Defying the Norm: Gender Transgressive Exploits of Suffrage Activists

The women’s suffrage movement is typically portrayed primarily as a movement for women’s political equality. Yet in many important ways it also represented a gender revolution of sorts. Whether through playful forms of gender transgression or overt expressions of gender identity, suffragists challenged notions of ideal femininity in their political activism and everyday lives. Through various daring gender-defying exploits, young suffragists especially pushed the boundaries of feminine respectability in their suffrage activism. This defiance of heteronormative expectations and binary gender norms influenced contemporaneous and future struggles for queer and trans liberation.