When Risqué Turtle Ladies Were All the Rage
This morning I got distracted by a trinket box in the shape of a turtle lady.
It began when an old-ish tweet by Patricia Lockwood crossed my path. She’d found an antique figurine for sale and was debating whether to buy it.
It’s made of bisque — unglazed white porcelain. This was commonly used by porcelain doll manufacturers because the matte texture was more lifelike than the shiny, glazed alternative.
It’s also small, about four inches long and two inches high.
From the paint job, you can tell it was mass-produced, so it was designed to be sold in shops at an affordable price.
Stylistically, it looks like it’s from the turn of the century (1890–1910). It’s got some Art Nouveau whimsy to it, but the hairstyle is also revealing, the way it’s piled onto the top of her head like a Gibson girl. Granted, the turtle girl’s hair is uncomfortably erect, but it’s in the general ballpark of a top-knot.
While it was probably designed between 1890 and 1910, porcelain objects were mass-produced from molds, so you can’t actually ballpark when it was made until you flip it over.
To do that, I tracked down the original Etsy listing.
It was made in Japan, so it’s a reproduction, but this also tells you that it was made after 1921.
Here’s how you know: The Tariff Act of 1890 (also known as the McKinley Act) required all imported goods to be stamped with their country of origin in English. At that time, porcelain made in Japan was stamped “Nippon,” but in 1921, U.S. Customs required Japanese imports to be stamped with the word “Japan” instead. This is also when import stamps started following the “made in” convention.
So, what does all of this mean?
It means this turtle lady was probably designed decades earlier by a German manufacturer (which dominated the bisque porcelain market in the United States) and sold in shops at an affordable price. It also means this turtle continued to be so popular that when World War I interrupted the European ceramics trade and Japan swept in to fill that demand, turtle ladies were one of the products they knew would sell.
And that enduring popularity probably had something to do with what you found when you looked inside.
You see her in her undergarments, a heart-shaped hole strategically cut in the back to give you a good look at her plump posterior.
This wildly popular trinket box was not a box at all. At least not in any practical sense.
This trinket box turtle lady was a peepshow.
Peepin’ at Ladies in the Age of Anthony Comstock
Around 1890, when this bawdy turtle most likely hit the market,
vice-suppression organizations were raiding shops for obscene material and hauling in citizens for arrest.
It was during the reign of Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and namesake of the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail.
The problem here is that obscenity was never defined, so its meaning expanded ever outward to include sex education pamphlets, birth control, feminist treatises on bodily autonomy, classic literature, bawdy pamphlets, novelties, and so on. They burned books and destroyed printing plates. They arrested photographers and shopkeepers and tried to prevent the production of plays. Arrests were selective and often vindinctive.
Nobody liked this guy.
But nobody stopped him either.
I’m mentioning this context because we see a lot of covert erotica during this time. There were playing cards with hidden watermarks that could be held to the light to reveal a sexual image. There were Stanhopes, tiny lenses embedded in objects that allowed the viewer to see microscopic nude photographs. There were trick cigar cases, like this one:
The exterior was decorated with an innocuous portrait, but inside there was a hidden panel that could be opened to reveal an erotic scene. In this case, a scene of a couple having sex while getting viciously attacked by a cat.
These saucy, bawdy turtle boxes were similar. On the outside, they’re all turtle lady, but on the inside…
A Veritable Cornucopia of Turtle Ladies
There are a lot of turtle-lady boxes on the market right now.
That’s remarkable considering how much is working against them for survival. For one, they were inexpensive and inexpensive goods tend to be discarded over time. They were also made of bisque porcelain, which can be fragile and prone to breakage. So for so many turtle ladies to exist now, it’s fair to assume that there was once a full-blown turtle lady mania.
Here’s a sampling of the spectrum out there:
There’s the chaste turtle lady. You get to see her undergarments and nothing more.
There’s the coquettish turtle lady who knows full well her drawers are wide open.
There’s the souvenir turtle lady so you can fondly remember your trip to Coney Island every time you sneak a peek.
There’s this extremely unsettling turtle lady with creepy flipper feet:
I like this review from someone who stumbled onto one of these at an antique fair:
Her shell lid is in the back, so Turtle Lady is kind of like a trinket box, except instead of trinkets, it holds her butt in crotchless bloomers.
Also she has no feet; just pointy black stumps. For some reason that part weirds me out the most.
Ahh, the good ol’ days, am I right? Back when people had MORALITY and VALUES and TURTLE LADY SEX BOXES.
Speaking of morality, the final turtle-lady type I want to mention is for those expecting to find a bare butt, but instead get a bear butt.
It’s like the porcelain version of rick-rolling. You see a turtle lady sitting on your friend’s shelf and decide to take a quick peek only to be confronted by a horrified bear cub.
Kinda weird, right?
It’s a pun (bare/bear) but it’s also pretty likely to be an allusion to teddy bears. And the person who put the ‘teddy’ in teddy bears was Theodore Roosevelt.
The story is that in 1902, Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear tied to a tree, deeming it unsportsmanlike. When this story took off in the press, he made a bear the mascot of his successful reelection campaign in 1904.
A store owner named in Brooklyn put a stuffed bear in the window of his shop calling it “Teddy’s Bear” and later secured Roosevelt’s permission to use his name when it was mass-produced. By 1906, teddy bears were all the rage.
Roosevelt was known as a brash reformer, but he was also known for his attempts to crack down on vice. (Vice laws were put into place shortly after his presidency.) It’s likely that when this particular turtle lady was sold, this bear was also associated with the idea of “good” moral values.
Sneaking a peek would not be one of those values, so instead of bare skin you get Teddy Roosevelt’s Bear of Moral Judgment:
It’s visual joke.
Burlesque humor was big at this time, so it makes sense.
The Turtle Lady Market
I’m a history person, not a market person, but as I was browsing the abundance of bawdy bisques, I picked up a few details worth passing on.
- While these don’t have a name, “turtle lady” is the most commonly used term.
- The vast majority of listings I saw were in the $80-$200 range. Lockwood was looking at one going for $500. That price is an outlier.
- Sharon Weintraub wrote the book on bawdy bisques. She also sells them. If you want a turtle lady of your own, that’s where I’d start.
And if you absolutely cannot stand turtles and wish you had another animal hybrid to choose from, you’re in luck.
There are also snail ladies.
If you like turtle ladies, you’ll love this 18th-century dildo found at a French convent:
You can also find me at kaiabell.com.
