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
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).
Chapter 6: Queering Death
* * *
This chapter looks at how female suffragist couples commemorated their shared lives (or had them commemorated by friends) after death. Loves that women might not have felt safe expressing during their lifetimes might find an acceptable expression in the context of mourning rituals, such as memorial poetry, shared graves, or the erection of funerary monuments with dedications mentioning both parties. Fellow suffragists might support such mourning in a context where society did not recognize that there was a relationship to mourn.
Rituals around death, funerals, and mourning offered a space in which female couples could co-opt practices that typically were associated with heterosexual marriage, and thus both make their relationship legible and claim the right to be understood as widows.
As usual, the chapter is illustrated with many specific biographical examples.
Conversely, death sometimes was a context in which a romantic/sexual relationship was re-written into “friendship” or “companionship,” either by the media, by surviving friends or family who worried about the deceased’s reputation, or by the surviving partner.
Relationships were also commemorated in wills that ensured the right of the surviving partner to their common goods and household. This could become a point of contention with birth families, from whom the deceased might have been estranged, or who were simply given a lower priority than the surviving partner.
Add new comment