Just occurred to me that while we don’t have specific data for Missouri, it’s unlikely that a huge percentage of women in 1928 rural MO voted, given the conservative nature of the state. Women’s suffrage had only been granted 8 years earlier, and what little data we have suggests relatively few women in Southern and border states cast ballots,
My guess is this is an item geared for men. It may even have been geared for a specific occupation, such as physicians, whose numbers may have been small, but whose influence was great.
I hereby rescind my earlier guess of icebox scraper.
I probably would have said the same, but here are some. They seem to go under a variety of names like “turkey wing whisk”, “fantail whisk” and “witches whisk”.
So far the only thing I’ve found pictures of that specifically has triangular holes is a vintage corn scraper, only that’s not a particularly good match either.
Did you use a magnet to see if it was made of steel? Despite the 1928 date for the election of some coroner named Schwartz it looks more modern to me.
That style of rolled metal handle is tickling some kind of memory, just can’t place it. It does resemble some melon slicing tools, but nothing in particular.
Since it probably was something that many would have found useful as some sort of promotional give-away, and more likely to be used by males in 1928, I would suggest that it is likely related to smoking.
My best guess is a pipe bowl scraper, for cleaning out the used tobacco from your pipe bowl.
I had a new idea. After thinking about it more, I don’t like it, but I’m going to throw it out anyway.
It’s the handle of a fan. The triangular holes were where the slats attached to the handle, but the slats are long gone. Maybe there was a piece of wood in the handle too – where the metal wraps around the back it looks like it could be enclosing a piece of wood. These fans could have been handed out in the summer before the election.
I’m not crazy about this theory because – I’ve never seen a fan with this kind of design; it seems unnecessarily complicated compared to a normal fan with slats pinned at one end. And it seems kind of odd for a fan to have that big hanging hole or whatever it is at the end of the handle.
Yeah, this. It’s in remarkably good shape for something from 1928. And the few metal election campaign tchotchkes I could find from that time period were engraved. The text on this just doesn’t look 90 years old.
OP, are you able to make any guesses about a possible upper and lower bound for the age?
I meant we don’t have specific dating for the number of Missouri women who turned out to vote in the November, 1928 election. Sorry, I thought that was evident from the context in my post.