Finishing Up Our Queer Suffragists
Friday, May 30, 2025 - 09:00
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. Studies of 19th century queer women's history sometimes leave the impression that there are two poles: polite, acceptable romantic friendships and Boston marriages, and transgressive female masculinity and "passing women." But both themes are present in the suffrage movement, intertwined and reacting to each other, which this study demonstrates admirably. If you're writing sapphic historical fiction set in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, I'd consider this book essential background reading.
And on a more personal note: second day in a row working on rivisions of my skinsinger stories! I think the rhythm that I'm settling into is working on fiction first thing in the morning, over breakfast. Then a combination bike ride and LHMP reading at a coffee shop. Then some time doing housework and misc. projects. Then yard work when it starts cooling down in the evening. I knew going into retirement that I would be essential to develop a standard schedule, but I'm still sorting out the details.
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Full citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Conclusion
There is a summary of the themes of the book and a discussion of the variety of ways in which queer suffragists engaged with the rising sexological theories regarding same-sex love, in parallel with the various attitudes toward “respectability politics.” Some came to identify as homosexual, others distanced themselves from what they considered “unhealthy” desires. Some defiantly displayed their queerness within the movement, others felt that it was important not to distract attention from common goals.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most queer women could avoid close scrutiny as there was broad latitude for women’s friendships, but in the post-WWI era, there was an increasing awareness of, and hostility towards, relationships perceived as homosexual.
After the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, and especially in the context of queer-baiting of the 1940s and 1950s, some surviving suffragists turned on former comrades, or worked to purge evidence of queer elements in the movement, or even purge evidence of their own past same-sex relationships. This has meant that reconstructing the truth of queer elements in the suffrage movement can require triangulation from the more candid records of friends and associates, or from tangential public records. The question of who is reconstructing those lives affects what is reconstructed, as biographers bring their own agendas and prejudices.
The author emphasizes the importance of queer persons and practices to the success of the suffrage movement, while also acknowledging the enormous variation in those lives, practices, and attitudes. The cyclicity and persistence of the themes of “respectability politics” and the “lavender menace” is noted.
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