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 1: Mannish Women and Feminine Men
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Opposition to suffrage was largely fueled by fears that if women engaged with the male-coded world of politics, it would be to the detriment of female-coded concerns and activities. Home life would suffer. This ideal of “separate spheres” was never more than a stereotype, especially among the working classes. But all manner of social woes were pinned on the upending of the “natural order” in which women were excluded from public life.
The extreme version of this disruption was the specter of mannish women and feminine men. Suffragists were not the only women targeted by this view, and not all women who were breaking gendered rules did it as a political statement. But the conjunction came to be viewed as a weak point in the movement’s message.
Pop culture push-back against women who adopted male-coded dress or behavior included warnings that they made themselves unmarriageable, and even direct accusations of lesbianism. This last had roots in the imagery promoted by sexologists of the “mannish” lesbian. Much of the supposed identification and criticism of such women focused on physical appearance, but a desire for independence, education, and social freedom were also identified as symptoms of “degeneracy.” Such views were especially pernicious when applied to Black women, who were already subject to racialized stereotypes of hypersexuality and criminality.
At the other extreme, suffragist leaders were sometimes labeled as sexless, using epithets like “Amazon,” “hermaphrodite,” or “third sex” for supposedly rejecting a traditional domestic role. A more neutral term for women exploring freedom and independence (and eschewing marriage) was “new women.”
Mainstream suffragist leaders, rather than dismissing these images, tried to highlight those members of the movement who embodied traditional roles, citing children and husbands, and emphasizing the value of suffrage to middle-class married women.
The mirror concern was that if women invaded masculine spheres, men would automatically become feminized. Men who directly supported suffrage were mocked.
Suffragist messaging turned gendered insults back on their opponents, arguing that it was anti-suffrage women who were the real “manly” women. Conformity to normative feminine ideals was clung to as a protection against anti-feminist sentiment.
[Note: The chapter reiterates these points with a great deal of supporting data from media and correspondence of the time. I’m not going to summarize that level of detail.]
This strategic promotion of the image of the affluent, white, femininely-beautiful, married, maternal suffragist also sidelined the presence of non-white activists, who were sometimes entirely excluded from parades and imagery. Black suffrage organizations launched separate campaigns, focusing not only on gaining Black women the vote, but protesting Jim Crow efforts to deny it to Black men.
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