Abstract
Lesbian history has not evolved simply as a sub-genre of women’s history, but out of a series of debates within feminism, women’s history, the history of sexuality, and within the gay and lesbian community. This chapter will examine the development of lesbian history primarily in relation to feminism and women’s historiography. The debates around lesbianism within women’s liberation have generated considerable controversy, which was in turn reflected in the historical writings on the subject. The sexual experience of women in the past became a critical discussion point for late twentieth-century feminists engaged in debates about sexuality.
All women’s lives are precious, but histories are complicated things. While all lesbian history is women’s history, not all women’s history is lesbian history. These identities may be intertwined at times, but they are separate, distinct legacies and at other times they may be in conflict.
Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country, 1986
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Notes
Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 149.
Rita May Brown, ‘Take a Lesbian Out to Lunch’, in Plain Brown Rapper (Oakland: Diana Press, 1976), pp. 79–96.
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 207.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs 8, 4 (1980): 631–60.
See, for instance, Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) and Gyn/ Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 62.
Emma Healey, Lesbian Sex Wars (London: Virago, 1996), p. 77.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 16.
This term comes from Ros Ballaster, ‘“The Vices of Old Rome Revived”: Representations of Female Same-Sex Desire in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England’, in Suzanne Riatt (ed.), Volcanoes and Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (London: Only-women Press, 1994), p. 16.
Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Does It Matter If They Did It?’, in Lesbian History Group (eds), Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbian History 1840–1985 (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), p. 27.
Lillian Faderman, The Scotch Verdict (New York: Quill, 1983).
Liz Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendship? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography’, Women’s History Review 1, 2 (1992): 196.
Judith Bennett, cited in Martha Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts and All Facts and No Theory?’ Radical History Review, 60 (1994): 57.
There are of course notable exceptions. See Louis Crompton, ‘The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capitol Laws from 1270–1791’ and Brigitte Eriksson, ‘A Lesbian Execution in Germany 1721: The Trial Records’, in Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen (eds),Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality (New York: Haworth Press, Stein & Day, 1980), pp. 3–20, 27–40;
Theo van der Meer, ‘Tribades on Trial: Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam’, in John C. Fout (ed.), Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 189–210; and
Ruth Ford, ‘The “Man-Woman Murderer”: Sex Fraud, Sexual Inversion and the “Unmentionable Article” in 1920s Australia’, Gender & History, 12, 1 (2000): 158–96.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 43.
Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Great Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977) and Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991).
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982)
and Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Faderman first articulated this notion in her article ‘The Morbidifica- tion of Love between Women by Nineteenth-century Sexologists’, Journal of the History ofHomosexuality, 4, 1 (1978): 73–90.
Sheila Jeffreys, ‘“The Spinster and her Enemies”: Sexuality and the Last Wave of Feminism’, Scarlet Woman 13, 2 (1981): n.p. and The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985).
Alison Oram, ‘“Friends, Feminists and Sexual Outlaws”: Lesbianism and British History’, in Gabrielle Griffin and Sonya Andermahr (eds), Straight Studies Modified: Lesbian Interventions in the Academy (London: Cassell, 1997), p. 175.
See, for instance, Liz Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendships? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography’, Women’s History Review 1, 2 (1992): 193–216 and
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995). See also
Sylvia Martin, ‘Rethinking Passionate Friendship: The Writings of Mary Fullerton’, Women’s History Review, 2, 3 (1993): 395–406.
Linda Gordon and Ellen Carol DuBois, ‘Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield’, in Carole A. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge, 1984), p. 41. Ironically a number of these women were seen as heroines of cultural feminism because of their contribution to a separatist sexual politics. See Cook, ‘Female Support Networks and Political Activism’.
With the exception of Frances Finnegan’s Poverty and Prostitution: A Study ofVictorian Prostitutes in York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), most historical texts on prostitution written in the 1980s followed this pattern. See especially
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Class and Sex in New York 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986).
Amber Hollibaugh & Cherrie Moraga, ‘What We’re Rolling around in Bed with: Sexual Silences in Feminism’, in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (London: Virago, 1984), p. 412.
Judith Walkowitz, ‘Male Vice and Female Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (London: Virago, 1984), p. 50.
See Jeffreys, Spinster and her Enemies; Margaret Jackson, ‘Sex and the Experts’, Scarlet Woman 13 (1981) n.p. and ‘Sex Research and the Construction of Sexuality: A Tool of Male Supremacy?’, Women’s Studies International Forum 7, 1 (1983): 43–51.
Margaret Hunt, ‘The De-Eroticisation of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys’, Feminist Review, 34 (1990): 25.
Joan Nestle, Lesbian History Archives News, 8 (1984): 15.
Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, ‘Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940–1960’, in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Books, 1989), p. 427.
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Buffalo: Routledge, 1993).
Lisa Duggan, ‘History’s Gay Ghetto: The Contradiction and Growth in Lesbian and Gay History’, in Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenweig (eds), Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 281–302.
Laura Gowing, ‘History’, in Andy Medhurst and Sally Munt (eds), Lesbian and Gay Studies (London: 1997), p. 62.
Martha Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory’, Radical History Review, 60 (1994): 57.
Jill Liddington, Female Fortune: Land Gender and Authority (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998), p. xvi.
Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) and
Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History ofthe British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 40.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. xii, her emphasis.
Anna Marie Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996), pp. 101–26.
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© 2002 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (2002). Surpassing the History of Men: Women’s History and Lesbian History. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_11
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