Skip to content Skip to navigation

England

Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.

For a full list of LHMP place tags click here.

LHMP entry

LHMP #445f Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 6

[Note: it is actually rather hard to do a very condensed overview of these chapters that are of less interest to the Project. I’m trying to get much more high-level for these last few chapters.]

A 1957 committee considered potential changes to the legal treatment of “vices”. One goal of the changes was to keep activities in this category, such as prostitution and homosexuality, out of public view. Even decriminalization was not intended for the benefit of the accused, but to suppress knowledge of the activities.

LHMP #445e Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 5

By the 1920s, certain sexual offenses between women were criminalized, but not the generic “gross indecency”. “Female husband” disappeared from the record with respect to sexual offenses, but the case of Victor/Valerie Barker signals a new direction of medicalized approaches, combined with anxiety over single women in the wake of World War I and the glimmerings of visibility brought by the obscenity lawsuit over The Well of Loneliness. This was a short-lived visibility ended by a rejection of sexological arguments for acceptance.

LHMP #445d Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 4

In 1921, Parliament debated, but did not pass, a bill that would have criminalized “gross indecency between female persons” as part of a general male reaction to the new freedoms and social power women were obtaining. There was a belief that if women engaged in lesbianism, they would never again be interested in men.

LHMP #445c Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 3

The central premise of this chapter Is to examine how the law came to acknowledge the existence of sexual “indecent assault” by one woman against another. But the case used to illustrate this concerns a midwife who was hired to examine the virginity of an underage girl being procured for prostitution. The case had a number of complicating factors. The men doing the procuring were anti-prostitution activists and journalists, working to demonstrate how easy it was to obtain such victims. One focus of such campaigns was to raise the female age of consent from 13 to 16.

LHMP #445b Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 2

Changes in understandings of Lesbianism in the 18th century can be illustrated by newspaper and legal accounts of “female husbands,” for example, the famous case of Charles/Mary Hamilton. Hamilton’s case was not particularly unusual, but the attention given to it was. Hamilton was working as a quack doctor, who courted and married the daughter of his landlady. Two months later, the bride announced that her husband was a woman and a legal inquiry resulted, including depositions by both partners.

LHMP #445a Derry 2020 Lesbianism and the Criminal Law Chapter 1

Derry begins by contradicting the myth that Queen Victoria was the reason there were no laws in England against lesbianism. There are three problems with this myth: no such law was proposed; if it had been, the queen wouldn’t have any power to block it; and such a blockage wouldn’t explain the earlier absence of such laws. But the lack of specific laws doesn’t equal the “benign neglect” suggested by some historians. The main policy against lesbianism was silencing. Laws would recognize lesbianism as “a thing,” whereas silencing was aimed at preventing it from being imaginable.

LHMP #444 Tomlinson 2009 Women on Stage in Stuart Drama

Introduction: Shifting Sisters

LHMP #443b Benbow & Hawkyard 1994 Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage Appendix

As a supplement to the discussion of records of women cross-dressing, the book has an appendix with quotations from the court records. It notes that these are not an exhaustive record—indeed the number of records is relatively small. It’s likely that the attention given to cross-dressing as an offence varied depending on what other concerns might draw attention, for example a rise in the concern over vagrancy in the 1590s.

LHMP #443a Shapiro 1994 Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage Chapter 1

In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611.

LHMP #441 Rackin 2005 Afterword

The afterword sums up the conclusion of the collection that the “all male stage” is a myth and an aberration, being true only of certain specific times, contexts, and locations. Women are absent from the stage only when “the stage” is very narrowly and carefully defined. The concept holds true in England only for a narrow range of time between the rise of private professional companies (displacing the earlier tradition of guild-sponsored plays) and the entrance of women into those companies at the Restoration.

Pages

Subscribe to England
historical