found their way into the collection.

One of her absolute favorite postcards was a picture of a bunch of young school boys in a class photo standing outside their school. It was a black and white photo, and if I remember, it was from the 1920s or 1930s. The back of the postcard said something like:

Dear so and so,
John is doing so well in school. It’s amazing how much he’s grown. Things are good here. We’re taking grandma to the asylum and dropping her off. She’s been roaming around the house and acting strangely. She’s driving us all mad.

Well, back then, that was all it took to send a woman off to an asylum. Women at the time were often sent away when they exhibited “strange behavior” like what we can now identify with perimenopause.

Back to me. While I’m sitting there, my brain is churning with all sorts of ideas of how I can use this topic and blend it with perimenopause, and that’s where the idea of the Greetings from Perimenopauseville postcard collection was born!