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Margaret Chung (1889-1959) advocated for the voting rights of Chinese and American women through her activism in the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Chinese American League of Justice, the Chinese Protective Association, and the Chinese Women’s Reform Club. The New York Times described her “mannish garb” as “distinctive.” A gossip columnist for the society tabloid Town Topics was less kind, snidely remarking on her “oddities” and expressing his intense dislike for “the masculine fashion in which she handled her hat.” But Tinker was determined to be who she wanted to be and fight for others who desired the same right.Ī photo of "Miss Annie Tinker, whose mannish garb was distinctive," New York Times, ()Ī decade later and on the opposite coast of the country in San Francisco, Dr. In the 1913 parade, Tinker dressed in riding boots, breeches, a man’s coat, and silk top hat that elicited much comment from parade-goers and the press. Instead, people labeled women like Tinker as “mannish.” Tinker proudly formed a “cavalry of suffragists” to ride on horseback in New York City suffrage parades. But in the 1910s, those words were not in general usage. In the present day, Tinker might have described herself as non-binary, gender fluid, or butch. One such suffragist, New York philanthropist Annie Tinker (1884-1924), refused to conform to gendered notions of how a woman should act and dress. I use the term “queer” here as an umbrella term to describe suffragists who challenged gender and sexual norms in their everyday lives and, if they were alive today, might identify as LGBTQ+.
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In the early twentieth century, modern terms such as LGBTQ+ did not exist, but LGBTQ+ people have always existed.
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Queering the suffrage movement can also help us move beyond a framework that privileges only the stories of heterosexual, gender-conforming suffragists to also consider the various ways suffragists transgressed normative boundaries of gender and sexuality. Scholars have already begun "queering" the history of the suffrage movement by deconstructing the dominant narrative that has focused on the stories of elite, white, upper-class suffragists. “Queering the suffrage movement” can allow us to disrupt the traditional narrative of suffrage history by considering it from different perspectives, including the perspective of LGBTQ+ history. Laughlin and Squire’s demands may seem humorous to us today, but in their own unique ways they were challenging gendered norms. Newspaper from the Chicago Tribune on June 22, 1913, "Would you rather have a Vote than a Husband?" (). Squire” rather than “Miss Squire,” because she believed that single women should be afforded the same respect as married women. She explained that she would rather have a vote than a husband because “with a vote a woman’s wages, dignity and position are raised with a husband they may be lowered.” Squire insisted that what women really want from men is to be recognized as “an individual, an equal, maybe, a human being even, as they themselves are.” She declared that as an unmarried woman she deserved the same respect that married women enjoyed and insisted on being referred to with the honorific title of “Mrs. Squire also made a bold statement against the oppression of women by publicly declaring her refusal to marry. When Belle Squire joined the fight for suffrage, she not only wanted the vote, she wanted to smash what we now call “the patriarchy.” In 1910, she led the "No Vote, No Tax League," inspiring at least 5,000 women in Cook County, Illinois, to refuse to pay their taxes until women were granted the right to vote. There are, of course, more serious examples, besides Laughlin’s demand for pockets, of how suffragists defied the gendered conventions of their day. The women’s suffrage movement allowed women to re-examine, question, and begin to systematically rebel against the many restrictions they had lived under for centuries – including oppressive gender and sexual norms. Objecting to the restrictive nature of women’s clothing was just one of the ways that suffragists sought to upend the status quo in the early twentieth century. When lawyer and suffragist Gail Laughlin (1868-1952) discovered that her evening gown had no pockets in it, she refused to wear it until the pockets were sewn on. Collections of the Library of Congress ().