 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about an overlooked woman in history.
Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement, by Wendy L. Rouse This book was very academic in tone for my taste, but extremely informative. I'd heard of Carrie Chapman Catt, but had no idea that after losing two husbands, she spent 38 years with a woman companion, Mary Garrett Hay, and was buried next to her rather than one of the husbands. Similarly, I'd heard of Black suffragette Angelina Weld Grimké, but had never seen the letter urging another woman to be her "wife," nor the passionate poems addressed to women. Passionate "friendships" between women were accepted at the time, sometimes termed "Boston Marriages" (apparently after The Bostonians, an anti-suffrage novel by Henry James). Such relationships were outwardly portrayed as nonsexual, even as the women lived together for years and spoke of each other in romantic terms. Suffragettes were attacked with the usual anti-feminist stereotypes: ugly, masculine, man-haters, etc. (The same tired attacks get recycled every generation.) The suffrage organizations tried to counter this with respectability politics, keeping wives and mothers in the forefront, with any deviation from standard gender roles pushed to the back. There were a number of other interesting women discussed. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, whose photo appears on the cover, was an early advocate of dress reform. And Annie "Dan" Tinker, who was apparently bisexual, also wore men's clothes and led mounted cavalry in suffrage parades. It was definitely worth the textbook-like writing style to learn about such fascinating women.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |