History must not only be studied, but continually re-studied and re-surfaced. We have all seen how easy it is for something "obvious" to become memory-holed even in as short a time as the last five years. How much easier when the primary sources were shaky to begin with and the myth-makers have a social and political agenda that they may not be entirely conscious of themselves. How easy it is to re-write history "as it should have been" (a phrase that has always grated on me in the context of the Society for Creative Anachronism, regardless of the direction of one's "should").
LHMP
Blog entry
I haven't blogged this chapter in as much detail, as it runs crosswise to the topics the Project is interested in. But it's always useful to see the ways in which structurally parallel topics in male and female queer history (if you will forgive me for applying an inappropriate binary) are so very non-parallel in how they played out. A very brief slice of very recent history has convinced us that queer history can be viewed as a unified subject. But apparent/assigned gender has always been a stronger force than any theoretical similarity in non-normative experience.
If women taking on male identities can be explained away for practical reasons (safety, economics, social power) then where is the explanation for men taking on female identities where those advantages are reversed? If women taking on male identities can be explained as a necessary requirement for desiring women, then where is the explanation for their female partners desiring them?
I'm starting coverage of a new book today, about how queer the Old West actually was and how that got hidden. At this point--thanks to my retirement work-schedule--I'm keeping my blog buffer full enough that I can commit to posting something every day for Pride month, just as I did when I kicked off the Project back in 2014. Well, actually, in 2014 I started posting on June 9, so I didn't actually post every day that month. I think maybe I did the whole month in some other year?
This concludes Wendy Rouse's book on queer people and themes in the American women's suffrage movement. I found this book rich and useful, because while the specific lens Rouse uses is suffragists, there is nothing about these women and their lives that is specific to the suffrage movement, as opposed to being specific to a particular era and context in US history.
Another chapter in the America's queer suffragists book. I almost have the next book all written up and ready to go. And--hey!--I worked on a fiction project today! I'm doing revisions on my "skin-singer" stories with the goal of self-publishing them as a collection, combined with a concluding never-before-published novelette. Mind you, I've been saying for years, "This is the year I get the Skinsinger collection out," but for real this time. My goal is to have it available by Worldcon (makes a nice target).
Here's the next installment of our queer American women's suffrage movement.
I think this chapter is the weakest in terms of framing the topic as "queer" since it's basically "suffragists in the US and Britain talked to each other and sometimes had the same types of interpersonal relationships with each other that they did with their fellow contrytwomen. Also: there was a lot of Pankhurst fangirling.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 315 – The House of the Women by Jeannelle M. Ferreira - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/05/31 - listen here)
The last chapter looked at couples, this one expands to "extended families" among American suffragists and the ways in which they can be seen as "queer".
In the mean time, I'm writing up notes for the next book, which investigates the prevalence of cross-gender presentation in the American West, and the process of erasing or "normalizing" those who participated.
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