Wendy L. Rouse, "Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement" (NYU Press, 2022)

This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dies. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dies. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting 4 hours or more. Botox on a botulinum toxin A prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month, versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alerture doctor right away is difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugeric's disease, myostheniographis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxCronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the Public Benefit Corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai/spotify. Welcome back to new books and political science podcast on the new books network. I'm Susan Lee Bell at St. Joseph's University, and today I'm joined by Dr. Wendy L. Rouse to discuss her new book, Public Faces Secret Lives, A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement, published by NYU Press in 2022. When the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment was commemorated in 2020, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were often the focus of museum exhibits, teach outs, and well-timed scholarly works. Highlighting the queerness of the movement was rarely the narrative, but Public Faces Secret Lives argues that the narrow focus on cisgender, heterosexual women erases the existence and importance of queer suffragists. Highlighting queerness reinforced a quote patriarchal, cis-header normative standard of ideal womanhood and manhood in order to make suffragists and women suffrage more palatable to voters. Yet queerness was central to the history of the suffrage movement. Dr. Wendy L. Rouse not only recovers the lives of individual queer suffragists, she queers the history of the women's suffrage movement as a whole. Her work emphasizes the complex ways in which suffragists balance their principled beliefs in wider social reforms with a strategic form of respectability politics. In order to contribute to a process of recovery, her book forcefully examines the manner in which historical processes have led to the erasure of queerness in the history of the suffrage movement and the consequences of that erasure. Dr. Wendy L. Rouse is a historian whose research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the progressive era. She's presently professor of history at San Jose State University where she's the program coordinator for the history social science teacher preparation program. I am delighted to welcome Wendy to the new book's network. Thank you for having me here. I'm so excited. So your book, which I enjoyed so much, actually on a vacation, so it's a serious book that can also a page turner. Your book opens in 1873 with Dr. Mary Edwards Walker walking on to the stage of the National Women Suffrage Association Convention in Washington, D.C. Susan B. Anthony does not immediately yield the floor and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you say, is visibly annoyed and she doesn't believe Dr. Walker should speak because she wasn't on the program. Yet Anthony, you say, understands that Dr. Walker was famous and popular and she yields the floor and Dr. Walker explicitly criticizes the National Women Suffrage Association for failing to push broader social reforms. Now, Dr. Walker was famous in her time, but she's not had a place in our American narrative as Susan B. Anthony has. So let's start with why Dr. Walker was so famous. What was she famous for as she stepped onto the stage at the NWSA? Yeah, so Dr. Walker was a famous dress reformer, so she was advocating for the idea that women should be able to wear any clothing that they choose. And if you know anything about Amelia Blumer and the movement, the bloomers, as they're called, right, this movement for women to be able to dress as they please in more comfortable non restrictive clothing. That's how Walker had gained her fame by wearing clothing that was typically associated with men at the time. And so the early suffragists had all been advocates of dress reform, but as the years went by, they began to deemphasize the focus on dress reform and to focus more explicitly on the fight for the vote. Because they felt like they were getting too much criticism for appearing in this dress reform outfit, and so they kind of dropped that as a cause. So Walker was upset that they had had chosen to step away from what she perspective is a very important issue for women's rights. And so she was criticizing the leaders for being too narrow in their focus for the fight for women's equality. Thanks. One remind people who Walker was in addition to the dress reform piece because she's Dr. Walker and also why was dress reform so important to her? Yes, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker had been a physician during the Civil War and had gained some fame for being this really well-known physician, women physician, who helped in the movement. And the dress reform movement itself was significant because it reflected the idea that women should have the right to be comfortable, to wear non-restrictive, to wear healthy clothing, because as you know, corsets and other clothing at the time was considered very unhealthy. And so it was part of this broader idea that women shouldn't be confined and restricted to these very strict gender norms and gender ideas about presentation. So the fight for women's rights to wear what they wanted to wear was part of this broader conversation about women having access to equal rights. And so that's why Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was really an advocate of this. And we're going to talk a lot about all of the things that you just said, but why this project for you now? Tell us a little bit about your previous scholarship and how this book builds upon it. So in the past, I've mostly focused on the progressive era. So about 1900 to 1920, I've looked at immigration history. I've looked at the history of families and children and women's history specifically. My last book was on was her own hero, the origins of the women's self-defense movement. And I was literally looking at how women began studying boxing and jujitsu during the early 20th century as a means of physical empowerment, as a means of stepping outside the gender norms and really being able to protect and defend themselves on the street and in their own lives and their own homes from violence that they faced as women. And when I was researching that project, I noticed this clear association between the women's self-defense movement and the women's rights movement or the suffrage movement at the time. And this really fascinated me because I saw these connections between this idea of their physical empowerment and their political empowerment. And so that made me much more interested in the suffrage movement itself. I always taught suffrage history in my US history classes. And another thing that I started to be curious about was the relationships of the individual suffrages. Because what I noticed is that we tend to talk about the political history, right? We talk about their fight for the ratification of the 19th Amendment. And we forget that these were real people with real lives and that their choice to be involved in this movement really impacted their personal lives, their personal relationships, even in this argument that we're talking about between Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, right? There's all kinds of personal politics that come into play. So I was curious about the lives of the suffrages and how did their involvement impact their relationships. And as I started diving into some of their individual lives, I noticed that their relationships were indeed very queer, that a very gender non-conforming, very sexual non-conforming, I mean there was a lot of same sex intimate relationships movement. And so that led me into wanting to know more about that aspect of the history of the suffrage movement. And one of the things I like most about the book is the way in which the suffragists emerge as individuals who are part of a wider movement. They are all very different. You don't try to make them similar. You also don't try to put them at war with each other, but you really try to show the complexity and the texture of this movement in a way that I've not seen in other suffrage history. So thank you. I really enjoyed that part. You speak explicitly at the beginning of the book about language choice. You say that you're going to use the word queer as an umbrella term to refer to suffragists who were not strictly heterosexual or cisgender. And I'd like you to explain just a little bit more about that choice and why you think it's an important choice for capturing the identity of 19th century people who might not have used that word themselves to describe themselves. Yeah, this was an issue that really was a concern in the very beginning of my research because I was new to studying LGBTQ history or queer history. And I wasn't exactly sure what language I should be using. So I did a lot of research and I learned a lot about queer history. And as I learned, I started to understand that really our modern ideas about gender and sexuality cannot be applied to the past because they didn't live in the same time period. They weren't experiencing the same social norms that we do today. And so any of the modern terms like lesbian or bisexual or pansexual or gender non-binary or gender queer, that really doesn't apply when looking at the past because they didn't have or use those words to describe themselves. Those were not in common usage in the pre-1920 period. Even though maybe those words existed, they weren't being used by the individuals to identify themselves. There was also no common like queer community, right? There's no LGBTQ movement yet. So there's no sense of this. We are united in a struggle together fighting for common cause. So with that then, when we're talking about the past, we can't say therefore queer people didn't exist, right? Because queer people have always existed. But the terms that they used differed from what we used today. So queer is often seen as a broad term to identify, as you said, anyone who is non heterosexual or non cisgender. And I found that that was a much more encompassing term that allowed us to talk about gender non-conformity, a variety of gender expressions, a variety of gender identities and sexual identities. And it made it much more easy to kind of address this queer history of the suffrage movement without getting into the weeds of the modern terminology debate. And I really think it works for the reader. I mean, I think you explain it so clearly in the opening. And then as it's threaded through the words work, they don't jar the reader out of the time period that you're focusing on. And I think the book is trying to show complexity, right? It's really trying to add an entire dimension that has been erased. And we've seen some excellent work on how race, for example, is ignored. And also how it fractured the movement, how leaders opted to leave out contentious issues of equality in order to satisfy in the case of race, southern suffragists. What are some of the cleavages? Obviously, you're