Husband Edwin Bjorkman, Partner Kathleen De Vere Taylor
Queer Places:
Helicon Home Colony, N Woodland St & Walnut St, Englewood, NJ 07631
22 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011
116 Waverly Pl, New York, NY 10011
Greenwood Union Cemetery, Rye, Westchester County, New York, USA
Frances Maule Bjorkman (October 24, 1879 – June 28, 1966) was a New Yorker prominent in the woman's suffrage movement. She was a member of the National
Woman Suffrage Association. She was a member of the Heterodoxy Club. She lived at the Helicon Home Colony, an
experimental community founded by Upton Sinclair.
She was a writer, known for Votes for Women (1912). Frances Maule was a reporter for the Denver Post and the New York American. Maule began her newspaper career on the Denver Post, where she worked under Winifred Black, who wrote under the byline, Nellie Bly. She moved to New York in 1900.
In 1906 she married to Edwin Bjorkman, a Swedish-American literary critic, translator, newspaperman, author and New York Times reporter. In 1907, the Bjorkmans joined the Helicon Home Colony, a utopian community in New Jersey founded by author Upton Sinclair. They lost all of their belongings when the colony was destroyed by fire after only four months' existence. The marriage ended in divorce in 1918.
As of June 1920, Edwin and Frances were still living together on Fifth Avenue in New York, N.Y. She then moved to 116 Waverly Place.
Before and especially after her divorce, Maule increasingly turned to her suffrage chosen family for support. She moved into an apartment building in Greenwich Village with other suffragists. Maule forged intimate relationships with radical women who embraced a diverse set of political and social beliefs, from anarchy and socialism to birth control and free love. Queer relationships were also common among this group of Village suffragists. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Maule and fellow suffragist Kathleen De Vere Taylor eventually became lovers. The 1930 and 1940 censuses show Maule and Taylor living together until Taylor passed away in 1949.
Between 1934 and 1957, Maule wrote eight books on vocational guidance for women, and from 1937 to 1957 was editor of the publication Independent Woman.
References:
 Public Faces, Secret Lives by Wendy L. Rouse |
Other references:
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