August 20, 2020

Molly Dewson, left, with Polly Porter in 1925. Their relationship is one of many that have surfaced as scholars seek to broaden history’s narrative of the suffrage movement.Castine Historical Society

By Maya Salam

Senior Staff Editor, Culture

“Non-heteronormative relationships were just part and parcel of the suffrage movement.”

— Susan Ware, a historian and the author of “Partner and I”

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In 1920, the suffragist Molly Dewson sat down to write a letter of congratulations to Maud Wood Park, who had just been chosen as the first president of the League of Women Voters, formed in anticipation of the passage of the 19th Amendment to help millions of women carry out their newfound right as voters.

“Partner and I have been bursting with pride and satisfaction,” she wrote. Dewson didn’t need to specify who “partner” was. Park already knew that Dewson was in a committed relationship with Polly Porter, whom she had met a decade earlier. The couple then settled down at a farm in Massachusetts (where they named their bulls after men they disliked).

Dewson “made every political decision, career decision based on how it would affect her relationship with Polly Porter,” Susan Ware, a historian and the author of “Partner and I” and “Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote,” told me.

Dewson was far from the only suffragist who had romantic relationships with women. Many of the women who fought for representation were rebels living nonnormative, queer lives.

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“These kinds of non-heteronormative relationships were just part and parcel of the suffrage movement,” Ware said. “It’s not like we are having to dig and turn up like two or three women. They’re everywhere.” Including among the highest echelons of the movement.

Even Susan B. Anthony had relationships with women, said Lillian Faderman, the author of “To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America — A History” and a scholar of L.G.B.T.Q. history. Anthony wrote romantic letters to the suffragist Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and had a long relationship with Emily Gross.

Today, we have many terms for romantic relationships between women: lesbian, bisexual, same-sex and queer, among others. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were sometimes called “romantic friendships” or Boston marriages, which Faderman described as “long-term domestic relationships between two women who were financially independent thinkers.”

When the history of the 19th Amendment is taught in classrooms, suffragists are often depicted as boring, chaste and dowdy, and their campaign is rarely framed as a major social and political movement. But as greater attention is starting to be paid to suffrage history, and to the roles of Black and brown women, the narrative that is emerging is much more varied.

This broader, more accurate picture is also increasing our understanding of queerness in the movement.

Wendy Rouse, a historian and associate professor at San Jose State University, who is among scholars working to “queer the suffrage movement,” uses “queer” as an umbrella term to describe suffragists who challenged gender and sexual norms in their everyday lives.

They did this by choosing not to marry, for example, or by living a life outside the rigid expectations placed on women in other ways. The suffragist Gail Laughlin demanded that pockets be sewn into her dresses, a radical request.

At the same time, societal expectation that middle- and upper-class white women would marry men created a smoke screen of sorts. “I think that the world outside didn’t speculate about the possibilities of a sexual relationship between” women, Faderman said. This smoke screen extended to detractors of the movement, known as anti-suffragists.

They argued that these women would reject marriage, family and the home, and they feared women would adopt men’s clothes and assume male privileges, Rouse said in an email. But somehow they didn’t latch onto the fact that many of these women were having romantic relationships with each other.

This oversight was in part because same-sex relationships didn’t start to be pathologized until the early 20th century, and because, as Ware put it, “Women are kind of invisible, period.” But maybe most of all, it was because the suffrage movement itself downplayed the queerness within it — a defensive strategy that contributed to the erasure of queer suffragists, Rouse said.

Leaders of the movement opted instead to present a version “palatable to the mainstream,” Rouse said, by emphasizing normalcy. So suffragists who were seemingly happily married wives and mothers — or young, beautiful and affluent, a.k.a. marriage material — became the faces of the movement.

Despite this internal friction and these fraught side effects, it ultimately made practical sense that queer women would be at the forefront of the movement. Married women of the day often had children, and mothers didn’t have time to lead a movement, Faderman said. “But the women who didn’t have kids, they did have time to lead.”

For these queer women, the freedom to choose whom and how they loved was tied deeply to the idea of voting rights.

“They knew they would have no man to represent them,” Faderman said.

Read the full article here.

What else is happening

Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed.

Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for vice president in Wilmington, Del. Wednesday night.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

“That I am here tonight is a testament to the dedication of generations before me.” Democrats formally nominated Senator Kamala Harris for the vice presidency on Wednesday, officially making her the first woman of color on a major party ticket. [Read the story]
“Don’t forget: Joe and Kamala can win by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me.” Hillary Clinton, whose presidential candidacy in 2016 sent Joseph R. Biden Jr. to the sidelines, made a bittersweet return to center stage on Wednesday, urging voters to support the Biden-Harris ticket. [Read the story]
“When women succeed, America succeeds.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several other female speakers at the convention on Wednesday celebrated the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and nodded to the unfinished fight for equality. [Read the story]

This In Her Words is written by Maya Salam and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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