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**Honorable Mention for the 2023 Francis Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize**
**2023 Judy Grahn Award-Publishing Triangle Finalist**
Restores queer suffragists to their rightful place in the history of the struggle for women’s right to vote
The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.
Rouse argues that queer suffragists did take meaningful action to assert their identities and legacies by challenging traditional concepts of domesticity, family, space, and death in both subtly subversive and radically transformative ways. Queer suffragists also built lasting alliances and developed innovative strategies in order to protect their most intimate relationships, ones that were ultimately crucial to the success of the suffrage movement. Public Faces, Secret Lives is the first work to truly recenter queer figures in the women’s suffrage movement, highlighting their immense contributions as well as their numerous sacrifices.
Author: Wendy L. Rouse
Paperback Published May 2022 248 pages
"It’s time that their stories were told … From the brutality of prison force-feedings to the vaudeville ditty ‘No Wedding Bells for Me,’ the LGBTQ+ historical survey Public Faces, Secret Lives reveals the movements behind the suffrage campaign with verve." ~Foreword Reviews
"Public Faces, Secret Lives brings to life the work and names of the queer champions of the women's suffrage movement, restoring their rightful place in history and feminism, intersectional as it should be. Author Wendy L. Rouse highlights the radical, innovative action queer suffragists took to challenge traditions around family, love and death — and shows us how they had a lasting, crucial impact on the success of the suffrage movement." ~Buzzfeed