alluding to them in the opening story about Dr. Walker walking onto the stage and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton there. What are some of the cleavages that you think your book reveals within the movement? And how do they help us better understand the movement as a whole? I think the biggest kind of overarching theme is that there is a great deal of diversity within the suffrage movement. There are individuals expressing a wide variety of gender identities and sexualities, races, ethnicities, right? There's a lot of diversity in the movement. And it's difficult for them to identify what what is the main issues that we should focus on? How do we gain popular support for these ideas, these broad ideas of women's rights? And what happens then is there there's almost this huge like debate within the movement about how they publicly should present themselves. You know, anti-suffragists are claiming that these are managed abnormal women who look nothing like or act nothing like proper respectable women should act. And so in response to this, the mainstream suffrage leaders, many of themselves who if they were alive today might identify as lesbian gay queer. They are concerned about how to best present their cause in a way that's going to gain the most support. And so in the process, they end up really narrowing their focus to a single issue, the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and then really narrowing their message to specifically present themselves as respectable wives and mothers. Even though many in the movement, most I would say were not married, were not heterosexual, were not like even interested in some of these same issues, were not white, were not middle class. They started to do that as a conscious attempt to try to gain the popular support. This had negative consequences, which is another point that I keep making throughout the book is that many of the most marginalized members of their communities, so we're talking about black women, women of color, indigenous women, we're talking about gender non-conforming individuals, we're talking about queer women like gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, all of these individuals are no longer seen as part of the movement, right? They're almost pushed to the extremes and marginalized or erased from public view. And so this has long term consequences for the queer history and also for social movements as a whole. Wow, that was so beautifully said. You have an early example of this at the individual level in the introduction to the book. You show us a picture of Anna Shaw and she has this super short haircut and it's a great photo. It's the kind of photo you would want on your profile if you were doing social media, but you describe how it is she altered her own appearance in a sense making the kind of respectability politics decision that you're describing the movement makes. She makes it internally. It's internalized for her that she that her success or her ability to do certain things is somehow made easier if she conforms and that sort of tension within her own individual decisions. And this is one of the sort of brilliant aspects of the book is the way in which you move between the individual lives of the suffragists and the broader movement. And you said this at the start, you're a specialist in this period, your book is narrating one part of the story, which is the end of the 19th century to the ratification. And as you say, there was this perception of suffragists as sexual and gender deviance who were dangerous to society. And I'd like you to outline just a little bit more about what that propaganda looked like in terms of depicting suffragists as dangerous and who was that message coming from. And then we can talk about how the suffragists responded, but what was the kind of stuff that was out there? Sure. So anti-suffragists implied that that suffragists that women who wanted the vote were abnormal, that they were not like the average wife and mother, that their demand for equal rights reflected their essential desire to to upset the existing gender order, right? Because there was this idea of separate spheres that men operate in the public sphere and the political world and that women operate in the private sphere in the world of the home, and that each in balance kind of keeps society operating and functioning. And so this idea that these women wanted to enter the political sphere was a threat. It literally would undermine the stability of society, of families. And it was therefore the marketing of the anti-suffrage movement was that these women were going to destroy society if they continued in their demand for the vote. And so what they did then is anti-suffragists took these individuals in the movement like Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who were advocating for a more extreme upheaval. I mean, they are advocating for an upheaval of the gender binary. And so they pointed these women and they say this is what's going to happen. Women will become men. Men will become women. It will literally invert the norms and will essentially have a complete chaos in society. So it's just it's panic over the potential that the gender binary might be disrupted and that the balance would be would destroy society. sort of irony to the idea that any man who accepts the notion of women's equality becomes a passive unmanned person. So it's like he loses, he loses the power that he has by simply agreeing with this idea of women's equality. Now there had been some success. The Marriage Equality Acts had started to chip away at some aspects of coverture, coverture is a system of