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In 1891, Eliza Lynn Linton penned a vehemently antisuffrage article for the journal the Nineteenth Century. In this piece, she characterizes bourgeois women who leave the home and domestic sphere for the public sphere of politics as poor eugenic subjects. They have not “bred true” and they are “wild,” masculine, and socially abnormal. Comparing the cultural masculinity of these public women with the physiological masculinity of “bearded” women and other sexological deviants, Linton defines suffragists, “the wild women of politics and morals,” as not only unfeminine but also unnatural. Agitation for the vote indicates “a curious inversion of sex”—that is, gender inversion.1 Such inversion may be the result of volitional deviance—that resulting from impure parental mixing—or of social Darwinist devolution . Yet, among all of her accusations of moral and developmental failure, Linton never accuses these inverted suffragists of homosexuality, nor does she explicitly discuss sexuality at all. Here gender inversion exists without sexual inversion, and the racial body politic will be preserved or destroyed through politics rather than procreation.2 The rhetoric of the women’s suffrage debates demonstrates that turn-ofthe -century female masculinity was not solely a sign of sexual deviance, as c h a p t e r 2 public women, social inversion: the women’s suffrage debates These insurgent wild women . . . have not “bred true”—not according to the general lines on which the normal woman is constructed. There is in them a curious inversion of sex, which does not necessarily appear in the body, but is evident enough in the mind. Quite as disagreeable as the bearded chin, the bass voice, the flat chest, and lean hips of a woman who has physically failed in her rightful development, the unfeminine ways and works of the wild women of politics and morals are even worse for the world in which they live. —elia lynn linton, “The Wild Women” 31 32 public women, social inversion sexologists would have us believe, but also a sign of social deviance and a challenge to the ideology of separate spheres. This chapter examines how debates over women’s suffrage in Britain transformed turn-of-the-century notions of femininity and intersected in the production of modern sexuality for women by engaging with the terms of domestic, imperial, and national identities. I trace the fragmentation and partial dissolution of separatespheres ideology as a dominant trope for bourgeois women by examining constructions of nation, gender, and sexuality within discursive battles over citizenship. The women’s suffrage debates illustrate connections among nationalist and gendered ideologies of femininity. Furthermore, by the mid- and late twentieth century, readings of suffragist masculinity as female homosexuality misconstrued the role of masculinity in gender and sexual ideologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Geopolitics and sexuality were mutually produced in the British women’s suffrage debates; and this mutual production set the stage for wartime and interwar reconfigurations of female sexuality through changing rhetorics of empire, nation, and identity. The turn of the twentieth century saw cultural shifts over meanings of domesticity and the ideology of separate spheres. Women’s agitation for full citizenship increased in several geopolitical locations while the British Empire first reached its zenith and then began to falter against anticolonial nationalist movements in the colonies. The politics of empire and gender equality came together under the sign of the “domestic.” Amy Kaplan notes that “domestic has a double meaning that links the space of the familial household to that of the nation, by imagining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home.”3 When suffragists and antisuffragists struggled over the proper roles of women and men in public life and the domestic sphere, they often engaged their debate through the terms of imperial power and proper racial and national, as well as familial, subject formations. Thus Linton characterizes the “wild women” of suffrage not only as sexologically inverted and culturally destructive women, but also as women who have not “bred true.” “Breeding”—that is, women’s maternal functions—also figures prominently in discourses of separate spheres, suffrage, and empire. As Anna Davin and others have noted, bourgeois white women were seen as central to the population, defense, and ideological reproduction of the British Empire: “If the British population did not increase fast enough to fill the empty spaces of the empire, others would. . . . The birth rate then was a...

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