Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster

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Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster

4.16 of 5 stars 4.16 · rating details · 19 ratings · 6 reviews

Jeannette Howard Foster was to lesbianism in the mid-twentieth century what out authors such as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin were to gay men. She unapologetically blew the lid off Cold War sexual repression in 1956 with her Sex Variant Women in Literature-the first-ever study of homosexual, bisexual, and cross-dressing characters appearing in more than 300 works, from anci

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Hardcover, 448 pages

Published June 10th 2008 by Da Capo Press (first published June 9th 2008)

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Feb 16, 2009 Elevate Difference rated it 4 of 5 stars

The problem with biographies is that they all too often end with the death of a person you’ve come to like and admire. Sex Variant Woman is just such a biography. Jeannette Howard Foster is just such a person. Born in the late nineteenth century, in an era when women had no political or economic rights to speak of and gay people were deemed either irredeemably sinful or pathologically mentally ill, Foster managed to find no shame in being either a woman or a lesbian. For a woman of her time, thi...more The problem with biographies is that they all too often end with the death of a person you’ve come to like and admire. Sex Variant Woman is just such a biography. Jeannette Howard Foster is just such a person. Born in the late nineteenth century, in an era when women had no political or economic rights to speak of and gay people were deemed either irredeemably sinful or pathologically mentally ill, Foster managed to find no shame in being either a woman or a lesbian. For a woman of her time, this was a tremendous accomplishment. It would not be Foster’s only accomplishment.

One of the most influential lesbian scholars of the twentieth century, Foster would spend decades creating her seminal work, Sex Variant Women in Literature, a guide to the lesbian references and characters found in stories told across a variety of cultures and dozens of centuries, the first scholarly work to take lesbianism seriously as a topic. With a commitment bordering on obsession, Foster traveled extensively in her search for material, risking much to find it, and even taking a job or two just for the access they gave her to relevant collections. This search would lead her to become the librarian for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, a job that offered both tremendous intellectual benefits and unexpected professional drawbacks. Throughout her life, Foster would influence and correspond with thousands of lesbians who found themselves reflected in her work and who were inspired by it to broaden the scope of scholarship on the subject of women who love women.

Passet’s biography of this great woman, constructed through a historian’s careful consideration of all possible sources, offers invaluable insights not only into the life and mind of Jeannette Howard Foster, but also into the times she lived in, the influence they had on her, and the influence she had on them. In the intimate details, we find a woman of great humor, tremendous intellectual gifts, and dauntless courage. In the ever-shifting circumstances of her life, we find the constant reminder of all that has been accomplished by Foster and women like her for all women, and lesbians in particular. It is easy to forget, in the days when the religious right looms large, that Foster and her ilk struggled not just against the forces of cultural conservatism, but also against the whole of science and academia to bring the truth to light and to demand the dignity afforded by their human status.

Sex Variant Woman has some minor flaws in that it doesn’t follow the easy chronological order of many biographies and tends to travel back and forth through time as Passet tackles one subject after another in Foster’s life. Leaving one chapter only to enter the next and find Foster years younger than she had been in the last paragraph can be a bit disconcerting, but doesn’t require too much of an adjustment. Overall, it is a book worth reading, perhaps more than once.

Review by Melinda Barton(less)

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Oct 12, 2012 Charlotte rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: inspiring-lives

Looking for queer heroes? Consider the life of subversive librarian Jeannette Howard Foster. If you want daring, there’s plenty in this account of how she came to write Sex Variant Women in Literature, the first book to show that lesbian, bisexual and cross-dressing women could be traced back at least 3,000 years through more than 300 texts. As a self-supporting woman at a time when homosexuals were often fired from their jobs, Foster risked her livelihood by self-publishing this cornerstone of...more Looking for queer heroes? Consider the life of subversive librarian Jeannette Howard Foster. If you want daring, there’s plenty in this account of how she came to write Sex Variant Women in Literature, the first book to show that lesbian, bisexual and cross-dressing women could be traced back at least 3,000 years through more than 300 texts. As a self-supporting woman at a time when homosexuals were often fired from their jobs, Foster risked her livelihood by self-publishing this cornerstone of modern queer studies under her own name in 1956.

If you want drama, consider Foster’s four year stint working with Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research, right after his controversial 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. There, she faced down the sexual advances of both Kinsey and his associate Wardell Pomeroy, though both men were fully aware that she preferred women. She also found a confidant for her disillusionment with the great sexologist in Hazel Tolliver, a scholar of Latin and Greek hired by Kinsey to translate accounts of sex crimes extracted by Catholic confessors, who became Foster’s partner of 30 years.

Notable lesbians rarely get full-scale biographical treatment these days, never mind those who aren’t as famous as Gertrude Stein or Natalie Barney. So Joanne Passet’s incisive new biography, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, is especially welcome — not just because Foster deserves to be better known as a lesbian author, poet and translator, but because her life spanned all but the last decade of the 20th century, and opens a window on lesbians in the Midwest and South.

