Suffragists Being Queer in Public
Here's the next installment of our queer American women's suffrage movement.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #479f Rouse 2022 Public Faces, Secret Lives Chapter 5: Queering Space About LHMP 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).
Chapter 5: Queering Space
This chapter looks at a variety of ways that women associated with the suffrage movement “performed queerness” in public. Obviously, not all suffragists took part in the following, but those who did helped create the image of the transgressive “unfeminine” suffragist. The following is something of a catalog of these transgressive activities, which the book describes in connection with specific women who embodied them:
Masculine dress Male-coded activities like drinking, smoking, and engaging in active sports Converting women’s clubs into activist spaces in both public and private venues Forming women’s clubs that had a multi-racial membership, including featuring Black speakers Short (male-coded) hairstyles Engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with other women and creating households more expansive than hetero-domesticity (as detailed in previous chapters)The chapter moves to a discussion of racial issues that breaks the flow somewhat. Many white suffrage organizations and spaces excluded Black women. Black suffragists formed their own organizations, which were typically closely entwined with racial equality activism and general voting rights issues. Black women who crossed boundaries around gender expression and domestic relationships could face double-pushback, accused not only of damaging the public face of suffrage but also that of racial equality. Despite this, lesbian relationships and transgressive gender presentation were as common among Black suffragists as white ones.
Both live theater and the new movie industry were sites used by suffragists to promote and celebrate their views and values. Pro-suffrage speeches were incorporated into performances. Semi-comical songs and skits depicted traditional marriage as drudgery. Gender “impersonation” performances by both sexes sometimes deliberately pointed up “gender as performance” in support of women’s rights. (Anti-suffrage performances were also popular, of course.)
Two specific pro-suffrage plays (British in origin) are discussed: Before Sunrise and How the Vote was Won. The film 80 Million Women Want--? Documented the suffrage movement. In addition to suffrage propaganda, the plays featured “new women” who preferred career to marriage and had close same-sex relationships, although these themes did not always prevail at the conclusion of the scripts.
We return to the catalog of activities categorized as “queering space.” Parades were a powerful visual symbol of claiming public space, sometimes done in the face of official prohibition. But parade organizers sometimes issued “dress codes” to soften their image to the traditionally feminine. Those who defied these restrictions included a “suffrage cavalry” organized and led by Annie Tinker (who habitually wore male-coded clothing).
Returning to racialized examples, we get a mini-biography of Chinese-American suffragist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Chippewa attorney Marie Bottineau Baldwin. Historically-Black women’s college Howard University gets a lot of references in this book in connection with both faculty and students, and as a locus of connections and organizing.
Targeted protests and activism in Washington DC, especially by more militant forces associated with the National Women’s Party (NWP) kept the cause at the forefront of government attention, and could be met by forceful and violent police suppression, with methods reminiscent of the British hunger strike/force-feeding episodes that captured public attention.
Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: USAMisc tags: cross-gender roles/behaviorfemale co-habitationhomosocial environments/communitiessinglewomenemotional /romantic bonds between womenfemale comrades/friendsromantic friendship View comments (0)
