LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Good evening, faithful LGBTQ Literature readers. Apologies again for the mess that was made out of the schedule this and last month. We missed the February diary, but I’m glad we’re on track again for our regularly scheduled March diary. And by “we,” I mean “I”—there’s nobody else to blame here! Your continued patience and support for this series, which really is a labor of love, is appreciated.
Recently, I’ve been preparing for a guest speaking appearance in a friend’s classroom. It’s an upper-level history class, and she wants me to cover past and recent trends in LGBTQ historiography (how LGBTQ history has been written about over the years). Come to think of it, that might make a good LGBTQ Literature diary at some point. But, in preparing for the talk, I’ve been revisiting a number of books I haven’t touched in a long time, including the one I’d like to cover in this diary. I’d actually completely forgotten about this book, mainly because I “lent” it to a student several semesters ago and, of course, never got it back (I never expect books back when I lend them out to students, and that’s okay). This is one of those rare books written by an academic historian that could have quite a bit of crossover appeal for popular audiences. And, if you’re interested in LGBTQ history, it’s definitely one to have on your shelf.
That book is Lillian Faderman’s To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America (1999). Faderman is a giant in the field of lesbian history, having written earlier books such as Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981) and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (1991). You may remember that I covered the latter of those books in a previous LGBTQ Literature diary, which you should check out if you haven’t. Of these three books, To Believe in Women may be (in my opinion, at least) the most accessible. And, to me, it’s the most interesting in that it intentionally complicates periods of American history that we may think we know already and provides a different perspective on familiar American stories.
Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Faderman divides the book into four parts, each focusing on a different historical period during which women have fought both to expand their own roles and to better American society. The first part is “How American Women Got Enfranchised” (focusing on women’s suffrage), the second is “How America Got a Social Conscience” (focusing on the Progressive Era), and the third and fourth (both self-explanatory) are “How American Women Got Educated” and “How American Women Got Into the Professions.” Again, much of this is ground already well-trodden—most serious students of American history know about the women’s suffrage movement and Progressivism, for example. But, as the book’s title suggests, the focus is on how “lesbians” (there’s a reason I’m putting that in quotes), in particular, played central and leading roles in each of these times of progressive change.
Now, before going any further, we have to grapple with the use of the term “lesbian” here. Faderman, who is not sloppy about things like terminology, addresses this very early in the book:
For a variety of reasons, many of the women at the center of this book would not have used the noun “lesbian” to describe their identity, or even have been familiar with the word. However, using materials such as their letters and journals as evidence, I argue that that term used as an adjective accurately describes their committed domestic, sexual, and/or affectional experiences. I also argue that in their eras, lesbian arrangements freed these pioneering women to pursue education, professions, and civil and social rights for themselves and others far more effectively than they could have if they had lived in traditional heterosexual arrangements.
There are people, of course, who would take great issue with this. To be honest, I’m not sure I am completely comfortable with the term as it’s used—I have written before about how I feel about applying modern terms of identity to historical people (as a side note, see this previous LGBTQ Literature diary for more on the theoretical debate between essentialists and social constructionists). Faderman goes on to preemptively respond to this criticism:
To Believe in Women will perhaps be seen as being in opposition to postmodernism, which does not recognize the possibility of reclaiming women of the past as lesbians. Academic postmodernists might point to the precarious status of identity — the instability, indecipherability, and unnameability of sexualities — and conclude that lesbianism cannot really be discussed, particularly in regard to history. With their epistemological doubts, they would be suspicious of any attempt to construct a coherent pattern out of complex human lives in order to create a “grand narrative” of history. Grand narratives — indeed, any such theoretical speculations, they would argue — must ultimately expose themselves as “passionate fictions.”
I believe that such arguments have merit and serve as an important corrective to a simplistic temptation to name the “lesbians” in history. As the postmodernists claim, it is impossible — especially when dealing with historical figures — to make safe statements about identities, which are so slippery in their subjectivity and mutability. However, if enough material that reveals what people do and say is available, we can surely make apt observations about their behavior. That is what I have attempted to do in this book. I use the term “lesbian” as an adjective that describes intense woman-to-woman relating and commitment.
The place where she does not do this, of course, is in the title—which authors often have little control over, anyway. Faderman does, in fact, suggest an alternative title, which she recommends that readers keep in mind if they start to get uncomfortable with the shorthand “lesbian” being used: What Women of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Whose Chief Sexual and/or Affectional and Domestic Behaviors Would Have Been Called ‘Lesbian’ If They Had Been Observed in the Years after 1920, Have Done for America. LOL, okay—point taken.
And, throughout the book, Faderman certainly makes quite a compelling case for understanding these women (many of whom, again, we think we’re familiar with) and their relationships with other women as “lesbian.”
While most of these women appear not to have had what we in the later twentieth century have called a “lesbian identity,” they somehow recognized each other. On what basis? Perhaps it was because they fought together to expand women’s possibilities, they were usually not living with a husband, and, most important, they were ostensibly engaged in a romantic and committed relationship with another woman. They often knew each other well. Anna Howard Shaw, the suffrage leader, was close not only to other suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and the woman Anthony called her “lover,” Emily Gross, but also to women such as M. Carey Thomas, the college president, and her partner, Mary Garrett. Thomas was also friends with Jane Addams, the social reformer, who, along with her partner, Mary Rozet Smith, was friends with the suffragist and politician Anne Martin and her partner, Dr. Margaret Long. When Addams and Smith visited Boston, they often dined or stayed with the writer Sarah Orne Jewett and her partner, Annie Fields.
These women seldom wrote to each other without also sending regards to the partner of the correspondent; “Love from both of us to both of you” was an oft-repeated phrase in their letters. When female couples traveled with other female couples, it was taken for granted that each woman would be sharing a room with her partner and not with another friend. Sleeping arrangements were understood to be as inviolate as they would be with husband and wife. Those qualities and lifestyles these women shared and recognized in each other apparently constituted an “identity” of sorts, though there is little evidence that they gave a name to it.
Faderman goes on to note some of the terms that were used at the time to describe people we would consider gay or lesbian, including the familiar (to students of LGBTQ history) pathological term “invert.” And something interesting that she points out is that, while the women the book discusses (such as the suffragists) did not adopt these terms of identity themselves, sexologists did apply terms like “invert” to these women (and, if you look at cartoons depicting women’s suffrage activists, you will see that opponents of suffrage often depicted activists as “inverted” and “unwomanly”). One example:
In his 1897 work, Havelock Ellis even laid the blame for what he said was an increase in female homosexuality on the “modern movement of emancipation,” which encouraged women’s “intimacy with their own sex” and taught them “disdain” for women’s conventional roles.
It is also important to point out that there was no one-size-fits-all model for a “lesbian” relationship.
Almost all of the women discussed in the pages that follow had a primary relationship with another woman that lasted for twenty years or more. However, there was no one model of domestic and affectional arrangements among them. In some cases, such as that of Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony, one member of the couple mostly kept the home fires burning while the other traveled the continent to procure women’s rights. Lucy Anthony, who would surely have been called a “femme” if she had lived in the mid-twentieth century, had no interest in a public role for herself, yet she believed ardently in the women’s movement and felt that by taking care of the charismatic and politically effective Shaw, she was contributing to the cause.
In contrast, other women worked together with their partners to advance women’s position. Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier were both pioneering doctors in the New York infirmary that Emily founded. Frances Willard and Anna Gordon both led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay were both suffrage leaders on a national level. Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon both worked on issues of peace and civil rights.
In other cases, one woman made her considerable fortune available to the reform work in which her partner was engaged, thereby empowering the beloved partner while promoting a cause in which she too believed. Jane Addams was able to put Hull House on the map in part because of the many excellent projects that the generosity of her wealthy partner, Mary Rozet Smith, permitted her to pursue. M. Carey Thomas became one of the first female college presidents in 1894 because Mary Garrett, with whom Thomas lived until Garrett’s death, in 1915, told the trustees that she would give Bryn Mawr a large yearly endowment if, and only if, Thomas headed the college. Miriam Van Waters became a powerful women’s prison reformer with the help of the purse and political clout of Geraldine Thompson, with whom she had a long-term committed relationship.
But in all of these cases, one of Faderman’s arguments is that being in a long-term same-sex relationship enabled these women to be leaders in their respective movements. Had they been in traditional heterosexual marriages, it is likely that many of these women would not have been able to make the mark on American history that they did. Women at the time understood this, of course, and Faderman includes a 1920 quote from Crystal Eastman that really underscores this idea:
Two business women can “make a home” together without either one being over-burdened or over-bored. It is because they both know how and both feel responsible. But it is the rare man who can marry one of them and continue the home-making partnership. Yet if there are not children, there is nothing essentially different in the combination. Two self-supporting adults decide to make a home together: If both are women, it is a pleasant partnership more often than work; if one is a man, it is almost never a partnership — the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter over it, and finally perhaps gives up her outside work and condemns herself to the tiresome half-jobs of housekeeping for two.
If you look at the writings of prominent women activists from the time, you’ll see this idea repeated often. Faderman includes another quote from Susan B. Anthony: “I am so glad of it all because it will help teach the young girls that to be true to principle — to live to an idea — though an unpopular one — that is to live single — without any man’s name — may be honorable.” As Faderman points out, living independently of men meant that these women were truly fighting for their own lives in addition to fighting for the lives of future women.
Of course, you can’t discuss this topic without also talking about constructions of gender and the ways in which these women activists both resisted and selectively embraced what it meant to be a “woman” during this period. In this area, the women leading these movements certainly understood the revolutionary nature of what they were demanding (whether it was the right to vote, the ability to get an education, the ability to enter a profession, etc.). But—especially considering how women activists were portrayed by their opponents—they also felt a need to tread a fine line.
The individuals who are the subject of this book might all be said to have had “gender trouble,” in the sense that they could not accept the restrictions inherent in the notion of gender: they were dissatisfied with the way the category “woman” was constructed, and they were frustrated by the limitations placed on them as forced members of that category. They desired the privileges that were associated with men. Such desires demanded that they break into the “masculine” public sphere, claim it for their own, and thereby neuter the notion of gender-appropriate spheres. However, many leaders who were particularly effective in the nineteenth century strategically disguised the fact that gender was a concept with which they wished to dispense. If, as Judith Butler has argued, all gender is performance, most of the heroes of this book can be said to have performed the role of “woman” while conducting their battles to invade the public spaces belonging to men.
[...]
It was in fact these women’s secret understanding of the sham of gender roles that fueled the movements that eventually gave women the vote, the right to a higher education and a profession, and the power of influence over public policy. But because most of them believed — with justification — that their society was not ready for unalloyed radical approaches, they often argued that changes in woman’s sphere were necessary not because women were just like men and gender was an absurd notion, but precisely because women were different from men. With essentialist arguments — which their own lives patently contradicted — their strategy was to proclaim that women’s special gifts were desperately needed in the muddle of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century society.
I think I will leave it there for this diary. I’ve covered most of Faderman’s “big” ideas in To Believe in Women, but I haven’t even really scratched the surface of the rich history covered in each of the four main parts of the book. There is still plenty for you to read and digest, and I am certain that this book will change your perspective on broader American history.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2022):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 30: Ushka Waso
February 27: OPEN
March 27: Chrislove
April 24: Clio2
May 29: OPEN
June 26: OPEN
July 31: OPEN
August 28: OPEN
September 25: OPEN
October 30: OPEN
November 27: OPEN
December 25: OPEN
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE