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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 321 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 18: Mutually Oblivious

Saturday, August 16, 2025 - 07:00 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 321 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 18: Mutually Oblivious - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/08/16 - listen here)

This is part of a series of episodes examining popular historic romance tropes as they apply to female couples. How do they work differently from the same tropes in heterosexual romances? A trope, as used in this context, refers to some type of stock story element that carries with it certain types of assumptions and expectations. It might be a character type or character pairing, such as the wallflower and the rake. Or it might be an aspect of the relationship dynamic, such as a marriage of convenience. Or it could be a scenario, such as “only one bed.” The way that tropes play out in romance novels rely on certain societal expectations that are embedded in the specific setting. Some tropes that work well in past centuries make no sense in a contemporary setting. And some tropes that are weighted with meaning when a man and woman are involved have entirely different meanings and consequences when the characters are both women.

Today I want to briefly explore the trope “mutually oblivious,” that is, when the characters are both attracted to each other but have no idea that the other person feels the same way, or when the characters have established a non-romantic relationship and belated realize that they’ve Developed Feelings but don’t feel able to communicate that. This trope can interact with all sorts of other tropes that set up how the characters met, or what sort of relationship they’re starting from, but the essential dynamic is that they both assume that their interactions are not romantic, or could not be romantic, and that the other person feels the same way.

As is often the case with these romance tropes, an important underlying social expectation is that when people of opposite sexes interact, a potential romance is always on the table. So for male-female romance stories, the key set-up is to justify why they aren’t thinking in terms of romance, and why they assume the other person is in the same situation.

A good example would be in Jane Austen’s Emma where Emma and Knightley have known each other all their lives, there is a significant age difference that meant they hadn’t interacted as peers, and neither is in a position where marriage is an imperative causing them to evaluate all interactions in terms of romance potential. (And, if I may digress, I always feel that Emma’s connections with women are far more important to her than her connections with men, which has great mutually oblivious energy from a sapphic angle.)

Other fertile contexts for heterosexual obliviousness in historic romance could be class differences, single-minded focus on a cause or problem, or misunderstandings about the other person’s availability.

But when you switch over to a female pairing, the most obvious cause of obliviousness is the lack of a society expectation that closeness will result in a romantic relationship. Or perhaps, I should say a sexual relationship, because as we’ve discussed extensively, in many eras there was an expectation that women would engage in romantic friendships. But it was expected that those friendships would have certain limits. If the women believed in and accepted those societal limits, then you have a scenario where they may be oblivious to their own deeper attraction and assume that a deeper attraction is not possible for the other party.

So you have two versions of sapphic obliviousness, both of which I’ve seen done in historic romance novels. In the first, the heroine is oblivious to the possibility of erotic desire for another woman. She has these feelings, but doesn’t know how to make sense of them because they’re feelings she’s been told she should be feeling for a man. And because she’s confused about her feelings, it doesn’t occur to her that the woman she desires might also have them, or might know more about what to do with them.

This version can make sense in a culture where sapphic desire isn’t represented in popular media. No plays about cross-dressing girls falling in love. No novels involving scandalous aristocrats. And it can make sense in a culture where erotic desire is considered restricted to heterosexuality. But there are a lot of historic cultures where that isn’t the case. Where people are assumed to have pansexual potential (even if only certain versions are approved). Where depictions of eroticism between women are seen on stage, or celebrated in poetry, even if they aren’t considered the done thing in everyday life. Where gossip about women in sapphic relationships is in regular circulation. So the failure mode of this version of obliviousness is to rely on it within a cultural context where we would expect the characters to be aware that desire for another woman is both possible and accessible. For example, in the later 17th century, in England and France when libertinism was all the rage and satirical pamphlets were suggestive of sapphic relationships among the aristocracy, it would be less plausible that a woman could be oblivious to the possibility.

