In his sartorial history entitled The Psychology of Clothes (1930), J. C. Flugel states that traditionally “clothes reform tends to receive support from the generally rebellious, as a welcome symbolic expression of revolt.” Certainly woman suffrage advocates throughout the nineteenth century relied on the rhetoric of dress reformers to reinforce their demands that, as Mark Twain and other equal-rights advocates phrase it, women's tongues be untied and their political voices heard. Arguing that their traditional dress codes amplified the physical differences that supposedly made women “naturally” unsuitable for political responsibility, suffrage proponents suggested that women adopt male attire in order to free themselves from their social and political “fetters.” Drawing on the numerous autobiographical accounts of women who cross-dressed in order to serve as soldiers in the Civil War and the increasingly common accounts in newspapers after 1850 of “the deaths of men who turned out to be women,” equal-rights proponents claimed that female transvestitism, because it disguised the physical differences that made women subservient to unscrupulous men, ensured not only women's political equality but their sexual purity as well.

However, by “discovering” the female sexual invert, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexologists effectively neutralized the increasing political power of the woman's suffrage movement.