This is a historiography article, reviewing a variety of general histories of sexuality and homosexuality and evaluating them. The author sets out a principle that “the most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence.” The focus is specifically on the 19th and 20th centuries.
19th c
LHMP entry
Rekhti is a genre of Urdu erotic poetry, spinning off from the formal, classical ghazal poetic genre. Rekhti differs both in the point of view of the poetic persona, in the subject matter, and in the use of language. Within Urdu culture (a southern Indian Muslim culture whose language has a strong admixture of Persian in an Indic base), traditional ghazal poetry had two modes: “Persian” in which the poetic persona is male and the beloved can be male or female, and “Indic” in which the poetic persona is female and the beloved is male.
This study considers three categories of transgender experience. Although a variety of terms for these categories are noted, for convenience they are labeled erxing (two-shaped) corresponding roughly to intersex, nü hua nan (FTM), and nan hua nü (MTF). The period of study is primarily the Ming (1368-1644 CE) and Qing (1644-1911 CE) eras, though earlier material is also noted. The material is structured in five sections: an introduction discussing the source materials, a discussion of each of the three categories, and a brief summary of conclusions.
Introduction
The book covers the imperial era of China (221 BCE to 1912 CE) plus a few earlier texts. The subject is “socially defined expressions of same-sex erotic and sexual attraction, enacted or imagined.” This is not “homosexuality” as such. Some texts may depict same-sex acts that don’t derive from erotic desire.
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
I can forgive Vicinus for starting off by claiming that much of the historical work on cross-dressing men has focused on the theater and especially on Shakespeare’s works, only because this article was written before much of the work on gender-crossing and trans history has been done. She’s looking at the couple of decades around 1900, a time when understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing one of those periodic revolutions. The instability of how to read “male impersonation” came from both the multiplicity of framings of the act itself and the attitude of the viewer.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.
This article examines the question “were the Bluestockings queer?” Also the converse “were Bluestocking and ‘lesbian’ mutually contradictory?” On the Bluestocking side, Lanser places 5 women generally considered the movers and shakers: Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, Hester Mulso Chapone, and Sarah Robinson Scott. The Bluestockings weren’t a clearly defined group and membership was sometimes assigned from outside, rather than being a self-identification—a process in which historians have participated.
This is a high-level overview of the English Bluestocking movement(?), as part of a special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly on “Reconsidering the Bluestockings.” As such, it doesn’t touch much on specifically sapphic topics, but provides a useful context for various individual Bluestockings.
A great deal of this article isn’t directly of interest, so much will be glossed over. The “proverbs” in question are various Greek adages in reference to people from Lesbos that mostly are not in reference to female same-sex relations. [Note: I’ve seen some arguments that some of the interpretations are more ambiguous that indicated here, but I’ll stick to summarizing what’s in this article.]
This article focuses on the end of the 19th century as the era when a medical model of homosexuality replaced a religious/moral model, creating the conditions for the idea of belonging to a sexual minority. Starting with the first publication of a medical paper on “sexual inversion” in Germany in 1870, the next few decades saw increasing interest from medical professionals in the topic.
This is an overview of the rise of sexological theories about female homosexuality. The field consistently made connections between homosexuality and neurosis in women, as well as connecting the former with “inversion” or masculinity. Different part of the field gave different weight to ideas of genetic versus behavioral causes. There were also systematic ways in which the sexological approach to homosexuality differed for men and women. But the overall concept pressured women with homoerotic feelings to consider themselves mentally—and perhaps physically—ill.
This article uses the lens of one particular well-documented life in the 19th century to track the shifting images and understandings of female masculinity during that era, and perhaps incidentally to comment on the general environment of shifting understandings of gender and sexuality that continue up to the present. One of the points being made is that for modern people to try to pin down one specific label or category for a historic person undermines the variable ways in which that person themself may have reported their own understanding.
The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.
Martin uses the writings of early 20th c Australian poet Mary Fullerton, and in particular numerous poems related to her long-term relationship with Mabel Singleton, to explore the debate among historians around the question of romantic friendship and lesbian sexuality. [Note: Fullerton was born in 1868 and much of the discussion concerns solidly 19th century topics, so I consider the article in-scope for the Project.]
Chapter 19: Sylvia Drake | W 1851
Sylvia Drake was 66 when Charity died and had not left her side for over 40 years. Family and neighbors commented on what a shock it would be for her to be on her own, with loneliness a common theme in their condolence letters. Some came close to recognizing that Sylvia was the equivalent of a widow, using that word, but she was denied the social recognition and status that widowhood normally conferred.