Foster’s coming out was both wilder and milder than you might guess. Born in 1895 as the oldest daughter of an upper middle class family in Oak Park, Illinois, she came of age when women’s romantic friendships offered a convenient cover for intense same-sex infatuations. Despite her frowning mother, Foster found self-acceptance as a teenager though fiction like Mary Constance DuBois’s “The Lass of the Silver Sword,” about a school girl’s crush on an older female student, and the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis. Her unrequited love affairs with several female professors led to a breakdown after Foster’s first year at the University of Chicago in 1914. But she regained emotional stability with the help of a sympathetic psychoanalyst, and gradually managed to connect with women who could reciprocate her feelings, sexually and emotionally—though she never quite found anyone who could do both in a lasting way.

In Passet’s fascinating depiction, Foster’s career and her 20-year project of uncovering a lesbian literary lineage were shaped not just by her passionate lesbianism, but by the sexism of her profession. Foster surely had a knack for attaching herself to female teachers who could guide her studies and professional advancement as one of the few U.S. women to hold a doctorate in library science. But they couldn’t protect her from academic sexism’s powerful kick, which kept her searching for a better position every five years or so. Yet in the long run, Foster prevailed in her iconoclastic mission to track down the coded lesbian literature that affirmed her deepest feelings. Living and working in 17 states brought her unprecedented access to lesbian literature in public and private collections from Chicago to Boston to Atlanta, which she cataloged in a single volume for the first time.

The book’s poignant final chapters unfold against the flowering of the lesbian and gay movement in the 1970s, when Sex Variant Women in Literature was plucked from obscurity and reprinted by a new generation of women. Several of them, including Naiad Press publisher Barbara Grier and activist and editor Karla Jay, embraced Jeannette personally after discovering her work, going so far as to visit her in a nursing home in rural Arkansas, where Foster lived near Hazel Tolliver and Tolliver’s later companion Dorothy Ross. Coming after the many years Foster had been pushed aside professionally, it’s a satisfying ending to Foster’s life, which richly deserves Passet’s sensitive and scrupulous attention — and ours.
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Nov 30, 2008 Louise Chambers rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: LBGT and women's history

Recommended to Louise by: The Gay and Lesbian Literary Review

Shelves: biography, lbgt, women-studies

Wonderful book! Fascinating, well researched. I had the feeling that the author had interviewed Dr. Jeanette Foster in person because the narrative read almost like a conversation (all the interviews occurred after Foster's death). I had never heard of Dr. Foster, one of the first women to receive a doctorate in Library Science, and a lifelong Lesbian. Foster worked with Kinsey at the Sex Institute, and many other places during her long career. Her Sex Variant Women in Literature is a classic wo...more

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Sep 16, 2008 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-nonfiction, biography, lgbt-books, september-2008, own

Well-known to seventies lesbians seeking visions of themselves in literature, Jeannette Howard Foster's "Sex Variant Women in Literature," was actually the work of a lifetime, originally published in the 1950s. Born in 1895, Jeannette was aware early on of her feelings for other girls, and with the help of psychologist William Sadler, who she consulted in early adulthood, came to accept herself as a lesbian.

Passet details Foster's education, loves (often unrequited), her creative writing, the r...more Well-known to seventies lesbians seeking visions of themselves in literature, Jeannette Howard Foster's "Sex Variant Women in Literature," was actually the work of a lifetime, originally published in the 1950s. Born in 1895, Jeannette was aware early on of her feelings for other girls, and with the help of psychologist William Sadler, who she consulted in early adulthood, came to accept herself as a lesbian.

Passet details Foster's education, loves (often unrequited), her creative writing, the restlessness that took her from college to college, career to career, state to state. Starting with a degree in science, she taught high school science for a time. She returned to school to get a Master's degree in English and Creative Writing and again turned to high school and college teaching. She ultimately got an additional BA in Library Science from Emory University, and then returned to the University of Chicago for a Doctorate in Library Science. Despite earning significantly less money than she had as a college professor, librarianship suited Jeanette, and provided her access to libraries that would be important in building the bibliography that would become "Sex Variant Women in Literature."

Among the places that Jeannette worked was Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research. Kinsey hired her as a librarian, but micromanaged her work, refusing to let her catalog the library using either the Dewey Decimal system or the Library of Congress system. Ultimately fed up, she left this high paying job.

An out and passionate woman who had spent much of her life in urban areas, Jeannette's final years were sadly spent in a tiny Arkansas town where she was forced back into the closet when she went into a nursing home. But her correspondences with many friends and colleagues kept her spirits up, until her former partner, concerned that their secret would be discovered, had all Jeannette's mail delivered to her, and started to withhold much of it.

Highly recommended to academic libraries, public libraries with an LGBT collection, and special LGBT interest archives and libraries.(less)

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Aug 07, 2012 Maggy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, lgbt

An excellently researched and dynamic biography. I loved the meticulous but engaging retelling of Foster's story.

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Jun 22, 2008 Ann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting book about a PhD in Library Science, who wrote one of the first books on lesbians in publishing. Foster helped many women find a way to validae their sexuality and also contributed an important work to scholarship. In fact, her work began as a way for her to validate her own sexuality. Also interesting was that Foster was Kinsey's librarian.

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