Other Random People

This chapter looks at the personal lives of some prominent suffragists. It was not uncommon for such women to have been married to men at some point, and they might leverage their status as a widow to deflect concern about domestic partnerships with women. These arrangements disrupted heterosexual norms regardless of whether the women involved considered them to represent a specific “identity.”

Carrie Chapman Catt was twice married, and her second husband agreed to let her do suffrage work. During that marriage, she traveled with and sometimes lived with Mary Garrett Hay, with whom she lived permanently after her husband’s death.

“Queer domesticity” among suffragists also encompassed singlehood and sharing living space without romantic partnership. But this chapter focuses on women in “Boston marriages.” The nature of the partnerships within Boston marriages could be varied—professional, creative, romantic, platonic, sexual, or combinations thereof. The common factor is a long-term committed pairing who shared a home and were viewed by their community as a couple. At the same time, such women might strategize how to present themselves as normative, in order to act more effectively in the political realm.

Simply choosing not to marry was a queer act, especially when motivated by feminist principles, but was available only to those with economic independence. The “new woman” who was identified as a type starting around the 1890s was college-educated, oriented toward a career, and—necessarily at that time—not married. This made them vulnerable to accusations of being anti-family, and were targets not only of anti-suffrage forces but also of eugenicists. This could be countered by framing singlehood as a personal sacrifice (for the sake of the movement). But some embraced a positive rejection of marriage as being an inherently unjust institution, claiming the title “Mrs” without a husband, and advocating against double-standards for married and unmarried women. Such views put them at risk of being marginalized by their fellow suffragists. Others chose singlehood after an unsuccessful marriage.

Alternatives to the nuclear family were common in Black communities, relying on networks and extended family relationships. Angelina Grimké provides an illustrative example. With her father working abroad, she lived with various relatives while attending school and developed a romantic friendship with fellow student May Burrill, with whom she exchanged passionate correspondence, although they later separated. She had several other crushes on both women and men while boarding with a family while continuing schooling. Grimké’s poetry illustrates her passions for women, which may have motivated her decision not to marry. But these passions were generally kept out of her correspondence and published work. Grimké’s political activism was a family affair, working on racial equality with Black relatives and on suffrage inspired by her (white) Grimké aunts. She generally lodged with relatives and never found a permanent partner.

Alma Benecke Sass and Hazel Hunkins may or may not have been lovers at Vassar and when their itinerant lives intersected later (both were traveling activists), but Hunkins felt the need to defend their habit of sleeping in the same bed, and their later correspondence is filled with longing for their time together. Neither married and they lived in all-woman environments when traveling. Their heyday in the 1910s and later was an era when advice literature for girls and young women was beginning to warn against co-sleeping, physical affection, and causal touching—warning of unspecified dangers. Their friendship and support continued despite differences over Hunkins’ more radical activities.

Non-normative domestic lives among suffragists also included overlap with free love advocates, and some of these, such as Margaret Foley, had relationships with both women and men.

Some women, such as Black suffragist and racial activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, used marriage strategically to create the image of heteronormative domesticity, which she used rhetorically to frame suffrage activism as a type of “housekeeping.” But her marriage lasted only 4 years and she had sexual relationships with both men and women, including a long-term, if sometimes stormy, partnership with fellow educator Edwina B. Kruse. Her diaries detail multiple affairs with women through 2 further marriages.

The “Boston marriage” was the most classically queer arrangement among suffragists. On the one side a radical rejection of patriarchy, these relationships were sometimes also strongly conforming to traditional images of domestic femininity, and a denial of sexual aspects to their relationship. Such women took a wide range of openness with respect to their private lives, even while presenting publicly as a committed couple.

This tension between desiring an intense, exclusive relationship while presenting it as a type of friendship could fracture some couples. The image of asexuality was a defense against criticism when they were—to all appearances—married.

For women not in heterosexual marriages, framing their public service as a type of maternal care was another defense. The privilege enjoyed by wealthy white activists could also take the form of policing the movement of radical elements, and discouraging the participation of Black women in order to seek the support of racist whites. One couple who took the opposite tack—actively supporting the inclusion of Black suffragists—was Nora Houston and Adele Goodman Clark, who also leveraged their image as “eccentric artists” to defuse scrutiny of their domestic partnership.