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).
Introduction
* * *
Part of the overarching theme of this study is the tension between “respectability politics” and the essential reliance the suffrage movement had on women willing to disrupt social norms, specifically including norms of sexuality and gender presentation. The resonances with the “lavender menace” confrontations of the 1970s are inevitable (and noted specifically in the conclusion).
As the author points out, the suffrage movement was very queer, as well as more diverse than popular mythologizing often admits. The author notes that she will use “queer” as an umbrella term to avoid getting bogged down in details of identity definitions. [Note: Though I think she does occasionally get overly expansive in what gets classified as “queer.”]
The early embrace of dress reform movements by leaders of the suffrage movement, such as Stanton, Stone, and Anthony was abandoned to avoid associating the public mockery of “bloomers” and similar reform styles with suffrage. At the other end of the scale, some prominent suffragists such as Dr. Mary Edwards Walker adopted masculine dress as part of their rejection of strictures on women’s lives, and were persecuted for it, both within and outside the movement. Walker’s social privilege and personal history as a Civil War surgeon who had been awarded the Medal of Honor only slightly mitigated the attacks on her, and she recorded the toll it took to remain true to her principles, especially the attacks and snubs from fellow suffragists. Early histories of the suffrage movement were written to exclude Walker and other queer figures, as well as erasing the participation of non-white and non-elite women.
Queer suffragists adopted a variety of strategies, from Walker’s outright defiance, to a careful separation of public and private lives, to deliberately cultivating a conservative, conventional femininity.
Many prominent suffragists were in same-sex couples, varying from social partnership to friendship to romance to sexual relationships. But despite the documentary evidence of their personal correspondence, these relationships were usually flattened into “friend” or “secretary” in the public record. The book lists many same-sex romantic couples, but will focus primarily on the lesser known ones.
Despite the silence of the public record, these relationships were common knowledge at the time and could be used to disparage the movement as a whole. Black queer suffragists experienced a triple threat which made them especially concerned about outward “respectability”, such as Alice Dunbar Nelson, who emphasized her status as the widow of a notable poet, while engaging in romantic relationships with both men and women during the period of her suffrage activities.
Advocates of “free love” such as Victoria Woodhull argued against sexual double-standards that penalized women, but hit a wall when criticizing the hypocritical sexual behavior of supposedly “moral” leaders such as Henry Ward Beecher. The backlash then associated the suffrage movement in general with free love. Leaders and historians of the movement openly recorded ejecting those they felt were too radical.
The introduction closes with the plan of the book, describing what each chapter will cover.
Add new comment