Chapter 17: Diligent in Business 1835
The chapter opens with a detailed dramatized episode from a typical workday for C&S, cited to a diary entry, but not indicated as direct quotes and clearly elaborated from the author’s imagination. This is the sort of concern I’ve noted previously about the fictionalizing of details.
Chapter 15: Dear Aunts 1823
Chapter 13: Wild Affections 1811
Chapter 11: The Tie That Binds July 1807
Chapter 9: Charity and Lydia 1806
Chapter 7: Never to Marry 1800
Chapter 5: So Many Friends 1799
Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787
Chapter 1: A Child of Melancholy 1777
Charity’s mother died of consumption shortly after Charity’s birth in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War. She was the last of 10 children. Death haunted the family with three of Charity’s grandparents and her oldest brother also dying within the same 2-year period.
The book opens with a description of a pair of cut silhouettes, framed with a lock of hair and labeled with the names of the two women. There follows an overview of their lives (which are then covered in much more detail in the chapters). Both women had determined not to marry. Both came from large families, though of different character. They met in 1807 and set up a household together where the continued as an acknowledged couple for 44 years.
This article mostly concerns attitudes toward m/f sex, so my summary is going to focus fairly narrowly on the high-level basic premise and the specifically f/f parts.
Given the prominence of the word “lesbianism” in the title of this article, I found it less interesting than I hoped. Margaret Fuller was a prominent American writer and feminist in the first half of the 19th century. The theme of this article is how her writings and opinions around various romantic connections she had with women illustrate the tensions around the dividing line between acceptable and praiseworthy Romantic Friendship and the types of relationships between women that were felt to go beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
As this chapter focuses on male cross-dressing, I will be skimming it more briefly. As in the first chapter, we begin with an extensive case history. “M” began dressing in female-coded clothing as a youth, and left home for the West at age 15 due to family conflicts. M preferred playing with dolls, cooking, and sewing rather than male-coded activities, but didn’t back down from fighting his bullies. Further questioning indicated that M’s mother had initiated both the cross-dressing and needlecrafts.
This chapter is probably the one of most interest in the book, cataloging and discussing cases of female cross-dressers. The text alternates between detailed case studies and general discussion.
In 1912, in Portland Oregon, Harry Allen (alias Harry Livingstone) was arrested and eventually charged with violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes) due to having written to her partner (who presented herself as his wife) Isabelle Maxwell in Seattle, asking her to come to Portland, where she then engaged in prostitution to support them both.
The chapter opens with an anecdote about Horace Greeley (tagline: Go west, young man!) in 1859 checking out those who had actually followed his advice and speaking with a Colorado gold prospector who had decided to return back east. After the interview, he was informed that the prospector he’d been talking to was a woman.
There is a summary of the themes of the book and a discussion of the variety of ways in which queer suffragists engaged with the rising sexological theories regarding same-sex love, in parallel with the various attitudes toward “respectability politics.” Some came to identify as homosexual, others distanced themselves from what they considered “unhealthy” desires. Some defiantly displayed their queerness within the movement, others felt that it was important not to distract attention from common goals.
This chapter looks at how female suffragist couples commemorated their shared lives (or had them commemorated by friends) after death. Loves that women might not have felt safe expressing during their lifetimes might find an acceptable expression in the context of mourning rituals, such as memorial poetry, shared graves, or the erection of funerary monuments with dedications mentioning both parties. Fellow suffragists might support such mourning in a context where society did not recognize that there was a relationship to mourn.
This chapter looks at a variety of ways that women associated with the suffrage movement “performed queerness” in public. Obviously, not all suffragists took part in the following, but those who did helped create the image of the transgressive “unfeminine” suffragist. The following is something of a catalog of these transgressive activities, which the book describes in connection with specific women who embodied them:
US and British suffrage movements existed at roughly the same time, but different approaches created a context for sharing tactics and experiences. This chapter looks at how US suffragists learned techniques and created alliances with their British counterparts in the early 20th century. These alliances also included transatlantic romantic relationships.
This chapter expands on the previous. While chapter 2 focused on individual romantic/domestic relationships, this one looks at larger non-traditional households that might include couples (or not) as well as un-coupled women. The focus is on mutually supportive arrangements, not simply people sharing an address. These chosen families (to use a modern term) provided emotional, financial, and medical support for each other, as well as mentorship for younger suffragists. They might include biological or adopted children of the members.
This chapter looks at the personal lives of some prominent suffragists. It was not uncommon for such women to have been married to men at some point, and they might leverage their status as a widow to deflect concern about domestic partnerships with women. These arrangements disrupted heterosexual norms regardless of whether the women involved considered them to represent a specific “identity.”
Opposition to suffrage was largely fueled by fears that if women engaged with the male-coded world of politics, it would be to the detriment of female-coded concerns and activities. Home life would suffer. This ideal of “separate spheres” was never more than a stereotype, especially among the working classes. But all manner of social woes were pinned on the upending of the “natural order” in which women were excluded from public life.
Part of the overarching theme of this study is the tension between “respectability politics” and the essential reliance the suffrage movement had on women willing to disrupt social norms, specifically including norms of sexuality and gender presentation. The resonances with the “lavender menace” confrontations of the 1970s are inevitable (and noted specifically in the conclusion).
Introduction
The author points out that this is an inescapably political book and should be read in that context. He points out that the question of “who is queer” is not at all straight-forward [pun intentional] in a historic context, and that queer figures have been silently and invisibly embedded in US history far deeper than most people are aware.
This is a narrative history of Anne Lister’s life between November 1831 and March 1834, the period covered by the tv series Gentleman Jack. The book was written specifically as a companion to the tv series, giving the actual details of Anne’s life during that period, which differs in various details from the tv series. (The tv series both omitted and invented significant details.) Interspersed in the narrative are extensive quotes from Anne’s diaries.
Introduction: Who is the Lesbian?
For the purposes of this book, “British lesbian history” begins in the late 18th century. It was unclear to me if this was simply a chosen scope based on the source material they wanted to present, or if the authors believe there is no lesbian history prior to that date. They assert that “lesbian identity” is a late 20th century concept. “Women…did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves as lovers of women.” [Note: we can take it as given that I disagree with that position.]
This article looks at French working-class lesbian culture from 1882-1930 and notes that a lot of previous coverage of French culture in this era has focused on the demi-monde, artists, and salon culture. The author challenges the assertion by some historians that a history of this sort—at the intersection of gender and class—is impossible to write. The decadent esthetic and visions of the Belle Epoque stand in contrast to the experiences of the working class. This was an era of union and feminist movements. WWI stepped up women’s participation in the industrial workforce.
The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women. In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.
The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.
It might seem odd to cover this article after covering Turton’s book (Before the Word Was Queer) that functionally includes material about Anne Lister, but “The Lexicographical Lesbian” goes into a bit more detail. And besides which, I’m a completist.
This chapter focuses on the philosophy, history, and development of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) specifically. The creation of the OED was a monumental project, delivered alphabetically in fascicles (separate installments of a larger work, meant to be bound into a single volume when complete). The fascicles were released beginning in the 1880s and completed in 1928, followed by a supplement in 1933 to catch up with developments in the previous half century.
This chapter compares the dearth of entries for f/f sexuality in general dictionaries in the 1750-1850 period with the wealth of discussion on those topics in medical dictionaries. The appearance of medical dictionaries as a genre aligned with an explosion of vernacular publishing in the health field in the 16-17th centuries. These were aimed not only at non-specialists, but at health workers outside the academic elite—people who didn’t have access to Latin literature. The publishing establishment operated as gatekeepers in terms of what material got published and how it was presented.
This chapter opens discussing how dictionaries explicitly presented themselves as censoring inappropriate language when aimed at an audience that included women. This sort of comment shows up as early as the later 18th century. Even the nature of what was being censored is censored, with explanations that it is aimed at “inelegant” words, rather than objectionable or obscene ones.
This chapter begins exploring the assertion that languages bear an essential relationship to the nature of their speakers, and that deviations of the language from this essential quality can be attributed to foreign influences. This idea appears in the introduction to a 1676 dictionary. The naturalization of words is paralleled to the naturalization of citizens and must be a strongly policed. Ethnic stereotypes are ascribed to languages along with the people who speak them. English, of course, is assumed to be neutral, moderate, and free from excess.
This chapter looks at how words are defined and cited, and the semantic frameworks they’re associated with, using “sodomy” and “buggery” as the working examples. [Note: my summary is going to give undue attention to discussions relevant to women.]
The book begins with an anecdote about the OED updating its entry for “marriage” when the (British) marriage equality act was passed, and how this was framed in the press as participating in a “change of definition”. This is followed by an anecdote from a slander case in 1942, which argued that “lesbian” could not be slanderous, as it was (incorrectly) asserted that the word didn’t exist in English when the relevant law was passed--an argument based on citations in the OED entry for “lesbian”, which was not included in the first edition published in 1908.
The defamation lawsuit brought by Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie against Lady Cumming Gordon in the early 19th century is often cited as concerning accusations of lesbianism against the two women. But This article looks at the details of the cause as illustrating points of Scottish legal procedure.
Pages