law that's been around in the English system that we inherited since at least the 12th century that says that women married women are covered by their husband in law. So the couple is one person in law represented by the husband and he has rights that include sexual access, 24/7, a certain amount of violence that he is allowed to beat but not kill his wife, et cetera, and also to take wages and property that may have been inherited by his wife. So they had had some successes but the vote seems to be the thing that really spoke to equality in a very, very different way than those other reforms. How did the suffragists respond to this propaganda? You know, you're saying that they in fact did realize they maybe could practice a form of respectability politics and wear certain clothes where there are other things that they did to try to push back on that narrative? Yeah, I think they began to shield their private lives more discreetly, right? So Anna Howard Shaw, as you mentioned, Tricia Forensen has written a biography of Anna Howard Shaw. So I borrow heavily on that research to kind of contextualize a Shaw's life. But as a young woman, she realized that her kind of gender non-conforming appearance was perceived by anti-suffragists as something that was a threat and so she began to encourage other women in the suffrage movement to conform outwardly, right? To present yourself in the most respectable way possible, you know, to wear modest conservative clothing, you know, and she began to kind of reframe her image in a way that she found helped focus on her message alone. So people weren't attacking her appearance, they were focusing on her message. And for her, this was very successful from her perspective, right? So her private life, however, she had intimate relationships with women. She lived a queer non-conforming lives in so many ways, so many of these women lived queer non-conforming lives. And they chose to kind of keep that more private. And again, this, I'm not going to say whether this worked or not because it was an individual choice and there were a variety of reasons why individuals might choose this. And so it, but it did have effects. I think that's the important point is that it did have an impact because the idea was to kind of erase anyone who was not that respectable white middle class, wife or mother. And so that was a conscious decision on the part of leaders of the suffrage movement. And it was a decision that had repercussions down the line. But at that time, they felt like that was the only way to get their message across about the vote. And it's extraordinary because really what they are about is women's autonomy. I mean, that's part of why they want the vote, that's part of why they want dress code reforms, why they want so many of these reforms. And this notion of choice and choosing and making decisions is crucial to autonomy, yet they recognize that the structural constraints you can have agency, but as long as you're in certain structures that agency may not be able to be as effective in terms of your public message. But this idea of, as you say, we start with this public private, it goes back to ancient, ancient Greek world, at least in Western philosophy. And we see them using that to, on the one hand, have a certain kind of public message and lead a different kind of private life. I mean, for me, one of the strengths of the book is how you use what we know about the private lives of individual suffragists to shine this light on the broader movement. And also, for me, to dispel really mistaken understandings of former times. So the late 19th century is often depicted as a time of conformity in which women operate within a patriarchal society that emphasizes particular domestic roles, particularly in marriage. But you show the suffragists inverting this and adapting to it in really different ways. How do their stories, and if you don't mind sharing maybe one or two, demonstrate the queerness of the time that our understanding of that time period is actually not accurate. Yeah, I mean, that's the most fascinating part of this research for me was to literally dive into the lives and to uncover what I could about these individuals. I mean, we know what their public appearance was, but what would their private lives actually like? So I guess a good example would be Alice Dunbart-Nelson. Alice was a Black suffragist, a member of the National and the North American Women's Suffrage Association. And she was active in the movement. She was an organizer in Pennsylvania and Delaware, traveled around and gave suffrage speeches and was advocating very publicly not only for the right of women to vote, but specifically for issues facing the Black community. She was talking about the violence against the Black community. She was talking about discrimination. She was talking about poor housing conditions. She was talking about a wide range of issues and raising this. So her activism, her notion of women's suffrage was much broader than just the narrow focus on the vote. But she also recognized and made a conscious decision for herself to shield her private life, right? So she presented herself as publicly as a heterosexual widowed woman because her husband had passed away. And she used his name in her speeches. She said, "I am Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbart because he was a very well-known Black poet, middle class status," right? And it afforded her respectability because she's the wife of this relatively well-known poet. And so she used that and relied on this idea of this heterosexual respectability to advance the cause in many ways, to make her voice heard, to