[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 19:08

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 318 - On the Shelf for July 2025

 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/07/08 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2025.

You might think that retirement means I’d never have a late podcast ever again, but here I am uploading it several days past the first Saturday. A certain amount of it is finding myself in the middle of “Time? What even is time?” But there’s another factor at play. They say that in retirement, every day is a weekend. Well, my weekends used to be jam-packed full of projects, and now every day is a weekend. On the plus side, I’m making a lot of progress on a lot of projects.

Publications on the Blog

I fulfilled my pledge to blog a publication every day in June for Pride Month, focusing mostly on materials relating to US history, which I’ve tended not to prioritize in the past. This included surveys of Colonial-era legal issues and cases, such as:

  • Richard Godbeer’s “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England”
  • Robert F. Oaks’ “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England”
  • Alden Vaughan’s “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall”

and

  • Greta LaFleur’s “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America”

or similar issues in the post-Colonial period, such as:

  • Estelle B. Freeedman’s “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics”

Several articles looked at literary themes, such as:

  • Lillian Faderman’s  “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James”
  • Mary E. Wood’s “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”

and

  • Kristin M. Comment’s “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic”

Several articles examined transmasculine topics, such as:

  • Jen Manion’s “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania”

and

  • Rachel Hope Cleves’ “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901)”

And of course I spend over a week blogging Cleves’ book Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.

Several articles tackled the process of researching queer lives or the historic resistance to doing so, such as:

  • Sylvia Martin’s “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate”
  • Pamela VanHaitsma’s “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship”
  • Lillian Faderman’s “Who Hid Lesbian History?”

and

  • Linda Garber’s “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction”

And due to the vagaries of my process, some non-US topics slipped in, such as Theresa Braunschneider’s “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women.” It’s been a while since I covered that much material in a single month, so I guess I can be excused for getting distracted from writing podcast scripts!

News of the Field

Before I move on to the new book listings, I wanted to give a shout-out to that rare instance of sapphic characters in a historic tv series. Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers follows the careers of a group of American heiresses looking to marry into aristocratic English society. There was a previous miniseries based on the same material in 1995 that stayed somewhat closer to the original material. The current show plays a bit more fast-and-loose with historic accuracy, introducing some race-blind casting and modern party-girl sensibility, but most pertinent to our interests, we get a sapphic romance that develops with the same scope and detail as several of the other relationships. This particular plot point does not exist in the original text, so we must be grateful to the producers for acknowledging that a female same-sex romance was solidly accurate for the period and working it in. We can’t yet know whether they’ll be allowed a happy ever after ending, but as the heterosexual pairings in the story don’t all get one, it’s probably a toss-up.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

While pulling together this month’s new book listings, it felt like I was finding a lot of titles on the theme of unsent or lost letters, though some of them were part of the current flood of publications that smell like AI, so they won’t be mentioned here.

I’ve been doing some initial stats for this year’s books and one interesting—or possibly concerning—trend is the dearth of historicals from the small queer presses, though in exchange we’re getting a startling number from major publishers. I hope to get back to doing a deeper analysis at some point, though it means I have to go back and do a lot of data-coding.

There are a couple of May books that only just came to my attention.

The Housekeeper's Ledger by Allison Ingram has a solidly gothic feel to it, but it’s difficult to guess exactly when the story is set.

When Anna Hale takes a humble position as housekeeper at the sprawling Ashmore estate, she expects long days, silent halls, and the cold indifference of Lady Catherine Ashmore. What she doesn’t expect is a trail of secrets hidden behind locked doors, a crumbling legacy haunted by old debts, and the sharp undeniable pull between herself and the woman she serves.

As whispers of betrayal and scandal echo through the estate, Anna and Catherine must navigate a web of lies, dangerous rivals, and the looming threat of ruin — all while confronting the fragile, fierce love blossoming between them. In a world eager to break them, Anna and Catherine will risk everything to stand side by side, but surviving the storm will take more than trust. It will take a choice.

I’m not sure that I can give a recommendation to A Truthful Companion By My Side by Claudia Haase, although the historic setting looks solid, but the writing feels like a very awkward translation from some other language.

Princess Agatha is alone at court with her cultural interests and intellect. She does not find any suitable conversation partners in her companions and ladies-in-waiting. Her curiosity is aroused all the more by the smart Ernestine and her unconventional lifestyle - and finally she finds the person with whom she can share all her passions.

The young Countess Ernestine doesn't think much of the aristocratic goings-on at court. She represses the thought that she was once promised to a crown prince as his wife. However, she could imagine a life together with Princess Agatha. But no sooner have they become close than the royal family insists on an early wedding ceremony with Agatha's brother.

Immerse yourself in the love story of two aristocratic women who lived at Bergfels Palace and Sturmstein Castle in the transition from the 17th to the 18th century!

June books cover a fairly wide spread of eras, including some unusual ones.

Secrets at the Ambrose Café by Carryl Church from Choc Lit Historical Romance is set in England just after World War I.

Two women. Two different worlds. One secret that could ruin them both.

Exeter, 1925. Della Wilde has set aside her dream of moving to Paris to study at the renowned Le Cordon Bleu, choosing instead to support her family torn apart by war. By night, she works at the prestigious Ambrose Café, serving the city’s elite — she feels utterly invisible.

Until a chance encounter with rebellious Alice Winters, the daughter of a powerful MP, upends Della’s world.

Alice is a woman caught between duty and desire. She secretly yearns to be an artist but is expected to marry a respectable suitor and raise a family. Della, with her sharp wit and quiet strength, is unlike anyone she has ever known. She makes Alice feel alive.

So she draws Della into her orbit — first as a muse for her secret art, then as something infinitely more intimate. But in a world where reputations are easily shattered, their growing bond is a danger that threatens not only their futures, but those around them.

As Alice risks scandal and Della faces the consequences of following her heart, they must decide: will they allow others to choose their path, or dare to forge their own?

Salt in the Silk by Delly M. Elrose sounds like it’s telling a Titanic story in an alternate form, set a decade earlier on a fictional ship.

1898. Aboard the RMS Victoria’s Grace, bound from Liverpool to New York, two women from opposite worlds collide: one born into ivory and etiquette, the other into soot and survival.

Catherine Ashbury, a refined upper-class heiress, is being shipped off across the Atlantic for an arranged marriage to save her family’s dwindling fortune. Cloaked in silk, obedience, and unspoken longing, she’s resigned to her fate—until she meets a girl who lives with no rules at all.

Nell Nolan, a tough and clever third-class passenger from East London, is an orphaned pickpocket disguised as a seamstress. With calloused hands and a pocket full of stolen coins, Nell isn’t afraid of breaking laws—or hearts. She boards the Victoria’s Grace with a stolen ticket and nothing left to lose, desperate to start a new life in America.

Their first meeting is accidental. Their second, unforgettable. What begins as curiosity becomes defiance—then desire. But love is dangerous in the shadows of a ship ruled by class, reputation, and silent codes. And when disaster strikes in the icy Atlantic, Catherine and Nell must face a choice no woman should have to make: Love, or survival.

A couple years ago I listed the first book in the Lavender and Foxglove series by Hilary Rose Berwick, set in a medieval convent in a world with a bit of magic. Somehow I missed books 2 and 3 when they came out—A Bounty of Bitterwort and A Rondel of Rosemary—but now book 4 turned up on my radar once more: A League of Lavender. Now I only wish the series was available somewhere other than Amazon because it sounds intriguing but not quite intriguing enough to drop my ethical objections.

Within the convent walls, the pestilence has largely passed, and Prioress Emmelot des Étoiles has a new conundrum: how, exactly, do bones become relics, and what will it mean for her convent when the pilgrims come to see them? Of more concern is the king's increased interest in those with magic sheltered by holy orders, including Emmelot's beloved, the novice Ysabeau.

But before she can solve those problems, Emmelot discovers the infirmary holds an unknown body with no signs of pestilence: a young woman clutching a posy of lavender — a sign of the conflict between followers of the old gods and the new. Now Emmelot must solve this murder before a longstanding feud erupts into open warfare.

