When constructing fictional narratives of the past, we often run into absolute statements along the lines of "women couldn't...," "women didn't...," "women always..." But when we look at the detailed truths of history, we usually find a lot of "women couldn't unless they..." and "women didn't typically..." and "women always...except when..." Once we get past the falsity of absolute statements, we need to get past a blythe assumption of exceptionalness, fighting our way to a nuanced particularity of the circumstances in which some women could, did, and didn't--with an understanding
LHMP
Blog entry
One of the things I love about the level of detail in this biography is how it shows the day-to-day interactions among family and community. Yes, C&S were accepted and cherished by their community, but that doesn't mean everything was constant sunshine and roses. They had family squabbles.
No extra commentary today. I've been bopping all over the place getting my bike tuned up and meeting up with friends in Sacramento and I'm exhausted.
After I finish up Charity and Sylvia, the numbering on the LHMP entries may get jumbled for a while. I realized that I'd skipped a run of numbers and need to go back and fill them in.
I hope that some of the listeners to the podcast have been intrigued enough by the quick synopsis it gave of Charity and Sylvia's lives to follow up with the more extensive summary presented here in the blog--or even to track down a copy of the book for the full story. I don't often coordinate the blog and podcast quite this closely, but it's often the case that I'll do a run of articles on a theme in preparation for working up a podcast.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/06/21 - listen here)
I can still write, record, edit, and post a podcast from scratch today, right? (Or I can finish up on Sunday, like I so often do.) You'd think that in my leisurely retirement I'd no longer find myself pushing podcast deadlines, but there's still so much on my schedule! And--I confess--today I meant to get right to work on it, but I've been hyperfocusing on a different research/writing project (on the history of the "Best Related Work" Hugo category) and have been having a hard time pulling out of that to work on anything else. This is a known failure mode for me.
In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate?
I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)
Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives.
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