give her some respectability. But privately, when you dive into her personal life, you learn that she had a wide range of relationships with men and women. At the very time, she's giving these speeches, and emphasizing, "I'm Mrs. Paul Lawrence Dunbart," she's having relationships with women, very intense sexual relationships with women. And if she were alive today, she might identify as pansexual, bisexual. But at the time, she kept these relationships secret and hidden because it didn't further her cause in the way that she wanted it to. And she was concerned because there was so much hostility against Black suffragists. They were often attacked as being sexual deviants, sexual immoral. And so she felt like a part of this was protecting the image of women and suffragists, part of it's about protecting the image of Black reformers at the time and making sure that her community and her personal life is protected and safe. Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine before they start. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Alerture doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Alerture reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myastheniographis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxCronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. I love that part of the book, and I particularly love how in a sense she's taking advantage of the patriarchal assumptions about the sexuality of widows. And so as she presents herself as a widow, the assumption is, well, she, of course, women can come visit her because she's not a sexual person. She's done. Her husband is dead, and she's able to, in a sense, use that belief to make personal choices that are more autonomous and freer. You talk a lot in the book about chosen families and the ways in which suffragists created really powerful networks of like-minded people. And this was part, you say, of how they protected themselves. You say a little bit more about chosen families and how that operated. And also for the people who have just read the personal librarian, you can talk maybe Boston marriages, come up there and in book clubs, but they're front and center in your book as well. Yeah, so many suffragists form intimate, same-sex relationships with other women, and they move in together and they establish lives together and they live together. And at the time, this was seen, this was nicknamed Boston Marriage because it was a common phenomena, especially in Boston and areas in the, in the Northeast where educated women after college would sometimes move in together and establish a life together. And so this idea was, I want to emphasize, it was way outside the norm because the expectation was that women would get married and have children. So if a woman chooses to commit her life to another woman, that's a real challenge to the existing system. So even though this was common, it wasn't accepted. I want to, I want to make sure I explain that because it was common, but not necessarily accepted in the mainstream. So these women were really living outside the norm of their time and chosen family then becomes very important to them. They're chosen partner, right? And then they're chosen friends, those that, that they let into their inner circle that know about their relationship that are, that become their friends and become their extended family. There's also individuals who were gender nonconforming, whose gender identity, isn't the identity they were assigned a birth. And so these individuals also find that chosen family is crucial because oftentimes they were ostracized from their birth family or even just their activism in the suffrage movement has ostracized them from their family. So chosen family is important for cisgender women and heterosexual women in the movement as well, but even more so for these queer suffragists. And I tell the story of Albert Eugene DeForest, who was, if he were alive today, might identify as a trans man. He very visibly transitioned in Berkeley and in this San Jose area, the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1800s. And DeForest lived with other suffragists, had he had docked one of the suffragists, Alita Avery, became his adopted mother and he looked to her as his family. And there were other suffragists who he considered family and he relied on for emotional support, for support when he was arrested for his gender identity and was harassed for that. And so they became his kind of chosen family kind of protecting him and nurturing and supporting him. And he was very active in a variety of reform movements at the time and was able to live his life and have this very rich and fulfilling life and career in part because he created a family that would support him. The first two chapters of the book focus on American suffragists, but you get to chapter four and you pull the lens back to examine how suffragists forged queer transatlantic alliances. So in, you know, in the ways that an individual could find comfort in building these kinds of chosen families, you talk more about networks that formed. And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about the effect those networks had on the personal lives of the suffragists and also moving their substantive claims, the women for women's rights forward. So both the personal and settling their suffrage goals, making their goals successful. Yeah, I think that this chapter really helped me understand just how important these alliances were. Like, I knew there were connections between the British suffrage movement and the American suffrage movement, but I didn't realize how personal these connections were until I really started kind of looking into this. So I use a couple of stories in there to highlight these transatlantic connections. And I think the most interesting one is Alice Morgan Wright. Alice was a New York suffragist. She was a young woman who graduated college, was beginning career as a sculptor and had this intense interest in art, but also in in the suffrage movement. And while she was traveling across the Atlantic to go study art in Paris, she met Emeline Pankhurst, who was the leader of the British suffrage movement of the militant arm of the British suffrage movement. And Alice was so enamored by this suffrage hero that she kind of begins hero worshiping her. She writes letters back to friends at home. I can't believe I met Pankhurst and she's the most wonderful woman ever. And she develops what is clearly a queer crush on Pankhurst. And Pankhurst was an older woman who had had much experience with many of the young women in the movement who were enamored with her. And I think she saw her as just a young mentee. She was going to encourage her activism and encourage her to pursue her career in art. So Alice ends up keeping in contact with Pankhurst, writing letters. She's in Paris and Pankhurst is in London. And Pankhurst is just letting her know this is what's going on in the movement. How are you? How's your work? And eventually Alice just cannot resist traveling over to London and participating in the the mass movement that is happening of the British suffragettes in England. And she gets arrested holding a rock in her hand about to break a window in the famous mass window breaking campaign that occurred in London. And she is arrested. She is put in prison and hallway with hundreds of other suffragets. And her family back home finds out about it because it's headline news in the the American newspapers that this American girl is arrested in London with the British suffrage movement. And so her parents are horrified. Her family is just they don't know what to do. They're trying to get get over to England and try to get her out of jail. But she is having the time of her life because she's not only in prison for the cause that she cares about the most, but she's imprisoned alongside Amaline Pankers. So she spends her time in prison writing love poems to Amaline that are published in the book. And she creates a mini sculptor of Amaline and she's just having the best time ever and doesn't even want to be taken out of prison. So it ends up becoming this debate within our family. But when she is released from prison, she does remain active in the movement. And in fact, later in her life comes back into the United States and helps fight for women's suffrage here. And later has a partner, same sex partner that she lives with for the rest of her life, who's active in the militant arm of the US suffrage movement. So it just shows you how important these connections were. And later in their life, in fact, in the 1920s and the 1930s, her connection with Pankers and with many of the other British suffragettes continues to fuel their activism. And they create coalitions across the Atlantic to fight for women's rights into the 20s and 30s and beyond. So these connections that they created were literally lifelong. And they were also, they helped forge these bonds in the suffrage movement internationally. The book is so good at describing the impact that space has. I mean, in the vineyard, you just gave the idea that prison becomes the space in which one could come to terms with your commitment to activism or explore your own sexual feelings or your art, you know, making the bust of Pankers, for example. And you talk a lot about these spaces and how they allow suffragists to socialize, to bond, to build community, and also the relationship between having that space and developing radical ideas. And you talk a lot about public and private throughout the book and, you know, a lot of these spaces are private spaces, but you also give examples of public sites that suffragists transform into sites of queer resistance. So I'm wondering if you'd say that wasn't really a very well formulated question. Say a little bit about the importance of space and how space helps develop ideas, but also these public spaces and private spaces. Yeah, so if we're living in a time of separate spheres, right? And the idea is that women's space is literally in the home and men's spaces in the public sphere. This idea of women stepping out into the political sphere and literally taking their first steps onto the street, right? like publicly, walking down the street, insisting on the right to vote, is a huge upending of existing norms. And so this idea that these suffragists are marching down the street, insisting that they should have equal rights, is really claiming space and querying space so to use queer as a verb, right? Because they're queer, meaning to upend existing norms, they're completely upending what is expected of women at the time of respectable white middle class women stay inside the home, and here they're stepping outside the home, demanding their right to have access to the public sphere. And then you have on top of that genderqueer suffragist, like Annie Tinker, who's literally marching in the parade in men's clothing, writing horseback, and leading a calvary of suffragists in the New York City parade, and the reporters are just shocked by her manned appearance and this masculine behavior. And so they're really claiming, especially queer suffragists, are really claiming the spaces their own, like we have the right to exist in public. And they claim spaces, they, when the National Women's Party, I talk a little bit about