Last Thursday, the URI Suffrage Centennial Lecture Series welcomed guest speaker Wendy Rouse to examine the history of the LGBTQ+ community in the suffrage movement.
The event was hosted by Katie McIntyre, associate director of the honors program and assistant professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at URI. McIntyre was joined by Annie Russell, director of the Gender and Sexuality Center, who introduced Rouse.
“Rouse has earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History at the University of California-Davis,” Russell said. “Her current research project is titled the Queer History of the Womens’ Suffrage Movement.”
Rouse has written books about the womens’ self-defense movement, the first wave of feminism and the effects of being Chinese-American on youth in the state of California. During her presentation, she detailed the less obvious obstacles that women in the United States face and why these obstacles have taken so long to overcome.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about the need to refocus our story to move away from just the emphasis on white, upper-class or middle-class leaders of the suffrage movement and to deconstruct that dominant narrative,” Rouse said. “One of the things that we really haven’t addressed enough is the need to move away from the cis-heteronormative framework, and to focus on the way that suffragists were transgressing normative bounds of gender and sexuality. My central thesis that the suffrage movement was very queer.”
Rouse cited examples of suffragists who not only challenged America’s predominantly patriarchal culture but those who challenged gender norms by deviating from standard dress code, refusing to have children or marry or otherwise protesting concepts of sexuality and domesticity.
Mary Edwards Walker was a suffragist during the late 19th century who regularly wore mens’ attire, according to Rouse. She believed that women have the right to wear what they please, not what they are expected to. Walker once said that she did not wear mens’ clothes— rather, she wore her clothes.
In the 20th century, an upper-class woman named Annie Tinker similarly challenged heteronormative culture by wearing genderqueer, masculine-style clothing. In Tinker’s case, Rouse noted the relevance of class privilege in comparison with the other suffragists she described.
“[Tinker] acted how she pleased and dressed how she pleased, and part of this was because of her class privilege,” Rouse said. “She was an upper class, elite white woman so she had the freedom to do this and people could write her off as this eccentric, wealthy woman.”
Dr. Margaret Chung, one of the first Chinese-American and female physicians in the country, was a suffragist. These accomplishments alone were victories in the gender equality movement, but Chung also defied historic norms. She often participated in activities that were largely seen as non-feminine, including drinking, smoking, gambling and cursing.
Rouse explained why this aspect of the suffrage narrative tends to be forgotten. Many people, even descendants of suffragists, publish biographies and other pieces that try to hide the queerness of these women, to sanitize the lives of suffragists and to erase any trace of same-sex significant others they may have had.
This is due to a myriad of reasons including sociopolitical rigidity and cultural framework. For example, Rouse explained that the families of women who openly challenged gender norms would regularly turn on them or their significant others because the relationship does not reflect a “respectable image.”
“This really negates the significance of these relationships,” Rouse said. “Sometimes significant others are completely scrubbed from biographies and you don’t even see their names.”
The lecture concluded with a Q&A segment with questions from the audience as well as prerecorded submissions. Cynthia Marroquin, a senior at URI, asked Rouse to discuss why the original feminist movement was so unaccepting of the queer community.
Rouse responded that the suffrage movement was more concerned with ratifying the 19th Amendment and did not want anything to detract from that priority.
Lorraine Dias Herbon, a member of the live audience, submitted a question about whether or not there were suffragists from regions that were more conservative such as the southern states.
“I have found queer suffragists in many of the states in the West; California, Virginia, Arizona,” Rouse said. “There were suffragists all throughout the U.S. that we would call queer, but again the majority of the documentation about the suffrage movement is really focused on New England and especially in New York and Washington.”