Published in: January-February 2025 issue.
Alice Morgan Wright: Suffragist, Sculptor
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WHEN I BEGAN researching my book Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, people warned me that I wouldn’t find much, and they weren’t entirely wrong. These women who had fought so publicly for the right to vote tended to live very private lives. Publicly, they dedicated themselves to reform, giving speeches and writing letters and articles to promote social change. Privately, many suffragists had passionate queer love affairs, creating their own chosen families to support each other.
Alice Morgan Wright was one of these 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 Wright’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. Wright’s collection included a large cache of letters that she had written to family and friends. If Goode were such a close friend, why was there no correspondence between them?
A careful reading of all of Wright’s correspondence turned up a hint in a single line of a letter between Goode and a friend. Wright had fallen ill and, fearing that she didn’t have long to live, Goode wrote: “I want to read every scrap of Wright’s memoranda I have assembled as well as her correspondence with me over the years.” This was proof that they had exchanged letters, whether they had survived or not. Although this finding offered no definitive answer about their relationship, the archival silence seemed to speak volumes. Goode’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-World War II 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 Goode chose to do.
However, I wasn’t ready to give up on the story of Wright and Goode. The more I searched, the more I found. I read through Wright’s 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.
I found poems from her college days that she had spent at Smith with Goode. One seemed especially revelatory of Wright’s dreams:
There is a land where duties cease,
Where life is but a fairy song,
Where zephyrs breath, the whole day long
The harmony of perfect peace. …
For there the king am I, and thou
The queen of all that realm as fair.
Our feathered minstrels of the air
Sing odes to us from branch and bough. …
And side by side, thy hand in mine,
We wander through the poppy field.
The rainbow cliffs above us yield
The splendours of their glowing line.
But soon grows dim that mystic light
And dies the rosy gleam so sweet,
For on the ground beneath our feet
I see our shadows still and white.
The blue lake sinks beside the lea,
The poppies turn from red to gray,
The rainbow mountains fade away,
I see dissolve the endless sea.
And now, my strange short reign has ceased
In vain my heart to thine still cries
The love-light dies within thine eyes
As comes the day up from the east.
The world of things that are appears,
As fades the world of things that seem.
But sweet the memory of my dream
You with me through the waking years.
This poem may be interpreted as an expression of queer desire and as a coming to terms with the reality of a love that could not be, at least not in the light of day. Wright apparently didn’t get the girl—or at least not yet.
After college, Wright went to Paris to study art and became active in the militant suffrage movement. Her letters from this time period reveal that she had a crush on the suffragist leader Emmeline Pankhurst, whom she met on the steamship to Europe. Wright was so enamored that she traveled to London to participate in Pankhurst’s protests. She shocked her friends and family back home when they read in the newspapers that Wright had been arrested for holding a stone that she was preparing to throw through a window to demand the vote for women. She went to jail along with over 200 suffragists arrested that night, where they launched a hunger strike to protest the government’s oppression of women.
When Wright finally returned to the U.S., she continued her activism in the suffrage movement, reuniting with her college friends, including Goode. They joined together in a life of activism on behalf of women in the National Woman’s Party and later as founders of the National Humane Education Society, which fought for animal rights.
A final hint from the archives seemed to answer one question definitively. Among the last items in Wright’s collections was a book of poems she wrote in the latter half of her life. A number of them were written on Valentine’s Day for an unspecified love:
My hands are torn by the spokes I
clutch
as the wheeling years go by
And the dust of their passing grays
my head
And my eyes are dim with the
dust they shed. …
And think how year by year
I love my lovely dear!
She is my noonday bright
She is my starry night,
She is my heart’s delight
My very dear.
A faint note added in pencil revealed that the poems had been dedicated to “E. J. G.”
Researching the queer lives of suffragists like Wright requires a meticulous excavation of the archival silences, a reading between the lines of existing sources. These small discoveries can help to shine some rays of light into the darkness, illuminating a previously unknown queer history of the women’s suffrage movement.
Wendy L. Rouse is a historian and the author of Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022).
