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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Wendy L. Rouse, "Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement" (NYU Press, 2022)
Description: When the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was commemorated in 2020, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were often the focus of museum exhibits, teach-outs, and scholarly works. Highlighting the queerness of the movement was rarely the narrative. But Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) insists that a narrow focus on cisgender heterosexual woman erases the existence and importance of queer suffragists – and how their transgressive notions of gender and sexuality impacted the suffrage movement. Hiding queerness reinforced a “patriarchal, cisheteronormative standard of ideal womanhood and manhood in order to make s...