In Her Own Shoes (The Ferrier Chronicles #1) by Mark Prime is another book with a medieval setting. I was a bit thrown by the title, because I’ve never encountered any adage similar to “in her own shoes” and can’t quite figure out what spin it’s trying to give.

In a castle built on legacy, one woman dares to claim her own name.

England, 1425. Tamworth Castle stands as a fortress of stone, secrets, and centuries-old power. When Elizabeth de Ferrel arrives to marry into the Farrier family, she isn’t stepping into a life of privilege—she’s walking straight into a battleground.

To secure her inheritance, Elizabeth must wed Sir Thomas Farrier, the ambitious heir of a noble bloodline now clinging to its influence. But she brings with her more than a title—she brings a dagger, a sharp wit, and a past she refuses to bury.

Inside Tamworth’s walls, every gaze has weight. Elizabeth forms an unexpected bond with Mae, a dark-haired scullery maid whose loyalty cuts deeper than her silence. Meanwhile, Griselda, the stone-faced housekeeper with more secrets than the cellar, watches Elizabeth’s every move—not as a threat, but perhaps as a guardian. And in the shadows, young Jonah, a servant boy marked by trauma, carries a truth that could set the castle ablaze.

When a bishop dies under mysterious circumstances, and Elizabeth receives a lock of hair as warning, alliances fracture, hearts are tested, and no one escapes untouched. Whispers rise of a Black Nun haunting the chapel—a spectral reminder that Tamworth remembers every sin carved into its walls.

At the heart of it all: a woman who refuses to shrink. Elizabeth isn’t interested in being the lady of the house. She wants to rule it. And she’ll do it in her own shoes.

The Letters Beneath Her Floorboards by Mira Ashwyn is one of those “unsent letters” stories I mentioned above, this time with a supernatural twist and stories in parallel timelines.

One letter. One mystery. One chance to heal.

When Rae Ashcroft returns to her late grandmother’s coastal estate, she isn’t looking for closure—she’s looking for silence. Haunted by a past she’s tried to bury, Rae just wants to escape. But the creaking old house has other plans.

Beneath a warped floorboard, she discovers a letter.

Written decades ago by a woman named Elise, the message unravels a forgotten love story between two women—one that was silenced, hidden, and never resolved. Drawn deeper into the mystery, Rae begins uncovering secrets Elise took to her grave… and uncovers echoes of her own.

At the heart of it all is Camille: the fiercely gentle, storm-eyed artist living next door. Rae doesn’t want to fall for her—but Camille is patient, kind, and maddeningly persistent. As the two grow closer, past trauma rises like a tide, threatening to drown the fragile trust Rae is learning to rebuild.

But someone is watching. The more Rae uncovers, the more dangerous things become. And the more she realizes—Elise never left. And maybe… she never meant to.

We get another medieval romance with lots of danger and angst in House of Ash and Honor by W.S. Banks.

When duty demands sacrifice, love demands everything.

Lady Avilene Northcliff has always been the perfect noble daughter—until her family arranges her marriage to the cold and calculating Lord Westmark. Desperate to escape a loveless union, she flees to the one place no one would think to look: the estate of her family's sworn enemies.

Lady Elara Blackwood should turn away the Northcliff daughter seeking sanctuary. Their houses have been locked in bitter feud for twenty-five years, built on lies, betrayal, and bloodshed. Instead, she offers shelter to the woman who ignites feelings she never knew existed.

As forbidden attraction blooms between them, both women discover that the enmity dividing their families rests on a devastating deception. When explosive family secrets surface, Avilene and Elara must choose between the safety of silence and a love that could cost them everything.

In a world where women's hearts belong to others, two enemies will risk everything to claim their own destiny.

The July books are mostly 20th century settings, or close enough. And as usual, the rhythms of pre-publication publicity mean that they’re almost all from major publishers.

Lavender & Gin by Abigail Aaronson leans in to the current fashion for Prohibition stories.

Taking on her brother’s identity has given Kasia almost everything she wants: money, power, a gang to call her own in Prohibition-era Detroit. Until a new police chief threatens to destroy everything she’s worked for, and a beautiful woman tempts her to expose her secret.

After a decade disguised as her missing twin brother, Kasia leads a gang running liquor for the most powerful mob in the city. The ruse gave her a foot in the door, but in order to keep her position—and more importantly, to keep money flowing in for her and her sick mother—she has to be willing to do whatever it takes. And what it takes is cold calculation and a ruthless hand. She needs both in spades when a new police chief is determined to eliminate Detroit’s mafia, a threat to destroy everything she’s built.

When Kasia learns Sophia—a glamorous flapper who owns an underground queer club—has an unusual hold on the supposedly-incorruptible chief, Kasia wants in on Sophia’s secret. Blackmailing Chief Harding could protect her gang and give her a leg up in the mob’s ranks. But her plan unravels when she falls for Sophia’s fiery spirit and sophisticated charm. After years of avoiding relationships to protect her identity, her feelings for Sophia lead Kasia to take bigger risks than ever. Risks that endanger her gang, her secret, and her life.

Emma-Claire Sunday follows up on last year’s Regency romance The Duke’s Sister and I with another Regency, The Fortune Hunter's Guide to Love once more from Harlequin Historical.

How can Lady Sylvia save herself from financial ruin?

Step 1: Move to the seaside for the summer, where there will be no shortage of wealthy bachelors holidaying.

Step 2: Strike a deal with local farmer Hannah. If Hannah can help Sylvia bag a rich husband, Sylvia will fund Hannah’s dream of opening a cheese shop.

Step 3: Charm their way into luncheons, parties and exclusive balls, but do not start to confuse friendship with romantic feelings for Hannah.

Step 4: Focus on her fortune-hunting scheme and do not let her heart get carried away by her unexpected and magical kiss with Hannah!

With a title like The Rebel Girls of Rome by Jordyn Taylor from Harper Collins, one might guess we were looking at a classical setting, but this one is a dual-timeline story set during World War II and the contemporary era.

Now:

Grieving the loss of her mother, college student Lilah is hoping to reconnect with a grandfather who refuses to talk about his past. Then she receives a mysterious letter from a fellow student, Tommaso, claiming he’s found a lost family heirloom, and her world is upended.

Soon Lilah finds herself in Rome, trying to unlock her grandfather’s history as a Holocaust survivor once and for all. But as she and Tommaso get closer to the truth—and their relationship begins to deepen into something sweeter—Lilah realizes that some secrets may be too painful to unbury…

Then:

It’s 1943, and nineteen-year-old Bruna and her family are doing their best to survive in Rome’s Jewish quarter under Nazi occupation. Until the dreaded knock comes early one morning, and Bruna is irrevocably separated from the rest of her family.

Overcome with guilt at escaping her family’s fate in the camps, she joins the underground rebellion. When her missions bring her back to her childhood crush, Elsa, Bruna must decide how much she’s willing to risk—when fully embracing herself is her greatest act of resistance.

Another story using that popular motif of dual timelines via historic research is The Secrets of Harbour House by Liz Fenwick from Harper Collins.

When Kerensa is sent by her father’s auction house to catalogue a neglected house overlooking the sea in Newlyn, Cornwall, it’s a welcome escape. Once the home of two female artists, Harbour House is a treasure trove, but one painting in particular catches Kerensa’s eye – a hypnotically sensual portrait of a beautiful young woman which dominates the hallway.

Captivated and intrigued, Kerensa finds herself piecing together the enigma of Bathsheba Kernow, a fiercely talented young artist who left St Ives almost a hundred years before, eager to escape a society that wouldn’t understand her, and her sweeping journey from the underbelly of Paris to the heady luxury of Venice, where a chance encounter would change her life for ever, drawing her into the most dangerous and forbidden of love affairs.