their establishment of headquarters, in Washington, D.C., was a very physical claiming of space. This is our right to exist. We have the right to operate in Washington, D.C., and so there's a claiming of space there. And then also in their private spaces, these women-centered spaces become opportunities for them to develop much more intimate relationships with each other, and open up a variety of queer possibilities in their romantic and personalized. So for the first time, you have women who are graduating college, which is a homosexual sphere, right? They're predominantly going to university with other women. And then they're instead of conforming and going into a heterosexual relationship, many of them are choosing to continue their lives in this homosocial space in the suffrage movement. And so in the process, they are living with other women, rooming with other women as they travel. And literally, their whole lives then is about women. And this offers an opportunity for them to develop intimate relationships and romances to fall in love. And so there's lots of examples in the book of women falling in love within the private space of the suffrage movement. - For me, one of the most poignant chapters was about querying traditions of death rituals and grieving. You talk about the public mourning and commemoration practices took on especially significant meanings for suffragists who lived on normative lives, unquote. And I'm wondering if you can explain a little bit about how suffragists managed to memorialize and grieve their queer relationships. And why you think these practices affect how we remember queerness, not just the queer individuals. - Yeah, I ended up writing a whole chapter on death and death ritual in part because when I was trying to uncover their personal lives, I found a lot of the evidence of their queer relationships literally at their death. So I ended up looking at probate records to see, who did they leave their, all of their life belongings, their possession, who did they leave that to? And what I discovered is that oftentimes it was these intimate relationships that they had struggled so much throughout their life to maybe hide or to conceal from public view because of their professional lives. Suddenly, these were very clear at the moment of their death. So that's how I ended up writing about death. And what I find is that they really do queer death ritual as well, they upend what's expected. So what you normally would see with heterosexual couples, you're seeing with these same sex relationships, right? That you're seeing that they are taking these rituals that we typically associate between a husband and a wife and they are modifying those and adapting those to their queer lives. So the best example of this is, I tell the story of two California suffragists, a Gail Loughlin and Dr. Mary Sparry and Loughlin and Sparry were active in the California suffrage campaign and they met because of their involvement in that campaign. Dr. Mary Sparry's mother was the president of the California Women Suffrage Association and Gail Loughlin was hired to come from the national headquarters to organize the movement in California. And so that's how they met and they fell in love and they lived together within the Sparry family home in San Francisco and then they also left and lived for eight years in Denver together where they lived and had careers and kind of developed their relationship. And it wasn't until Dr. Mary Sparry passed away in the influenza epidemic of 1919 that the real nature of their relationship comes to the fore and how that happened is when Sparry passed away she asked in her will that everything be given to Loughlin. And that even her physical remains be cared for by Loughlin. But the Sparry family was livid. They did not want Loughlin to be the one that cared for their daughter's remains and that inherited her property. So they took her to court, they challenged it. The course, the case went all the way through the court system and essentially the court sided with the will that it should stand. It was Dr. Mary Sparry's wishes. And so the Sparry family was so upset that they essentially created on the family, tombstone on the family had stone in Stockton. They inscribed Sparry's name and said in memoriam 'cause her remains were not there. But her remains were passed on to Loughlin who cared for them for the rest of her life. And Loughlin was upset because her own reputation was attacked in this court case. The Sparry family said that she was dominating, that she was masculine, implying sexual defancy. And Mother Sparry even said they lived together and they slept together in the same bed, implying with sexual deviancy. So Loughlin decided that she was gonna just carry on and she carried her partner's ashes with her for the rest of her life and cared for those until she passed away something like 30 years later. And when she passed away, she insisted in her will that they be buried side by side, laid to rest under the same headstone that bared both of their names. So ultimately in their death, they were together as they were in life. But it was a very visible reminder of this power of these queer relationships and the enduring nature of them even beyond this life. - That's a great story. I mean, the book is full of great stories. That particular chapter was a favorite of mine. The book focuses on individuals, but really your wider point is that queerness has been erased from the history of the suffrage movement, which seems ridiculous because as you read the book, you're just, it's everywhere, it's threaded through. This is not two stories. It's multiple stories and at all different levels. What are some of the ways in which queerness has been erased and how has history as a discipline been part of that centering or desentering of queerness? And what methods do you use to reverse that erasure and do you think authors who are pursuing any kind of history need to be aware of? - Yeah, so as time goes by and as the suffragists begin to age, they get older and they're concerned about their legacy, they're concerned specifically about how history will remember them, what stories will be told about them after their death. This is happening, this is coinciding with the 1940s, the 1950s, 1960s, right? There's an intense amount of homophobia during that time period. So many of the suffragists choose themselves to destroy evidence of their queer lives. You literally have suffragists talking about destroying their letters. So Alice Morgan Wright's partner goes through and removes all the letters that exist between her and right. And so you have examples and I have several examples in the book of the conscious decision of suffragists to can straight wash their lives or at least erase the queerness from their lives. If they did not do that themselves, then oftentimes their biographers have done that because again, they're writing these biographies of these great suffragists in a homophobic time. And so the concern is that we, oh no, there's evidence of their queer lives, we can't talk about that. So oftentimes we just do not mention it. So you get this kind of stereotypical old spister woman who never married, and no mention that she lived with another woman for 40 years, right? So it's kind of this erasure again of another form. And then you have descendants also who erase the queer history of suffragists. So I talk about how like Yale Laughlin's biographer was a family member and clearly knew about Laughlin's death and that she's buried with Mary Sparry and chose not to talk about that, chose not to address at all this long history in this court case or anything about them having a life together. So sometimes it's the suffragists, sometimes it's their biographers, sometimes it's the descendants that erase it. And so then the difficult part for the historian [BLANK_AUDIO] to try to uncover these lives that were consciously erased throughout time and to try to figure out what was their life actually, like who were their partners, who was most important to them, and how did this shape their involvement, the suffrage movement. And so it's literally sometimes going through the scraps in Alice Morgan Wright's collection. It was sometimes going through the back of her address books, which you wouldn't think to look, right? And then there's scribbled notes to her partner in there that I don't know if she was writing drafts of letters or what, but I would find evidence of that. Or going through and looking in her old notebooks from college, which you wouldn't think would have any reflection on her later career in life. And yet there are these queer love poems to other women, where she's just imagining this future of living with these women. And so it really kind of eludes the whole illustrates her whole life and gives you an idea of exactly how queer many of these suffragists were throughout their whole lives. Well, it's a fabulous book. I enjoyed every page. Is there something that we haven't talked about that you would like to include in this discussion? I think just making sure that we emphasize how important these stories really are, queer history gets erased, women's history often gets erased, and it's important to recognize that these stories are part of the larger story, right? These are our histories, and that we must talk about history. And you know, there's a lot of efforts right now, there's the don't say gay laws, there's a lot of attempts to try to hide and bury gay history once again. So this isn't something that happened in the past. It's something that's ongoing. This continued attempt to erase various aspects of our history. So I think it's important to continue to fight for our right to know our history and to make sure that we are telling these stories that are so important to all of our past. What is your current project focusing on? I'm going to continue to look at queer history. I'm looking at World War II potentially right now and some different aspects of queer lives because some stories have come forward. Through the process of doing this, I've learned a little bit more about efforts to hide queer history in different time periods as well. So I might be working on something like that, but it's still up in the air. Is that going to be hard? You're a master of the progressive era, and that is quite clear on every page of this book. You're bringing so much other background to move that far forward, to into the 20th century. Yes, we'll see. That's part of my trepidation, I guess, moving forward. But at the same time, there are stories that are coming to light that they need to be told. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for joining us on new books in political science and history. The book is Public Faces, Secret Lives, A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement, published by NYU Press in 2020. Thanks so much for joining me, Wendy. Thank you. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at $50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more, whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving, or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder. The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. Shop Labor Day Savings at the Home Depot, and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving.