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Interview with Dr. Wendy Rouse

Conducted by Shannon Bennitt
October 6, 2024

 

Shannon Bennitt: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what got you interested in being a historian?
 

Dr. Wendy Rouse: Yeah, so since the time I was a little kid I’ve always really loved history. I used to ask my mom to drive me to the historical sites, museums and stuff when I was just in fourth grade. I was just obsessed with that. I think it was just imagining the past and what it must have been like to have lived in it. I used to like that quite a bit. Then as I got older, you know, you’re told you got to go out and get a good job, make a lot of money, and so I was like, okay, maybe I’ll be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. But ultimately I chose to study history as my major because I thought that’s a great major to prepare for law school or anything like that because you’re learning to read and write. But I loved it so much I actually went on and I got my Master’s degree in history and archaeology, and eventually a PhD in history and started teaching. So I’m glad I did that because now I do what I love, right? I teach U.S. history, women’s history, and queer history at the university.

 

Bennitt: That’s awesome, thank you. Can you tell us what got you interested in researching queer history, and queer women in the suffrage movement? And what was the process of writing your book, Public Faces, Secret Lives like?

 

Rouse: Sure. So, I’ve taught history for years. I teach the U.S. History survey course, and every time I teach the suffrage movement I’m always struck by these women and their personal lives. So I started wondering about that. You know that picture where they’re all protesting in front of the White House? The Silent Sentinels all lined up?

 

Bennitt: Yeah.

 

Rouse: I started wondering, because they were getting arrested and going to jail so I was wondering what their personal lives were like and how it was impacted by what they were doing. What were their parents saying? What were their partners saying? So I started doing some research on each woman that was standing out in front of the White House and I realized as I was doing that that a lot of these women did not marry. I started wondering about these women, that they were living with these other women, right? So then I thought okay, there’s a queer history here that hasn’t been talked about. So I started to want to know more about that. Because I’ve always taught suffrage history. When I get to that unit, I’ve always mentioned it’s a battle for political rights. It's the battle for the vote. But when I started looking at the number of women who make up the movement, and so many of them are queer, I’m realizing that they’re fighting for more than the vote, right? They’re fighting for the right to be with who they want to be with and live how they want to live. So then I realized this isn't just a story about the vote.

 

Bennitt: Right. Yeah, super interesting. I guess, obviously you wrote your book, Public Faces, Secret Lives, which I read. It was super interesting, I loved it. So, I guess if you could talk about the process of writing it, how did you do that research?

 

Rouse: Yeah, well thanks for saying that, because it’s important to know that people are learning from what you research because sometimes you just spend years in your own little world doing this research and then suddenly it’s out there, and it’s nice to know that people care about it as much as you do. Basically, I started by trying to figure out which suffragists did not marry because I figured those were the ones that were likely to maybe have this other life that I can look into. Then I started trying to track down whether they had any personal collections that had been saved of their letters, diaries, and whatnot. This was the biggest challenge, is locating their personal collections, because so much of that history has been erased. Obviously there’s sexism and homophobia and whatnot that play a role, but also, honestly, just a lot of the suffragists themselves destroyed their own documents, or their descendants did. Because they were concerned about their reputation, because being gay, especially in the fifties and the sixties, that wasn’t something [people talked about]. People were in the closet, because the government was actively purging queer people from government employment. So a lot of them were worried about losing their jobs, or losing their careers, or their reputation. So, trying to locate anything that may have been left behind, that they may have chosen to not destroy, was the difficult part. Because I might find a whole bunch of letters that they had written, or diaries, but there may have been very little hint as to their lives. So erasure was a big problem. But, it’s important because we’re looking at trying to recover the queer history of the movement, so it was important for me to look at every little scrap of evidence. So sometimes I would be looking at scribbled notes in the back of a notebook that would give me a hint as to what they were thinking at the time, or who was their main concern in their life at the time. So, we call this looking for the archival silences, right? Looking for what’s missing from the record, and trying to locate it. Like if they have a really intimate or intense relationship with someone, where are the letters between them? And if they’re not in their collection, maybe they’re in another collection, or maybe there are fragments of letters. So trying to find out what’s not there and why it’s not there, was a big part of it. Then of course, there was just a challenge in convincing people that this was an important topic, because a lot of research has to be funded. You have to have a grant or a research fellowship to do the research because you can’t afford to do it on your own. So a lot of the challenge was just convincing people, hey, women’s history is important, and queer women’s history is really important. So that was a struggle all along.

 

Bennitt: Yeah, that makes sense. And I’m really glad you did it, it’s super cool to learn about. Really inspiring.

 

Rouse: Thank you.

 

Bennitt: Just something I wanted to touch on, in your book you talk about the homophobia and racism within the suffrage movement. Do you think you could speak a little bit on the racism within the suffrage movement? And particularly, you mentioned that so many white suffragists believed it was necessary to maintain an image of…you used the words “civilizing mission.” I was wondering if you could explain that a little bit.

 

Rouse: Yeah, sure. So many amazing books have been written on this topic and scholars who touched on the racism within the movement, and specifically the ways in which Black women were kind of pushed out of the mainstream white suffrage movement. I think a lot of this had to do with suffrage leaders narrowly focusing on trying to get the vote, trying to get the Nineteenth Amendment passed. So they began to ignore other issues—anything to do with inequality or oppression or racism, right, they’re just kind of brushing it aside. Then of course there's obviously their own racial hierarchies that they’re perpetuating in the movement. These outdated beliefs about race, civilization, and this idea that white people are more advanced or civilized than other races. That persisted among some of these women even though it was an outdated concept even at that time, right? It continued to frame their worldview. So, I actually found that a lot of research had already been done on those topics, but very little had actually been written about sexuality and gender, specifically those people who transgressed, like, they weren’t living heterosexual lifestyles or cisgender lifestyles. And that’s what I wanted to write about, is the queer history of the suffrage movement, because what I found is that discussion about queerness is still taboo. We talk about race quite a bit, but there’s still this fear about talking so openly about sexuality and gender in history. Even though we have this LGBTQ movement, and we’ve gained all these rights, a lot of people still don’t even know anything about queer history, or they’re afraid to teach about it because of oppressive laws that still exist. There’s “don’t say gay” laws and things like that. So it makes it very difficult to even talk about queer history because it’s still censored in today’s day and age. So that’s why I found that I wanted to look at that topic. And what I found, as you’ll remember, is that suffragists of all races were denigrated as abnormal women because they were fighting for the vote. They wanted the same rights as men and so the idea was that they must somehow be abnormal. There's something wrong with them. So anti-suffragists actually used sexological theory, which had just recently developed as a field. They start saying, “Look at these sexologists, some of them have defined homosexuality as pathological.” Therefore they used that, and said, therefore these women who are fighting for suffrage must be pathological as well. So what we see is homophobia merging with sexism, and they’re both used to dismiss suffragists as abnormal women, as these “mannish” women. So basically they’re denigrating women and they’re denigrating queer people all at once. I think it’s important to understand this because a lot of people don’t know this history. They’ve never heard of this. They don’t know about the way that suffragists were treated at the time. These conversations that we’re still having today tie back to this. You heard about the “childless cat lady” comment, right?

 

Bennitt: Yeah.

 

Rouse: Yeah, JD Vance. So people were responding to that and they were getting rightfully upset about it. But a lot of that has to do with the suffragists, because these attacks on women for failing to marry or to have children aren’t new. They go back to that time period. They told suffragists that they were abnormal women because they didn't get married. They didn’t have children. They weren’t embracing a heterosexual lifestyle. So therefore they must be sexually deviant women and they were dismissed. So we’ve seen this conversation before. It’s an attempt to put women in their place, to prevent them from stepping outside the domestic sphere, to prevent them from demanding equality, to keep them in a box. I think without understanding this history, people don’t always see that sexism and homophobia are actually intertwined and have a long, long history going way back in time.

 

Bennitt: Yeah, that makes sense. Super interesting. As part of my project, I’m planning to go to Cypress Lawn Memorial, which is somewhere in the Bay Area where a lot of suffragists are buried. Ms. [Serene] Williams and some of her students went there several years ago to research suffragists, and honor them with markers. So I’m planning to do that myself, the weekend before election day. I’m hoping to write biographies for a few of them. Ms. Williams said you’ve done some research about…researching gravesites, stuff like that, and I was just wondering, how do you go about that research?

 

Rouse: Yeah, that's awesome, and it’s really important that you do that, because a lot of these folks don’t have their history written, right? So yeah, great. Excellent project, glad you’re doing it. Essentially what you have to do is reconstruct their whole life. So you gotta find any records that exist, which may be very few. But whatever historical records are out there, you want to find. So, look for them in the newspapers. Go to newspapers.com, whatever databases you have access to, search for them in the newspapers. Find the census records. Look at them every decade in the census records. Find their birth records, marriage records, and death records. You’re going to use Ancestry, probably a lot for that. Then you’re going to construct a timeline of their life and try to fill in any gaps. If you don’t know something, what other records could you go to to find it? So you’ll do a lot of corroborating sources, too, to check that they’re accurate. Then you’ll probably want to construct a family tree if you can. Who are their parents? Did they have children and then also did they marry and who did they marry? It’s there that you’ll find out more about their relationships and who’s most important to them in their life. Then if you’re lucky, there might be letters, diaries, and scrapbooks, but not…that’s so rare, that’s very difficult to find. You’ll want to go, like, Online Archive of California, ArchiveGrid, and WorldCat, to try to see if there’s anything out there that exists.

 

Bennitt: Cool, I’ll check that out. Yeah, I saw…I was looking at FindAGrave for one of the suffragists, I think it was May Treat Morrison, and I saw that you had added her picture. I saw your name, so I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” Yeah, I guess, just to conclude, do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History Course, and if so, can you tell me why you think such a course should exist?

 

Rouse: Yeah, I totally do, and it’s awesome that you all are working on that. I think the more people that learn women’s history and study women’s history, the better, right? The more interest we have, the more likely people will continue to want to learn more. They’ll support the scholarship, read the new books. We want more people to dive into women’s history, to go to college and study that. I think this will help counteract some of the erasure, but also develop new histories, things that we don’t know about. Even you researching the biographies of suffragists in the cemetery, right, that’s new research that’s being done. Because one thing that I’ve really learned through queer history and women’s history is nobody’s going to write your history for you. Sometimes people sit back and they go, “Oh, I’ve never learned anything about this before.” And it might just be because it hasn’t been researched, or nobody’s cared enough to write that history. So it’s kind of our job to write our own history. So yeah, definitely a women’s history course will help students learn about all this, fill in gaps in the scholarship about what we don’t know, and hopefully just generate much more excitement and interest in women’s history and help it keep going.

 

Bennitt: Yeah, cool. Thank you. That’s about all the questions I have, is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

 

Rouse: No, good job! Keep working on it! I hope you find a lot of new things.

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