For Kerensa, still reeling with a grief of her own and facing an uncertain future in love, Harbour House will have secrets that will change her life too, and in ways she could never have imagined…

It’s fairly rare to find sapphic stories set in non-Western cultures written from within those cultures but there have been several in the past year. This month’s candidate is Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath by Moon Heeyang, set in Korea, although I’m not quite sure of the date as the reference is to a dynasty that lasted for five centuries.

In a world where lineage rules and silence is survival, two women in a noble Joseon household discover a forbidden love that defies rank, custom, and time.

Soona, a humble maid, and Lady Hyeon, the daughter of the house, share stolen glances in the steam of the bathhouse. What begins as duty unfolds into desire, and soon into a secret bond.

But when their love is seen—by the Lord himself—everything changes. A proposition is made. A second wife is named.

And both women find themselves pregnant.

Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath is a lyrical, emotional, and unflinching tale of queer motherhood, silent rebellion, and love that grows like magnolia in the cracks of stone.

The Original by Nell Stevens from W.W. Norton & Company has a twisty plot that looks like it has a lot of layers.

In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.

An unwanted guest of her uncle’s family since childhood, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household. She has unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls. Her life is altered when a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea. When he returns, a rift emerges between family members who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. Grace, whose intimate knowledge of fakes is her own closely guarded secret, is forced to decide who to believe and who to pretend to believe. In deciphering the truth about her cousin, she comes to understand other truths: how money is found and lost, and who deserves to be rich; what family means to queer people; and the value of authenticity, in art and in love.

Skating the edge of my definition of historical fiction, we have Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs from William Morrow Paperbacks, where the lesbian is one of a large cast of characters.

In 1968 we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd—a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns—locked away merely for being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly.

Mairin— free-spirited daughter of Irish immigrants, committed to keep her safe from her stepfather.

Angela—denounced for her attraction to girls, sent to the nuns for reform, but instead found herself the victim of a predator.

Helen—the daughter of intellectuals detained in Communist China, she saw her “temporary” stay at the Good Shepherd stretch into years.

Odessa—caught up in a police dragnet over a racial incident, she found the physical and mental toughness to endure her sentence.

Denise—sentenced for brawling in a foster home, she dared to dream of a better life.

Janice—deeply insecure, she couldn’t decide where her loyalty lay—except when it came to her friend Kay, who would never outgrow her childlike dependency.

Sister Bernadette—rescued from a dreadful childhood, she owed her loyalty to the Sisters of Charity even as her conscience weighed on her.

Wayward Girls is a haunting but thrilling tale of hope, solidarity, and the enduring strength of young women who find the courage to break free and find redemption...and justice.

Finishing up this month’s books we have a mid-century rural English romance: Miss Veal and Miss Ham by Vikki Heywood from Muswell Press. This is another book where my impulse is to buy it, but the publisher makes that difficult, not because of my Amazon blockade this time, but because they only distribute ebooks through one particular obscure phone app. Ah well.

Public companions, private lovers.

It is 1951 and behind the counter of a modest post office in a leafy Buckinghamshire village Miss Dora Ham and Miss Beatrix Veal maintain their careful facade as respected local spinsters. But their true story is one of passion: suffragist activists who fell in love at a rally in the 1900s, danced in London's secret gay clubs between the wars, and comforted one another during the first night of the Blitz. Together they have built a life of quiet dignity and service in rural England. Now over the course of one pivotal day their carefully constructed world begins to fracture. Through Beatrix's wry perspective we witness the severe impact of post-war changes on their peaceful existence. Changes that will lead to heart-breaking decisions for Miss Veal and Miss Ham. At the heart of this intimate, moving and witty novel is a story of resilience, the dignity of love that cannot be spoken, and the challenges that come when the future no longer feels safe.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading this month, once I get past the complex logic of how I want to acquire and read books? I often have three novels going at a time: one in hard copy, one in ebook, and one in audiobook. The different formats help me keep the stories separate in my head, but that was a bit trickier than usual this time because Joanna Lowell’s A Rare Find (my audiobook) and Lindz McLeod’s The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet (my print book) are both Regency romances and overlapped so solidly in feel and reading period that I kept having to remind myself which story I was in. Not that the stories are that similar in plot or characters, but if I had it to do over I’ve have avoided overlapping them. A Rare Find has a lot of resonances with the author’s Victorian-era story A Shore Thing which you may have spotted if you listened to my interview with the author. In addition to interesting gender choices, they share a tendency to pack the story full of subplots. So if you like a lot going on, this could be your thing. The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet is a fairly standard “let’s pick a couple of characters from the Austen Cannon and make them sapphic.” McLeod’s Mary Bennet is quite different from the book’s character and gets a complex queer community supplied by the author’s imagination.

A sale on the Chirp audiobook platform let me to pick up a series starting with The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman about which I’ve heard good things from friends. Like magical school stories, there’s an entire subgenre of magical library stories, which should be solidly my jam. In retrospect, I did definitely enjoy the book, but somehow in the middle of it I kept forgetting that it was waiting for me. Not sure why, but it meant it took me over a month to finish.

Wanting something a bit more bite-sized, I browsed through my to-be-read bookcase (yes, I have an entire bookcase with lonely hard-copy books waiting for me to pet them) and picked up Servant Mage by Kate Elliott. This fantasy novella managed to pack in enough plot and action for an entire novel—maybe even for a trilogy. A masterpiece of telling you just enough about the world and setting that you can fill in large spaces on your own.

Author Guest

One of the things I’ve wanted to work harder on in my theoretically greater free time is doing more interviews. I’ve made a good start this year, but from the other dropped balls you might guess that I don’t have one in this show. I do have several interesting people lined up for later this year—not all of them authors—and I’m always interested in doing companion interviews for new releases. In the last couple years, that means most of them have been for books from major publishers, because those are the books I know about enough in advance to set up the interview. I’d love to work with more small press and indie authors, but you have to let me know that you’re going to have books coming out!


Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Major category: 

neat sky!

Jul. 8th, 2025 08:10 pm
cellio: (Default)
[personal profile] cellio

Last night I looked out the window a few minutes after nominal sunset and saw an unusual and impressive color in the sky. Naturally, I ran outside to snap a few pictures before it disappeared.

These are unedited cell-phone photos, hastily framed because I know things like this don't last long. Read more... )

Holiday Delays

Jul. 4th, 2025 03:04 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Friday, July 4, 2025 - 08:04

After the flurry of postings in the last month, I'm taking a brief break for the holiday weekend. In fact, the "On the Shelf" podcast episode will be delayed probably until Tuesday, since I'm not going to try to record it in a hotel room. (I'm currently at BayCon/Westercon.) If you're at the con, make sure to find me and say hi.

Major category: 
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Thursday, July 3, 2025 - 07:00

I did one of those things where I started out writing a blog intro to the LHMP entry and ended up with an essay that needed to move into the entry commentary instead. (I really do need to do an explainer on the underlying structure of the data here.)

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Braunschneider, Theresa. 2004. “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 3: 211-29

I sometimes provoke outraged reactions in certain quarters when I claim that it isn't possible to disentangle lesbian history from transgender history. But this article gets into the type of reason why I say that.  (And I'll have an entire chapter in my book digging deeper into this topic.) What lies at the heart is that one strain (and there are others) of historic understanding of and reaction to a female-bodied person desiring another female-bodied person is to simultaneously force them into a heteronormative framework and then punish the "designated male" participant, not for homosexuality, but for gender transgression. We see this in contexts like the one discussed in the present article, where behavioral gender-crossing of some type is involved, but we also see it in the long history of investigating women expressing same-sex desire for signs of physiological masculinity.

Under a heteronormative framework, transness is far more legible and comprehensible than homosexuality. Thus, regardless of what identity models the people involved had available or adopted as their own, there has been a regular (though variable in strength) pressure to accept a trans framing. (This continues up through the late 19th century sexologists' conflation of trans and homosexual experiences under the "gender invert" label.) Even apart from the anachronism of applying current identity categories to historical people, this complicates attempts to neatly categorize historic people with regard to degrees/types of "female masculinity." If a female-bodied person could be labeled "masculine" for being intelligent, brave, strong, tall, athletic, honorable, independent, politically savvy, not conventionally pretty, etc. etc., then how do you trace a line between transmasculinity and accepting cultural brainwashing? (Please note: I am NOT implying that transmasculine identity is due to "cultural brainwashing." I'm saying that some people are trans men and some people have been labeled "unfeminine" for not aligning with certain cultural stereotypes.)

When I get negative reactions to my (admittedly provocative) statement about the entanglement of lesbian history and trans history, my impression is that some of it comes from assuming that I'm talking about trans women in lesbian spaces, whereas mostly I'm talking about the ambiguous classification of female masculinity. But when you come down to it, the historic people who reacted to a female-presenting person desiring a woman by accusing her of being "really a man, in some fashion" aren't that different from the modern bathroom police who see a female-presenting person who deviates in some way from a narrow definition of femininity and accuse her of being "really a man." And I wish more people were more familiar with the deep history of gender policing and the damage it causes.

# # #

Narratives of the lives and “adventures” of passing women were popular in 18th century British culture, purporting to provide biographies of women who lived as a man for some period of time, including: Hannah Snell, Christian Davies, Jenny Cameron, Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Charlotte Charke, Elizabeth Ogden, an unnamed “apothecary’s wife” whose story is appended to the English translation of the life of Catharine Vizzani, and Mary Hamilton whose story inspired the label “female husband” for those passing women who engaged in relationships with other women.

Despite being based on actual lives, and despite the assertion that each was “unique,” the stories as published became highly conventional, with certain fixed elements. One such element (the focus of this paper) is some type of erotic interaction between the passing character and another woman, either actively courting the woman or becoming the object of the woman’s interest (and usually delighted in so being).

There are two other contexts in popular culture of the time that feature cross-dressing women but do not include these erotic encounters: the “woman warrior” plot in which a woman typically dresses as a soldier to follow (or pursue) a male lover; and cross-dressing subplots in novels.

These erotic encounters in passing woman narratives raise and address questions about the relationship between gender and sexuality, and not always in ways that align with the supposed “lesson” such stories provided to the public. Previous scholarship on the genre usually addressed one of two angles: the challenge to stereotypes of gendered ability (Friedli, Dugaw, Wheelwright, Dekker & Van de Pol); or their situation within ideas of female homoeroticism in general (Lanser, Donoghue, Moore).

This article looks at how passing woman erotics disrupt an assumed correspondence between gendered social role and the object of desire. The author notes that 18th century attitudes did not assume an automatic connection between cross-dressing and homoeroticism and, in fact, to some extent passing woman stories act to reinforce heteronormativity, even as they question it. Further, they support an assumed principle that “gender difference must precede desire.”

The author cautions that passing woman narratives should neither be assumed to represent homosexual desire nor that they should be assumed to erase it entirely. Further, she argues that rather than “gender norms [being] defined through sexuality” these texts are part of an active process of creating those norms. The stories’ insistence on making erotic connections between cross-dressed women and normative women in pseudo-heterosexual relations act to separate masculinity (as a gender), with its concomitant orientation of desire toward women, from biological maleness. And it is this separation that creates a potential reading of female masculinity as tied to homoeroticism.

[Note: I’m skeptical about the claim that this is a process being established in the 18th century, because there is a very long historical tradition of associating desire for women with an assumption of masculinity, such that female-oriented desire triggered investigation into the potential masculinity of a female-presenting woman.]

The formulaicness of passing-woman erotic plots creates an expectation within the audience for such an encounter at any time a cross-dressing woman is introduced. In one version, the passing woman decides to court a woman (or women) either as a test of her passing, as a lark, or in active support of the strength of her disguise. And in the standard narrative, she is successful. The object of the courtship falls in love and pledges herself to the passing woman, often preferring that relationship to other rivals. The courtships may be presented hyperbolically or with a certain sly satire on conventional courtship rituals. But the essential element is that the courtship and its reception occur within a context where the two are understood to be man and woman.

This same formula holds when the normative woman initiates the courtship; it occurs within a context involving gender difference. An interesting doubled example is the brief description of the pirates Mary Read and Ann Bonny, when both are cross-dressing and each believes the other to be a man. In order to shift from desire to an active relationship, Bonny reveals her sex to Read (thereby establishing an assumed gender difference), only to have Read reveal her own sex, thus negating (within the narrative) the erotic potential. [Note: Compare a similar double-disguise plot in the play Gallathea, in which desire is sparked in both disguised women when they believe the beloved is male, that desire is challenged when both reveal their sex, but the desire outlasts the reanalysis that it is same-sex.]

The usual resolution of a gender reveal is that the normative woman’s desire evaporates and the previous desire is either reanalyzed as a good joke or an act of fraud. Here, though, we start seeing cracks in the façade. In the Jenny Cameron narrative, after Jenny reveals her sex to avert a duel with her rival for the girl’s affections, the girl immediately decides to marry the rival, lest she make a similar mistake in the future—that is, acknowledging the potential for her to again fall in love with a female-bodied person under the necessary masculine presentation.

A second type of resolution occurs when the passing woman concludes that the relationship is “impossible” (despite wishing that it were possible) and breaks off the courtship concluding that it “could not go beyond a platonick Love.” That is, the passing woman reciprocates the desire but chooses not to pursue it (and may or may not reveal her sex to her beloved). Here we find another distinction in how the narratives are presented. A passing woman who steps back from a homosexual relationship is typically presented as heroic and admirable (at least in that context, even if she may not be in other contexts).

In contrast, the third type—stories in which the passing woman continues to pursue the relationship, up to and including marriage and a sexual relationship—frame the passing woman as deceptive and fraudulent if the sexual relationship shatters the myth of "impossibilities." The classic example is Mary Hamilton.

Type 2 and 3 both challenge the idea that sexual difference is necessary for erotic desire (although the type 3 may frame the passing woman as mercenary rather than besotted), even if gender difference is still presented as essential. If is rare for the passing woman to reject the courtship or reveal her sex due to being horrified, disgusted, or simply uninterested. An essential part of the narratives is to depict the normative woman as desirable and (for all practical purposes) eligible. Rather, when the passing woman breaks things off, it is due to believing the next step (consummation) to be “impossible.”

Here, the passing woman narrative confronts the female husband narrative, in which that supposed impossibility is overcome. Now a different contrast in reception emerges: condemnatory narratives in which the female husband uses an artificial penis to overcome the “impossibility” and more neutral narratives in which some other means is used to side-step the question of consummation. It is this distinction in reception, Braunschneider argues, that works to help construct the normative relationship of gender and sexuality. It isn’t that desire can never precede gender difference, and it isn’t that the consummation of female homosexual relationships is literally impossible, but that when these principles are violated the narrative condemns them and frames the passing woman as monstrous and unnatural.

The judgement of the narratives is not based on the biological sex of the persons involved, but on the performed gender. The texts clearly assume—indeed, depend on—the audience knowing that the supposed “impossibilities” are, in fact possible, for key aspects may be provided only by implication or circumlocution. Thus, they create and acknowledge a space in which female-bodied people can desire each other and can consummate that desire. They simply define those possibilities as unacceptable.

A particularly convoluted example is offered to demonstrate the reductio ad absurdum of this program, contrasting what the participants in the scenario “know” versus what the narrator and the audience “know,” and how that knowledge shapes the presentation of the scenario. As long as the participants in the narrative “know” that an interaction is male-female, it is treated positively by the narrator, or at least as natural and expected, even though the narrator (and audience) “know” that the interaction is same-sex. At the same time, the passing woman is given a pass [pun intentional] on behavior that would be unacceptable in a man (such as abandoning their girlfriends without a qualm) because the alternative (continuing the relationship) would be unacceptable in a woman. The audience reception of the character shifts between treating her as a man and as a woman in inconsistent (but formulaic) ways, sometimes following the narrator’s “knowledge” that she is a woman, sometimes following the other characters’ “knowledge” that she is a man.

The same formulaic inconsistency occurs when it comes to sexual relations. When Mary Hamilton’s narrative follows her through one wedding night in which she doesn’t have her “device” available, wherein her flustered embarrassment is treated sympathetically (although in a mocking way), followed by clearly condemnatory descriptions of the sexual relations she engages in when the “device” is involved—but only after her wife discovers the truth. Her relationship becomes “vile” and “criminal” not only when one specific sexual technique is employed, but when it is known by the partner to be employed. That is, so long as Hamilton’s wife believes she is married to a man, the marriage is successful. When the relationship is known to be same-sex (by both participants) its nature is treated as being materially changed.

Time period: 
Place: 

Nothing Much to See Here

Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:14 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Wednesday, July 2, 2025 - 07:00

This is just a placeholder for a cross-reference. Go about your business.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Garber, Linda. 2015. “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction” in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(1), 129-49.

This is an early and much simpler version of the content in Garber 2022 to which I direct the reader.

cats: why are you LIKE this

Jul. 1st, 2025 03:52 pm
kellan_the_tabby: My face, reflected in a round mirror I'm holding up; the rest of the image is the side of my head, hair shorn short. (undercut)
[personal profile] kellan_the_tabby
2025 04 01 18.45.15

[A set of wooden shelves, crowded with shipping boxes, padded envelopes, rainbow packing tape, and other shipping paraphernalia. Major Tom’s hinder end is sticking out of a semi-empty space at the end that’s up against the wall.]

He took his sweet time wandering all the way across the table, but I didn’t manage to fumble my camera out until he’d commenced inserting himself into the only place over there that had ANY space left.

2025 04 01 18.45.20

[Tom’s stuffed all but his tail into the space, and is in the middle of turning himself around. It’s a bit of a process.]

& by then all I could do was take pictures, intermittently grumble at him, & laugh. He’s the horriblest.

2025 04 01 18.45.23

[Tom’s sitting neatly in the space, his head sticking out. He’s gazing contemplatively towards the door, ears perked, whiskers relaxed.]

He’s also the very handsomest, & yes, he WILL use that against you.

2025 04 01 18.45.27

[Tom’s now looking up & to the left, neck stretched out. Contemplative, but more in the ‘contemplating shenaniganry’ kind of way.]

YES, there are shelves up there. NO, there is not space for a tomcat. I explained this to him in very clear language. Some of it, I admit, was also fairly rude.

2025 04 01 18.45.36

[Tom’s looking down now, in the general direction of the camera.]

He did take a moment to scout a good path, instead of immediately scramming. He’s remarkably calm about being hollered at, despite having grown up feral. I think it’s because he knows I’m full of shit.

2025 04 01 18.45.38

[Tom’s making his way out of the corner, now, one paw placed precariously on a fortunately double ziplocked bag of soap.]

He NEVER stays on the rare occasions when he makes his way back to that spot. I don’t know why he bothers going at all, but if he’s having fun, more power to him.


originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

When You See It, You Can't Unsee It

Jul. 1st, 2025 04:18 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 - 09:00

There's an entire genre of articles on the theme "why is it so hard to find historic evidence for female same-sex relations?" It covers everything from the types of erasures and displacements that Faderman talks about in this article, to the deliberate and selective exclusion of f/f vocabulary from the Oxford English DIctionary (which continues the process of erasure to this day, as people relying on it to be complete and detailed). Time after time you get slapped in the face with the understanding that f/f relations were erased because people considered them shameful and embarrassing. Not even necessarily the people engaged in them! But their biographers, their descendents (who controled their legacy), and most historians up through the late 20th century. If a woman was considered otherwise admirable and praiseworthy, it was important to make sure that nothing "stained" that. And, of course, we can't ignore the contribution of general misogyny, because as we all know a woman must be perfect and of unstained reputation to avoid getting torn down for daring to be a woman in public. But one of the things that Faderman's work points out, is that much of the overt erasure is specifically a product of the post-sexological world.

This is an error that creeps into a great deal of sapphic historical fiction: characters are concerned about aspects of their relationships that actual people of the period would not have blinked at. Sharing a bed? No biggie. Kissing, embracing, and holding hands in public? Utterly normal. Writing love poetry and effusive declarations of affection? But of course! And yet so many current sapphic historicals have characters freaking out over things that their historic counterparts would have taken for granted as, not simply acceptable, but expected behavior. A romance novel requires conflict and roadblocks, but they should be ones that are true to the era, not ones borrowed from the 20th century.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Faderman, Lillian. 1979. “Who Hid Lesbian History?” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Autumn 1979, Vol. 4, No 3. 74-76. Also appears 1982 in Lesbian Studies; Present and Future ed. Margaret Cruikshank. Feminist Press, Old Westbury.

This article is essentially a teaser for Surpassing the Love of Men (which she explicitly says in the author’s note at the end). Given that, I’m not sure how much value there is to blogging it in detail.

The article starts by reviewing how lesbian aspects of history were being treated before the 1970s, with those aspects either ignored, discussed in coded language, or arbitrarily assigned to some random man. Biographies of women in homoerotic relationships were a particular subject of historical gatekeeping, with even explicit romantic and erotic expressions directed toward other women being forcibly re-interpreted as actually meant to be understood as heterosexual, even if some unnamed hypothetical man needed to be invented to assign the role to.

Another technique was the careful editing of quotations (as was done in Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s papers) to soften or redirect homoerotic language. Or the relabeling of romantic partners as “companions,” sometimes explicitly for the purpose of “saving” their reputation, even in contexts where illicit affairs with men were acknowledged blatantly. When unavoidable, same-sex relationships may be shrunk down to a brief mention while any possible scrap of evidence for heterosexual relations is elaborated in detail.

Anyway, this is basically a well-deserved rant against the historical erasure of lesbianism which may feel obvious and unnecessary 45 years later.

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Are We Proud Yet?

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:15 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Monday, June 30, 2025 - 07:00

I like setting myself little challenges for the Project to keep up my momentum and to avoid the sense that it's become an endless march from one random publication to the next. Thus, I alternate between thematic groupings and simply working my way through what's left in a folder or on a shelf. Doing an "every day" push for Pride Month helps kick-start me out of a period of distraction where other projects take priority. At this point, I have enough written up to continue posting every day into mid-July. And given what I know of my work habits, I'll probably do just that , though I'll probably slow down a little once I get caught up.

As you might notice from some of the briefer summaries I'm posting currently, in going for a somewhat content-neutral completeness goal, I'm now finding myself encountering a fair number of articles that are preliminary versions of material I've covered in book form, or articles that are more "popular" presentations of material where I've already covered the scholarly version. The Project, of course, has multiple functions. Foremost is the incentive for me to read and digest the information. Secondly is the purpose of presenting a summary for a non-academic audience. But one additional purpose is to give readers a chance to figure out whether they want to track down the original publications to do a deeper dive on their own. And for that purpose, summarizing an article as "this ended up being chapter 3 in book X" or "this material is covered in much greater detail in article Y" or "this is badly outdated and you might want to read Z instead" might help someone else map out their own research more efficiently.

Besides which, with over a thousand titles in my database, I can't always remember what I've already read and blogged! So including everything with any potential relevance that I've looked at means I don't find myself duplicating work on items that I concluded--at some point--weren't all that interesting. One step in working on each entry is reviewing the notes and references to find new publications to add to the database. I regularly find myself thinking, "Oh yeah, that's going to be interesting! Oh...wait...not only is it already on the list, but I've already read it!"

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Cleves, Rachel Hope. “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901).” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 32–62.

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.

Frances “Frank” Ann Wood Shimer grew up in New York, became an educator including founding and leading a college, and eventually retired to Florida and helped start the citrus industry there. Throughout this life, Frank (her preferred version of her name) used a variety of information sources to develop, shape, and revise her understanding of her identity. [Note: The author of the article uses female pronouns because, despite expressing various aspects of masculinity, Shimer identified her accomplishments as those of a woman who was proud to serve as an example of what women could achieve.) Cleves has identified five successive frameworks: “didactic literature, romantic friendship, phrenology, pioneer chronicles, and sexology.” The title of the article is a deliberate homage to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, which itself plays off the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

The first stage draws on literature aimed at children to instruct them in the dangers of cross-gender behavior and presentation. This was a genre that developed in the early 19th century in support of changing views of gender roles and the tacit recognition that those roles were not “natural” but must be trained into children. This literature established the parameters that girls should be modest, quiet, and non-athletic, whereas boys were expected to be loud, boisterous, athletic, and competitive. Shimer’s school essays reflect these models, depicting a domestic life as desirable, but at the same time rebelling against expectations by insisting on using the name Frank, rather than Frances, which was treated as a “youthful mistake.”

The articles discusses several typical stories of the type used for gender indoctrination and speculates that Shimer would likely have been familiar with them and that they might have shaped her later recollections of her childhood, such as a disinterest in playing with dolls, a love of outdoor activities, and a tendency to disruptive behavior in school. Like the “boyish girls” in the morality tales, Shimer occasionally cross-dressed as a child to engage in work that earned her enough to pay for her own advanced schooling. Unlike the girls in books, she never “learned her lesson” and retreated to feminine behavior.

At normal school, training to become a teacher, Shimer became part of the culture of romantic same-gender friendships common to single-sex schools. Although the particular institution she attended was co-educational, socializing was mostly gender-segregated. Close relationships with fellow female students are recorded in her “friendship album” (a type of scrapbook and public journal popular at the time). These include exchanges of poetry with Cindarella Gregory, using the conventional romantic language of such friendships, often drawn from popular poetry copied from magazines. Shimer was hardly alone in using a male-coded nickname when engaging in romantic friendships, though perhaps more unusual in using it as a regular thing, rather than only in the context of particular relationships. Male nicknames between intimate friends were a part of the culture of romantic friendship. Cleves speculates that her more general use of a male-coded name may have served as a signal of her deeper romantic interest in women. [Note: As in her book Charity and Sylvia, Cleves is given to phrasing speculations in a way that can become tricky to distinguish from evidence-based conclusions. “The [name]…may have signaled…suggests that…”]

After graduation separated them, the relationship with Cindarella Gregory was sufficiently intense that Shimer strategized to get both of them teaching in the same location, while worrying that she might be hampering Gregory’s career in the process. But the opportunity came when Shimer was asked to help found a seminary on the frontier in Illinois and was able to bring Gregory in as one of the teachers. They shared a household and bed for the next two decades, even after Shimer married—though evidently the marriage was to stave off rumors about a possible male romance, not about her arrangement with Gregory. The two Shimers never cohabited (he immediately left for medical school) and there is no indication that it was anything but a marriage of convenience. However when Gregory married, it caused a break between the two women. Later, Shimer found a new female partner in Adelia C. Joy and that relationship lasted until her death. Photographic portraits of Shimer with each of her partners follow the artistic conventions for married couples, with Shimer filling the pose normally taken by a husband.

Shimer’s interest in science and medicine led her into a third framework, which Cleves identifies as phrenology, but is a bit broader than that. [Note: Technically, phrenology concerns itself with the shape of the skull, but the theories here involve various physical variations and their supposed relationship to personality and intellect. The field also overlaps somewhat with eugenics and can go to bad places.] Shimer had invited a famous phrenologist to present lectures at her school and was particularly interested supposed gender differences expressed via phrenology. Shimer’s own analysis concluded she “had a larger and more powerful brain than the majority of men.” Shimer notes her reaction to the claim that she was “cut out for a man” as being “Not so very flattering either I don’t think.” Phrenology offered the possibility that gender-coded traits could instead by interpreted as physiology-linked traits, such that women could make positive claims to male-coded traits such as intelligence, leadership, and assertiveness without becoming men.

Cleves once again moves into speculation, saying that phrenology “may also have provided Shimer with a context for understanding another quality connected to her masculinity: her desire for intimacies with women.” Some theories based in phrenology relating to same-sex attraction are discussed. Then we get another sequence of “likely..may have…could be read…may have read.” While I admire the lengths Cleves goes to in providing historic and cultural background for her subjects, I get very frustrated when the connections she makes between the two are all framed in speculative language.

The next context for Shimer’s understanding of female masculinity comes through heroic traditions of female pioneers whose lives and actions contrasted greatly with the new models of femininity that emphasized passivity and domesticity. Pioneer women were celebrated for physical prowess and courage. [Note: Somewhat unfortunately, these narratives also existed with a tradition of erasing Native Americans from the historic present, and valorizing the white settlers as being a new foundation of history.] Shimer, in her memoirs, leveraged this tradition both by emphasizing her own “frontier” role in establishing the Illinois academy, but also harking back to a namesake and relative who was part of a prominent “kidnapped by natives” story and became a powerful presence within the Miami Nation. Despite the problematic aspects, the “frontier heroine” tradition provided a context for praising women for male-coded attributes and for positing that all women had the potential to be strong and self-reliant, thus redefining womanhood. Shimer’s work in establishing what would later be renamed the Frances Shimer Academy was constantly praised in gendered terms, noting that she “did the work of two men” and that it had been established with “no man’s aid.”

By the time Shimer retired to Florida (retired from teaching, but not from continued enterprise!), sexology was becoming better known in popular reception. The work of people like Krafft-Ebing reanalyzed the culture of romantic friendship and the lesbian encounters of students and teachers at single-sex academies as being pathological. Educated and economically independent “new women” were another target for psychoanalysis. Shimer pushed back against this framing in magazine essays, praising educated women and arguing that their critics were over-reacting and “hysterical” (using the term advisedly, in contradiction of its usual gendered implications). Although she rejected negative framings of female masculinity, Cleves suggests that in writing her memoirs, Shimer used the format and tropes of “invert” case studies to describe her own life and experiences as reflecting an innate masculinity. (Though her memoir is very vague on the subject of her romantic relationships.)

The concluding section of the articles discusses the value of viewing Shimer’s life history through the lens of trans studies, regardless of whether one considers her to fall within the category of transgender.

Time period: 
Place: 

Guest Appearance: Wizards vs Lesbians

Jun. 29th, 2025 06:52 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Sunday, June 29, 2025 - 11:52

There is this delightful literary review podcast which is simultaneously zany and intellectual, Wizards vs Lesbians, on which I made a guest appearance this week. We discuss Kate Heartfield's medieval fantasy The Chatelaine.

(Note: I'd been listening to the podcast for over a year when they decided to tackle Daughter of Mystery. When I saw that in the lineup I had a moment of "Oh crap, I should be a good girl and just delete the episode and not listen to it, because it's Not For Me." Well, I'm weak, so it's a good thing they liked the book, because their tastes only align with mine about half the time. But I pretty much agreed with everything they said, so I escaped any tragic consequences for my transgression. If you want to listen to that episode, it's here. If, unlike me, you disagree with their opinions on the book, please please please just keep it to yourself, because I don't want to be That Author.)

Major category: 
Publications: 

How Out Do You Need to Be to Count?

Jun. 29th, 2025 05:15 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Sunday, June 29, 2025 - 09:00

In the group of articles I've been reading lately, there are two interesting meta-topics: scholars talking about the process of research and their relationship to their subjects, and philosophical questions about the nature of "romantic friendship." I have some thoughts on the latter, which I'll put in the comments that display with the entry itself.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

VanHaitsma, Pamela. 2019. “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 6, No. 3:1-24

Debates over the relationship of "romantic friendship" and "lesbianism" tend to feel rather personal for me. As someone who identifies equally strongly as a lesbian and as asexual, the scholars who get hung up over the question of "did they engage in something we would classify as sexual activity?" feel like I'm being erased from history. At the same time, I solidly support the position that not all women who participated in romantic friendships, if trasported to the present time and given the current cultural background, would identify as lesbian. But I resist the notion that the key factor is sex. And that rather doubles down on the "we can't ever know" position that gets sneered at a lot by my contemporaries.

My personal take is that we should separate out the concepts of "romantic friendship" (and "Boston marriage" and all the other related concepts) from the concept of "lesbian even if they didn't use that word or an equivalent." For me, they are overlapping but independent historical concepts. A romantic friendship is certainly a context in which erotic relations could easily have occurred without leaving a documentary trace. The lack of a documentary trace is not proof that the women involved were heterosexual, any more than the lack of documentary evidence for opposite-sex erotic relations for those same women is proof of homosexuality. But whether or not they engaged in sex is, for me, a separate question from whehter they lived lives that I identify with as being lesbian. (I won't fall back on Bennett's "lesbian-like" label, because Bennett's category by definition would include all romantic friendships.) At the same time, I acknowledge the importance of sexual activity as part of what constructs the fuzzy, complicated, contested category that is the thing we study when engage in "lesbian history."  So in a way, I'm simultaneously saying, "Yes, sex matters, but sex doesn't matter."

Because I have a background in cognitive category theory, this isn't a problem for me. It's the same thing as saying, "Yes, flight is a key characteristic of the category 'bird' but there are many birds that do not fly and they are still birds." Maybe some romantic friends are penguins. Maybe some are fledglings. Maybe some had a broken wing that healed badly. And maybe some are bats. My metaphor is getting away from me. I just wish that the debates over this topic spent less effort on the subtext that I'm not a real lesbian. The present paper--though it's inspired by thoughts around lesbian invisibility--doesn't entirely escape that message.

# # #

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.

The specific project the author was pursuing involved archival materials related to two white women from 19th century Virginia (Irene Leache and Anna Wood) who shared lives and careers and described their relationship as an “opulent friendship.”

The larger part of the article concerns the author’s interactions with archives: the ways that indexing practices and selective creation of metadata shape the types of research that are enabled, the types of assumptions (warranted or not) that both sides may make about the other’s motives and prejudices, and the pressures on queer researchers to self-censor the nature of their projects when applying for funding, proposing projects, and strategizing for career success. Even when there is no animosity involved, the pressure to avoid anachronistic identity labels in the indexing process works to erase evidence of queer lives.

Just as the coming-out process can involve reading subtle signs of potential reception, the author was concerned about approaching archival material when the existing expert on the subject had described the two woman as “celibate lovers” and rejected the possibility that they had anything but “the purist alliance”—framings that the author read as indicating hostility to a potential lesbian framing of their relationship. At the same time, the author notes that stereotypes of archivists as hostile gatekeepers are just as dangerous to good relations with historians of all types.

Skipping past the author’s biographical musings, this process of reflexively “straightening” one’s presentation can be a confounding factor in researching the lives of romantic friends. Early historians of romantic friendship tended to emphasize that the romantic aspects were conventional, sentimental, and devoid of any erotic aspect. Whereas more recent scholarship has complicated the subject by identifying a wide range of relationships with more variable reception from their contemporaries. As a gross oversimplification, historians see what they’ve been trained to see in the data, just as contemporary people have been led to believe that “you can always tell” a lesbian by her gender performance.

Returning to the evidence for Leache and Wood’s sexuality, the author notes that—contrary to some assertions that 19th century women would be ignorant of lesbian possibility and therefore would not recognize it in themselves—these women discuss an artistic depiction of Sappho, identifying a “blending of the intellectual and the passionate,” discuss woman-woman love in Greek myth (as well as man-man love), and compare their own relationship to that of Ponsonby and Butler.

While none of this is proof of any specific reading of their sexuality, it offers a context in which they could have had models for a more erotic understanding of romantic friendship, even if they never recorded specific evidence for posterity. The author discusses the potential for 19th century women who did have erotic relationships to use the commonly accepted understanding of romantic friendships as non-sexual as cover for relationships that didn’t fit the non-sexual model. Such a strategy need not have been purely pragmatic, but could partake of its own pleasure in having a secret that the world didn’t share.

In the end, other that some tantalizing details of Leache and Wood’s lives, this article is more about the process of research than about history itself, but it speaks to shifting fashions in historic interpretation and the dangers of taking surface presentations for granted.

Time period: 
Place: 
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Saturday, June 28, 2025 - 17:05

As noted previously, the number of the entries is going to get a bit weird for a bit. But since I don't expect that much of anyone besides me pays attention to the numbering, this is no big deal. The most relevant part is that I've identified which article I want to slot into #500, so now I have to keep track of that as I fill in what comes before.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Martin, Sylvia. 1994. “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 243-266

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.]

Much of the article reviews and discusses the evolving scholarship around the intersection of female friendship and lesbian history, which she refers to as the “romantic friendship versus lesbianism debate.” This debate has played out in works such as:

Much of the tension has derived from the competing programs of valorizing women’s social (but non-sexual) bonds in the face of patriarchal framings that view relationships between women of any type as being inherently less relevant than the relationships to men, and the work of historians of lesbian history who view the active “unsexualization” of romantic friendships as queer erasure deriving from a discomfort with the idea that sex might sully the “purity” of those friendships. Even concepts such as Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” can be seen as downplaying an essential difference between sexual and non-sexual relationships in a way that undermines the meaningfulness of the category “lesbian.”

On the one side, we have positions such as Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg who argue that romantic friendships must have been inherently non-sexual because women were socialized to consider themselves non-sexual beings, and besides which romantic friendships couldn’t have been social acceptable (as they were) if there were anything sexual about them, plus nobody was a lesbian until the sexologists invented the concept. On the other side, we have positions such as Stanley 1992 and Moore 1992 who document the policing of 18-19th century female friendships that were felt to stray into “dangerous” sexual territory, indicating that people of the time certainly acknowledged the possibility that female friendship could have a sexual component. Both poles have contributed to failures of the historical imagination: either ignoring sexual potential or over-emphasizing it.

At this point, Martin returns to her Australian poet and women with similar lives, discussing how their lives have been treated by biographers through one or the other framing, either overlooking potential support for a lesbian interpretation (or viewing incontrovertible evidence as a “problem” to be explained), or assuming sexual relations against a background of ambiguity. Martin asks the question “Why is the lesbian such a problem to theorizing friendship?” She attempts to answer that question in terms of the gendering of mind-body duality and how the “woman as body” is pushed toward an interpretation focused on motherhood and nurturing, as well as a phallocentric definition of sex that denies lesbians the ability to participate in it. Thus there is no space within these frameworks for an embodied sexuality between women that is not an imitation of some other dynamic.

Even within the field of lesbian history, there is a conflict between envisioning a “utopian” image of an era when f/f relationships could be free of the suspicion of sexuality, and a desire to define lesbianism as defined by sexual desire.

[Note: The article spends a lot of time on theorizing, which I have condensed greatly.]

Returning once more to Mary Fullerton’s life, the article looks at hear own words and finds various potential interpretations. Fullerton was a feminist and socialist activist, was proud of her unmarried state, and asserted that she lacked the “sex instinct,” while engaging in a close friendship with a woman with whom she co-habited for almost four decades. Such a self-description in such a context would seem to support interpretation of her life as a classic non-sexual romantic friendship (if somewhat behind the historic curve, as the relationship started in 1909). However further examination of her love poems complicates the question. Her expressions of passion are spiritual but also bodily. Physical interaction is the means for spiritual unity. Further, we find that her definition of “sex instinct” was tied up in procreation. For her the “sex instinct” was the animal urge that drove reproduction—a drive that was not as strong in more “evolved” individuals. [Note: We shall overlook potentially problematic interpretations of this position for the moment.] This leaves room for seeing her poetry as representing an erotic same-sex desire that she viewed as entirely separate from the “sex instinct” she denied having.

 

Time period: 
Place: 
Event / person: 
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Friday, June 27, 2025 - 08:00

This finishes up Cleves' book on Charity and Sylvia. As I noted in a previous blog, the entry numbers are going to be a bit jumbled for a while, both because I'd accidentally skipped a run of numbers and because I've already assigned a number to a book that's taking some time to write up, for logistical reasons. In the mean time, I have a bunch of short articles ready to go, which will take me through the end of Pride Month, after which I won't hold myself to the "post every day" schedule. It's been a fun challenge, but I have other projects that need to move forward as well!

One "fun" project has been an in-depth statistical study of what people have nominated over the years for the Best Related Work Hugo in all of its several forms. The results show some interesting dynamic interactions between categories as people try to find places to nominate works that don't quite fit, or as types of works shift from category to category as they are reorganized and expanded. Having done some initial work on the history of the category--as well as pulling the basic nomination data--I'm now slogging through the process of looking up each nominee and coding it for format (initially, always "book", but more recently rather variable), genre (e.g., biography, reference, criticism, humor), and specific topic. I've been pointed to some previous surveys of the category that tended to focus on the winners (or at most the finalists), but I think I'll be adding something new to the field.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8

Chapter 19 & Afterword

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.

Sylvia lived for another 16 years, wearing mourning black. Initially, she remained in their shared home and continued their business, but after half a decade, she found herself unable to continue working at the same intensity and reduced her sewing to family only.

Eight years after Charity’s death, Sylvia moved in with her widowed brother, who needed medical care. At the age of 83, in 1868, Sylvia died. The family buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.

As with so many aspects of their life, Charity and Sylvia’s wills reflected a marriage-like status, while also reflecting a more egalitarian life than m/f marriage offered. Charity left all her share in their joint property to Sylvia, and Sylvia in turn distributed her legacy equally between both their families, but with a feminist twist: largely leaving it to female relatives who were either unmarried or were poorly supported by their husbands.

The rest of the chapter uses the Drake family finances to illustrate the gendered dynamics of property law and practices at the time.

 

Afterword

This chapter reviews the nature of the evidence for C&S’s lives and the means by which it was preserved and kept in public awareness. Even into the mid 20h century, local tradition preserved memories of the two as a positive example of female devotion. Eventually, the tacit veil of ambiguity began to be removed and local historians began celebrating them as lesbian foremothers , after struggling against the “we can’t really know” crowd. [Note: Which included Lillian Faderman, who included them under confident assertions that early 19th century women could not possibly have imagined participating in anything more than chaste kisses.]

Time period: 
Place: 

Grilling Time

Jun. 26th, 2025 02:23 pm
hrj: (Default)
[personal profile] hrj
I finally tackled cleaning up the smallish patio. ("Patio" by virtue of having a concrete floor and a roof, though otherwise it's just a space behind the garage.) Standard distribution patterns of yard debris mean that winter deposits a layer of dead leaves, and my inattention to the calendar means that I never remember to put a winter dust-cover on the grill and smoker, so they need to get a thorough wash-down, as do the shelves and the patio furniture.

But a couple of work sessions took care of all those factors and earlier this week a fired up the grill just for the heck of it. (Corn on the cob, grilled eggplant from the garden, grilled lamb chops marinated in lemon juice.) It's one of those pieces of equipment where my desire to own it seriously overwhelms the actual amount I use it. (I own it for the fantasy life in which I have friends over regularly.)

Next job is cleaning out the fuel feed of the smoker (which I made the mistake of not emptying at the end of the season). Maybe it's baked enough that the pellets have un-concreted. I previously made a stab at disassembling it to clean out the stuck pellets, but balked at how much disassembly that seemed to require.

What Could Women Do?

Jun. 26th, 2025 03:50 pm
[syndicated profile] alpennia_feed

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Thursday, June 26, 2025 - 08:00

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 of the costs and tradeoffs and consequences.

Historical fiction usually centers around people who are atypical in some fashion--perhaps even extraordinary. And historical romance has conventions that often stretch the bounds of plausibility. (Young, handsome, unmarried dukes with no venereal discase anyone?) So when we're designing our historical sapphists, how obligated are we to make our characters more plausible than the standards straight characters are held to? That's a question that haunts me both as an author and as a reader, and in the end it's a question that each author grapples with on their own.

What are the historic structures that can be bent with little consequence for reader reception? Which are the ones that will start to throw readers out of the story? How many readers? To what degree? Where is the line between historical fiction and historic fantasy--not the historic fantasy of overt elements like magic and dragons, but the historic fantasy that has become unmoored from the details of ordinary existence that should have context and consequence?

Which readers will notice that unmooring, and how much will they care? Will they care if an early 19th century widow acts oblivious to the expectations for her state? Will they care if a woman engages in a profession that would have been hedged about with restrictions and handicaps because of her sex...but encounters none of those? Will they care if a woman carries a noble title that there was no legal way for her to hold in the stated time and place? Will they care if a character has an anachronistic worldview regarding sexuality? And which of these are essential to the story the author wants to tell as opposed to being dismissed as simply not being important enough to reflect?

Actual people in history often surprise us--as when Charity and Sylvia are able to become accepted and cherished by their community as a recognized couple. But it is the details of their path to that acceptance that make their story plausible. Charity's early missteps that showed her which hazards she needed to avoid. Sylvia's diplomatic negotiations to maintain family ties. The particularities of small-town New England life that allowed for possibilities of a specific shape and nature, but would not have allowed for others. (For example, it's unlikely that they would have received the same acceptance if Charity wore male clothing and took up a specifically male-coded profession. Either of those in isolation, perhaps, but probably not in the context of being part of a recognized female couple. For that, they would probably have needed to relocate to a community where she could pass entirely--as some such couples did.)

For myself as a reader, there are some historical infelicities that will move a book from "historical fiction" to "historic fantasy" in a way that the author may not have intended. And if my brain was set for the expectation of history, it may be the difference between whether I enjoy the reading experience. (There have been books where I could only enjoy the story by flipping that switch in my brain.) As an author, I enjoy the challenge of writing stories that both follow history and provide a desired HEA, within the constraints of the times. It's the same way that I enjoy the challenge of writing strict meter poetry--the point isn't simply slavishly following a particular scheme of rhyme and meter, but of doing that and creating a work of beauty and emotional catharsis. And, as always, the goal of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project isn't to say "you must write this specific type of story with this specific level of historic accuracy" but to provide tools to know that whatever choices you make are informed ones.

Major category: 
Full citation: 

Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8

Chapter 17 & 18

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.

The emphasis of the chapter is on the exhausting balance between having a constant stream of sewing workload and the material comfort and stability it provided. In general, unmarried women lived lives of poverty or dependence or both. There were many examples around C&S of what happened to women who either had no skills or were too old or infirm to earn their own room and board. C&S recorded endless long working hours and the ill health it generated, including repetitive stress injuries and eyestrain.

While they never became rich, even by local standards, their standard of living and personal property were equivalent to the household of a more traditional married couple, even through multiple general financial crises of the early 19th century. In general, they avoided debt, and many of their customers paid in kind, helping to buffer the consequences of financial panics, even as some relatives were badly affected.

The stability of their business also meant they were able to employ a succession of young women as assistants and apprentices. They provided not only wages, but training that the women could then take with them to support themselves or even to set up their own shops with additional employees. Sewing itself was only part of the job—the more skilled aspect was patterning and the tailoring of male clothing.

Their particular path to economic independence would fade somewhat in mid-century with the invention of the sewing machine and commercial printed patterns.

 

Chapter 18: The Cure of Her I Love 1839

In 1839, Charity suffered what was likely a heart attack. This came after a lifetime of various acute and chronic ailments that were endemic in the 19th century. Both women experienced chronic headaches, including migraine symptoms, as well as the usual round of infectious diseases. Treatments of the time were largely bleeding and quack medicines, including regular treatments to “purge the system” (i.e., induce vomiting and diarrhea). One medical principle was that a medicine could be considered effective if it produced a violent effect, even if that effect was debilitating. There were also treatments using traditional herbal remedies that likely had a better cost-benefit ratio.

In general, this chapter discusses ailments mentioned in C&S’s correspondence and diaries, with the treatments either used or recommended, as well as discussing the general state of medical practice at the time.

The 1839 attack, though frightening, was survived. Charity lived another 12 years after that to the age of 74. During that period, she would lose siblings and friends, one by one. Another heart attack took her life in 1851.

Time period: 
Place: 
Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 01:36 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios