When Kay Gately of Wilton Gayterry Kennels showed a stately Afghan hound and her husband Tom trotted out a sporty Airedale terrier at the 1943 Westminster Dog Show, neither they nor their audience ever considered that the particular breed or even species of their four-legged friends said anything about their own identity or social status. Unlike the Gatelys, who were professional handlers, regular Wiltonians have often judged one another on their pet-keeping practices.
For girls and young women in the late 1800s and early 1900s, showing affection for pets, particularly kittens and puppies, demonstrated appropriately feminine and “instinctively” maternal attributes. When girls played with these animals in gentle and nurturing ways, they received praise. Boys, meanwhile, were indulged or even goaded on for being rough.
Popular illustrations reinforced these standards and were widely collected by girls and many women, too. Born in Ridgefield and later a resident of Norwalk, Bridgeport, and Danbury, dressmaker Eliza A. Bouton Allen filled her scrapbook with colorful trade cards that used gender stereotyped children and their pets to advertise products and local businesses.
Other artists depicted domestic scenes with anthropomorphized kittens most often playing the roles of human females, usually daughters and sisters. Puppies, in contrast, were usually presented as adult women or boys. A master of the genre – and possible inventor of the cat meme – was American photographer Harry Whittier Frees.
At least one Wilton girl adored Frees’s photographs: Betty Ambler of Ambler Farm. Betty collected a remarkable seventeen Frees photographs in her scrapbook, each one carefully clipped from a newspaper or magazine complete with caption. In one, a pale, long-haired “Susie Kitten” sits in a wagon pushed by her darker, shorthaired older brother. In others, Susie goes grocery shopping for her mother, resourcefully and responsibly prepares her own lunch, and gives her little brother “a big speller to make him happy” when she has to take him to school, essentially babysitting him as he “isn’t old enough to attend
regularly.”
Real life, of course, was more complicated than the artistic shorthand. A Town of Wilton dog license register from the 1890s reveals that, when it came to adults and their pet canines, breed, health, and accountability are what mattered most when it came to signifying their owners’ gender conformity and respectability.
Pugs for example were popular ladies’ lapdogs with endearing and fanciful names like Ko Ko, Bijou, Mikado, and Daisy. Psychologists today believe these flat-faced and round-headed pups remind people of babies. Their infantile look and relative lassitude – though the breed was not then so severely brachycephalic – help explain the pug’s historically close association
with women.
Dogs belonging to men and boys – many of them hunting companions or working dogs – were generally larger, or at least more athletic. Common breeds included terriers (on the small end), pointers, setters, and shepherds (on the opposite extreme).
Besides physical descriptors like Spot, the most popular names for men’s dogs included King, Rover, Fido, Jack, and Caesar. Some of these emphasized spirit (King and Rover suggest nobility and boldness) or loyalty (Fido is Latin for “faithful”).
However, poorly disciplined and aggressive dogs caused enough trouble for everyone, that every dog in Connecticut had to be registered with the local Town Clerk beginning in 1878. It quickly became a universal sign of middle-class respectability – independent of gender and race – to pay the licensing fee and register names, breeds, and colors, thereby making pets traceable. Recognizable breeds, health, obedience, and marks of ownership (engraved collars were heavily advertised in the summer of 1878) denoted owners’ morality. “Mongrel” breeds, sickly appearance, disobedience or aggression, and no obvious signs of ownership signified poverty, even criminality.
Today Wiltonians still sometimes pass judgement on their neighbors for how they treat their pets. Visit any local Facebook group and watch as the comments fly when someone asks about letting their cat outdoors or wonders why so many dogs seem to go missing in Wilton. Our concerns about animal welfare have clearly grown and that’s obviously a move in a positive direction. We all, however, still enjoy a good pet meme. •
