When I began researching the book Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, people warned me that I wouldn’t find much. They weren’t wrong. There was so much information that has been lost over the years. These women who had so publicly fought for the vote often lived very different private lives. Publicly, they dedicated themselves to reform, building movements for equality and social change. Privately, they had passionate queer love affairs, creating their own chosen families to support each other.
Alice Morgan Wright was one of those queer suffragists. She grew up in Albany, New York and went on to become a sculptor, an advocate for women’s rights, and a leader of the animal rights movement. Biographers frequently noted that Edith J. Goode was her closest friend and constant companion. In searching for more about their relationship, I scoured Alice’s extensive collection of materials. On the surface, there wasn’t much. There were no letters between them. There was no hard evidence to indicate little more than a friendship.
This only made me more curious. Alice’s collection included a large cache of letters she had written to family and friends. If Edith was such a close friend, why was there no correspondence between them?
A careful reading of all of Alice’s correspondence revealed a hint in a single line of a letter between Edith and a friend. Alice had fallen ill and fearing that she didn’t have long to live, Edith wrote: “I want to read every scrap of Alice’s memoranda I have assembled as well as her correspondence with me over the years.”
This was the proof that there were letters between them, or at least there once was. Although this finding offered no definitive answer about their relationship, the archival silence seemed to speak volumes. Edith’s choice to remove the letters was an important clue.
For most suffragists, living their lives openly was not possible. Some, especially those who lived into the virulently homophobic post-war era, chose to destroy evidence of their queer lives by burning their personal letters and diaries. In other cases, relatives, descendants, or biographers erased aspects of a suffragist’s queerness fearing that these facts would tarnish their reputation. Perhaps that is what Edith chose to do in this case.
But, I didn’t want to give up on the story of Alice and Edith. The more I searched, the more I found. I read through Alice’s old tattered school notebooks and examined drafts of creative writings in her journals. Individually, they weren’t much, but collectively, they revealed a very queer life.