The second version of this trope is when the characters are aware of the possibility of an erotic relationship, but oblivious to each other’s actual interest. It could happen in ways that are closely parallel to the opposite-sex version of the trope. Perhaps the nature of their interactions have been so clearly non-romantic that they both assume that romance isn’t on the table. Perhaps they’ve simply never thought of each other that way and it’s a surprise when erotic feelings arise. In contexts where there’s an awareness that sapphic relationships are frowned on, it’s also possible that each woman believes that admitting to erotic feelings in the context of a romantic friendship would ruin things. That it would be too shocking. In this version, they aren’t oblivious to their own feelings, but rather to those feelings being mutual.

For that matter, there can be a version of “mutually oblivious” where it isn’t the erotic possibilities that surprise the characters, but a change in the nature of a more basic relationship. Perhaps it’s a longing to shift from mere acquaintances to intimate friends that takes them by surprise. Perhaps the barrier is a business relationship that throws them together but has no trappings of a more personal bond. Here we get even closer to a version of the trope that is indifferent to gender.

The secret to a successful “mutually oblivious” trope is to know what sort of knowledge your characters are likely to have about sapphic possibilities, as well as what sorts of intimate friendships are considered normal within their culture. Anyone can simply miss cues about the other person’s feelings, but what are the social barriers to even recognizing there are cues to miss or misread? Find the tipping points between neutral relations and significant ones then push your characters unexpectedly over the edge so they have to deal with that new knowledge. And once they no longer have the excuse of being oblivious, that’s when the fun can begin.

Show Notes The “mutually oblivious” trope in f/f historic romance

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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Links to Heather Online

Website: http://alpennia.com Email: Heather Rose Jones Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop Bluesky: @heatherrosejones Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast

Release Day for Skin-Singer!

Sunday, August 10, 2025 - 09:28

ETA: Books2Read link corrected.

It's the official release day for my new collection: Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven! You can find it at your favorite e-book outlet through the Books2Read universal book link. (The Kindle version isn't linked yet as I only set it up yesterday, but it should be there in a couple days.) I'm still working on adding links where you can buy the print version. Books2Read is being annoying and I haven't had time to sort it out yet, so at the moment only the Amazon link is there. But I know it's available through Barnes & Noble, and through Bookshop.org and probably other sites I haven't checked yet.

I was hoping to have print copies with me at Worldcon, but at this point (based on the tracking data) I think it's unlikely that they'll arrive tomorrow in time. That's on me -- I should have started the whole process earlier. But hey, having a target deadline did finally get the project done!

The skin-singer stories began with my first professional fiction sale. The world, the characters, and the overall story arc "just growed" as I kept asking myself, "And then what?" If you've enjoyed the stories back when they appeared in the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, this is your change to have them all collected together and to enjoy a brand new novelette that finishes the series. If this is your first encounter with the Kaltaoven shape-shifters, I hope you'll enjoy my (relatively) quiet and cozy adventures as my heroines make their way through a sometimes-hostile world and bargain their way to a better place for their people.

If you enjoy Skin-Singer, I hope you'll spread the word on social media and consider leaving reviews in relevant places. This is sort of a "test project" for future self-publishing and I'll be doing a lot of experimentation to find my comfort zone for publicity.

Major category: PromotionPublications: Skin-Singer: Tales of the KaltaovenTags: Skin-Singerpublishing

Cross-Dressing and its Meaning ca 1900

Sunday, August 10, 2025 - 08:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This article feels a bit oddly structured, as if three topics have been picked out of a hat and then a thesis was constructed to connect them. But it adds another angle on the topic of "how things changed" around 1900.

At the moment I'm all caught up on material that I've read and written up for the Project, and have finished all the articles that I had transferred to my iPad for annotation. (Not that I'm anywhere near "caught up" in any absolute sense.) I'm going to take a brief vacation from LHMP blogging for a month or so (the podcast will continue on schedule) for some travel (Worldcon and a retirement-celebration trip with my BFF to New Zealand) and to get some traction on fiction projects. I've taken similar holidays before, but usually not intentionally! Look for the history blogging to return in late September.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #505 Vicinus 1996 Turn of the Century Male Impersonation About LHMP Full citation: 

Vicinus, Martha. 1996. “Turn of the Century Male Impersonation: Rewriting the Romance Plot” in Sexualities in Victorian Britain ed. Andrew Miller and James Adams. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

I can forgive Vicinus for starting off by claiming that much of the historical work on cross-dressing men has focused on the theater and especially on Shakespeare’s works, only because this article was written before much of the work on gender-crossing and trans history has been done. She’s looking at the couple of decades around 1900, a time when understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing one of those periodic revolutions. The instability of how to read “male impersonation” came from both the multiplicity of framings of the act itself and the attitude of the viewer. Although the act of male impersonation was situated within heterosexuality, like all theatrical cross-dressing, it raised the illusion (or threat) of same-sex desire. A “third category” as Marjorie Garber descries it that challenges the gender binary by its existence. But the popularity of impersonation acts points to a more complex response than the creation of a “category crisis.”

Although theorists like Butler focus on the fluidity of gender presentation, theatrical performance allowed for a fairly narrow range of stereotypical roles. Female impersonation betrays misogyny in focusing on the contrasting roles of “old hag” and “sexy beauty.” In contrast, the male impersonator role is almost always a young dandy, often one pretending to greater sexual experience (in contrast with the supposed “innocence” of the performer). The male impersonator retains enough femininity to be attractive to men, while presenting enough masculinity to be attractive to women.

The article looks at the careers and reception of three performers: Vesta Tilley’s music hall act, Sarah Bernhardt’s stage performances, and as a contrast, the fictional work The Heavenly Twins by Sarah Grand. [Note: I confess to some concern about how useful such a limited study can be for generalizations.] The analysis will conclude with a consideration of backlash against male impersonation acts in the context of the suffrage movement and the use of satirical accusations of masculinity, as well as the adoption of certain elements of male impersonation as part of early lesbian culture.

One popular context for Victorian-era male impersonation was comic music hall performances, as part of an ongoing tradition of theatrical cross-dressing that persists to the current day in the pantomime role of the “principal boy” who plays a romantic role opposite a female performer. At various eras, the fashion for the principal boy role might be a young, pre-pubescent woman or a woman with a mature figure that created greater contrast with the role. Part of the appeal of the role was the opportunity to see a female body exposed in form-fitting clothing. There was generally no attempt to create a realistic male impression—audience knowledge was an assumed part of the performance. At the same time, plots revolved around the (superficially heterosexual) romantic adventures (and success) of the performer. In the same era, when taken off stage, a similar cross-gender presentation was viewed as deviance and—increasingly—a symptom of homosexuality.

Vesta Tilley was a music hall performer across the turn of the 20th century, corresponding with the rise of the women’s movement. Performances were often filled with sexual innuendo, aimed at both male and female audience members. The most popular character type was the “swell,” a happy-go-lucky man about the town, interested in fashion and entertainment and spurning the thought of settling down into respectability. Tilley attributed some of her success to keeping a lid on the more risqué elements and appealing to a more respectable female audience (thought this claim in her memoirs may have been edited for posterity). Somewhat complicating the issue of universal sexual attraction of the character, the figure of the beautiful young “swell” was also linked to male homosexual culture. Thus all possible combinations of gender and orientation could be triggered by the male impersonator. This aspect, Vicinus suggests, may have contributed to the tendency of (male) journalists to avoid describing the eroticism of such performances. Women, on the other hand, were Tilley’s most ardent fans, expressing an eroticized adoration in letters and notes. Theatrical masculinity, such as Tilley’s, provided a sartorial model for lesbian culture in contexts and at a time when gender-passing was not a preferred option.

Sarah Bernhardt was one of a number of actresses famed for her “travesti” roles, as well as being famed for unconventional female roles. She played young tragic heroes, such as Hamlet, well into her 50s. She developed roles that avoided romantic scenes, while depicting weak, vacillating heroes who must succeed against the dominating villains through female-coded strategies. (There are detailed descriptions of her roles and the plots of the relevant plays.) Like the music hall stars, Bernhardt attracted adoring female fans who longed to imitate her dramatic style. Unlike Tilley, we have direct documentation that her fan club included prominent Parisian lesbians, such as Natalie Barney. Theatrical masculinity (but not actual gender disguise) became an element of erotic play in lesbian circles, documented with staged photos and performances. Bernhardt was also a cult icon among male homosexuals, some of whom adopted her feminine-tinged style.

In fiction, cross-dressing takes a different form in the 19th century. Rather than the earlier motifs of cross-dressed women provoking the romantic interest of women, in this era they pursue and declare their love for men, creating a male homoerotic illusion rather than a female one. We get a detailed presentation of the plot of The Heavenly Twins, in which—in addition to several plots about doomed women in relationships with dissolute men—we have the proverbial “convenient twin siblings” except that both are the (married) Angelica, who pursues a professional singer in male disguise, visiting him at night and teasing him about his love for Angelica. The disguise is revealed during a boating accident, the singer takes ill and dies, and Angelica returns to her husband. Vicinus examines the various possible erotic combinations implied in the scenario, as well as comparing the descriptions of the cross-dressed performance to music hall fashions. But in contrast to the music hall characters, suggestions of same-sex desire within the plot are confused. Angelica loves the singer, the singer loves her. When the disguised Angelica is approached by a prostitute she responds with horror. The disguised Angelica teases the singer but is treated with paternal affection—though in a form that takes other meanings when considered in light of pedophilic grooming. Vicinus, confusingly, argues that the scenario could be viewed as “groping toward an expression of lesbian love” which I find to be a bit of a stretch. (She’s basing this on the singer being presented as passive and the disguised Angelica as assertive.) The author seems to have had no transgressive intent, and claimed that the purpose of the novel was to highlight the dangers of venereal disease and to promote sexually pure marriage. So who knows?

Vicinus shifts to discussing the male-coded stylings of suffragists, in their tailored tweed suits and sturdy boots. The press treated this as an attempt to usurp male power, mocked the fashion, and accused suffragists of being lesbians, with their dress as evidence. Of course, some suffragists were lesbians, and many lesbians were adopting mannish styles to varying degrees. The conjunction had an influence on popular taste in theater and fiction, as male impersonation was becoming ever more strongly associated with homosexuality, and more “innocent” gender impersonation motifs became less popular.

Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: cross-dressinggender disguise f>mtrouser roles View comments (0)

Are We Back On Marie Antoinette Again?

Saturday, August 9, 2025 - 09:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This seemed like an appropriate pairing for yesterday's article, although I feel like the topic has been covered to death in previous articles I've blogged.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #504 Wagner 2013 Pathological Bodies About LHMP Full citation: 

Wagner, Corinna. 2013. Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-1938169-08-3

One minor thing that annoys me around this topic is that it's functionally impossible to determine whether Marie Antoinette actually did have any sapphic relationships, whether with the women named in the attack-pamphlets or with anyone else. Given the implausible nature of some of the other accusations against her, the simply fact that she was accused of lesbian sex can't be considered to have any inherent truth value. Now, we can glean some historic facts about public attitudes toward sexuality (and powerful women), and about what sorts of idea people had about lesbian relationshps. We can know what images the average person believed in or at least was exposed to. But MA's actual personal life? That is so obscured by the political noise that even if someone turned up a purported diary entry saying, "My darling girl, I can't wait until we can once again make wild passionate love among the gardens of the Petit Trianon," the best bet would be that it was a forgery.

# # #

This book as a whole looks at connections between medical theories and political culture, in 18-19th century Britain and France. Only one chapter has any relevance to the Project and this summary will be confined to that material.

Chapter 1: The Case of Marie Antoinette: Revolutionary Politics and the Biologically Suspect Woman

Like a number of other publications, this focuses on the political propaganda that depicted Marie Antoinette as an extreme sexual deviant along several axes, with a special interest in tying those themes to deviant anatomy.

The process of turning MA into a hated figure via sexual propaganda pre-dated her, having been used against salonnières and other courtiers earlier in the century, but the intensity and virulence was unprecedented. MA was simultaneously supposed to have committed adultery, incest, sodomy, lesbianism, murder, and treason. Underlying this campaign was not only attacks on a specific woman, but the establishment of specific sexual norms and political values. These revolved around the idea that women were inherently unfit for politics and government, and worked toward the elimination of women from public life.

A key aspect of this process was promotion of the idea that biological differences between the sexes required distinct gender roles, and that women’s bodies were inherently pathological. [Note: This is part of the rise of the “separate spheres” philosophy and the general 19th theories about the genders as essentially separate species.] Despite the political conflicts between France and Britain, this French propaganda influenced British attitudes, resulting not only in negative attitudes in Britain towards MA, but shifting debate around women’s participation in public life.

Another aspect of the French discourse was how it interacted with medical research of the time, especially theories about the connection between physiology and sexual deviance. The chapter reviews Laqueur’s theories about a shift from a one-sex to two-sex model of bodies. There’s a long discussion of this in the chapter, including discussion of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings on gender and “nature” fit in with it. But I’m going to skip the details on that.

The pornographic pamphlets slandering MA begin in 1789 with accusations of incest and adultery, suggesting that her children are bastards, and depicting her as sexually voracious. This was ascribed to “uterine furor” with a physiological cause that drove her to seek ever expanding sexual gratification. In some publications, this sex drive is specifically ascribed to her “cunt” rather than to her as a person.

Nymphomania was a newly identified condition in French medical writing and generally ascribed to a physical condition, either a disorder of the nerves of the uterus, or in some cases to an enlarged clitoris that caused masculine sexual aggression in women. Other writers attributed a psychological cause (or at least contribution), due to an impotent or cold husband. (An issue present in the royal marriage.) However this aspect didn’t besmirch Louis’s reputation in the way that MA’s was. Especially in Britain, Louis was depicted positively by royalists.

Early theories of nymphomania identified multiple possible causes in women’s lives, all revolving around the idea of not having an appropriate, approved outlet for marital sex enjoyed in moderation. The overall theory was that women, though “naturally passive” had no sexual self-control and required external restraint in order to avoid sexual excess.

The introduction of accusations of lesbianism against MA occurred in a context where differences between the sexes were shifting from metaphysical causes (“nature”) to biological causes. Thus there was a medicalization of non-normative behaviors and a search for physical evidence of their cause. As a byproduct, depictions of abnormal anatomy (e.g., phallic women) were used to represent deprecated political figures. This process was not restricted to MA, but applied to her close companions as well as other women prominent in Revolutionary politics.

The chapter then moves on to similar symbolic connections between ideas of political “transparency” and a fascination with anatomical ambiguity (“hermaphrodites”) and the idea that women (and only women) presenting with anatomical ambiguity were “deceptive” and untrustworthy. This concern especially focused on the clitoris, how to understand unusually large organs, and how those organs might be used. [Note: As usual, I feel that discussions around this topic could really stand to have a solid grounding in intersex issues. Too often there’s a sense that early modern medical writers are either imagining the existence of clitoral hypertrophy, or are discussing only minor variations in size, as opposed to considering the variety of ways in which intersex anatomy might present.]  If—based on changing understandings of anatomical analogy—the clitoris is understood as a penis analogue, then it can be considered inherently “deceptive” and pathological as it has no biological purpose other than to infringe on male territory. If the clitoris is inherently pathological, then it must necessarily be associated with other pathologies, such as masturbation, lesbianism, and nymphomania. (This is also a review of the motif of large clitorises being associated with foreignness—especially the extreme version where it is attributed to non-European women.)

Medical discourse worked to create an image where, not only were men and women considered biologically separate species, but lesbians could be considered biologically distinct from “normal” women, by means of linking their sexuality with abnormal clitoral anatomy, and specifically with masculinized anatomy. [Note: This, of course, feeds eventually into one strain of sexological theories of lesbianism.]

At the same time as this medicalization of sexuality was developing, a counter-image of lesbianism as social fashion was created, with elaborate fantasies of an “Anandrine Sect” of women devoted to same-sex erotics. This motif implicated MA as well as some other prominent women in France (some of whom do appear to have been in lesbian relationships).

By 1793, the sexual propaganda against MA was so well established that it was used as legal evidence against her.

At this point, the chapter goes off into topics of less interest.

Time period: 18th cPlace: FranceMisc tags: enlarged clitorissexual/romantic desirehermaphroditismsex between womenEvent / person: Marie AntoinetteAnandrine Sect View comments (0)

And then they kept losing it again

Friday, August 8, 2025 - 08:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

In the 16th century, a handful of (male) French anatomists "discovered" the clitoris. And then things get really strange.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #503 Park 1997 The Rediscovery of the Clitoris About LHMP Full citation: 

Park, Katharine. 1997. “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. London: Routledge. 171-93.

This article takes a deep dive into French medical literature of the late 16th and early 17th century discussing the clitoris and developing mythology about it that would linger for centuries. One key element of this discourse was a reliance on textual material, despite many of the authors being surgeons.

We can see this in Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodigies (On monsters and prodigies) 1573 which includes in a discussion of “hermaphrodites” (i.e., intersex people) a discussion of hypertrophy of the clitoris (although he mislabels it as the labia) that can experience erection when stimulated “so that they can be used to play with other women.” In a later edition of the work, he adds material from Leo Africanus’s Historical Description of Africa (1556 for the French translation) about female healers who were said to engage in sex with their female patients, along with an unrelated note that some people in Africa would practice clitoral excision.

Park notes that this is part of a tradition of assigning female sexual deviance onto “foreign” and especially racialized women. Paré experienced push-back on this inclusion from colleagues who felt it was inappropriate in a work aimed at a vernacular audience available to female readers. But more notable is the way Paré’s text jumps from topic to topic implying, but not establishing, a logical connection. From hermaphrodites, he moves to the topic of enlarged labia (clitoris?), then to female same-sex encounters in north Africa where no anatomical anomaly is involved, then jumping to surgical measures for supposedly anomalous anatomy.

This tying together of otherwise unrelated topics (related only in that they involve female anatomy and sex between women) appears in a number of other French medical works in the same era. For example, Jean Riolan in the 1614 Discours sur les hermaphrodits (Discourse on hermaphrodites) argued that most supposed hermaphrodites were simply women with abnormally large clitorises. Riolan then connected this with the Greek tribades and asserted that such women preferred sex with women to men.

While medieval medical texts sometimes speculated on anatomical features that might predispose men to homosexual acts, these ca. 1600 French texts were the first serious post-classical discussion of a similar topic for women. Once introduced into the discourse, an anatomical basis for f/f sex became a prominent topic and displaced medical interest in m/m sex, but very specifically centered around the clitoris.

The function of the clitoris for female sexual pleasure was known to classical Greek authors, but was muddled by ambiguous and imprecise translations as the literature was transmitted via Arabic and Latin authors. [Note: One assumes that this knowledge was well preserved by sexually active women, even if they didn’t have technical terminology for it.]  The “rediscovery” came through a combination of returning to the original Greek texts and direct anatomical research by anatomists. But the medical discourse was strongly colored by anxieties about female sexuality, sex difference, and gender relations that were specific to the French context. We can see this in how the anecdotal stories presented in the texts may superficially be about anatomy, but are infused with lessons about male superiority and authority. It is this complex of topics that Park will focus on, providing an exploration of the key texts and their relationships.

While medical texts of the 16-17th century did not have the same authoritative status as such texts have today, they are a useful context for seeing how professional and popular views interacted and reinforced each other. Physicians were coming to be viewed as subject matter experts regarding legal questions of sex difference. In this context, there was pressure to assign non-normative female sexual practices to an anatomical cause (as opposed to a psychological or moral cause). Park notes that this urge has continued to shape medical theories about lesbianism into the 20th century.

Although early medical ideas about the nature and function of the clitoris fall generally into the “one-sex” model, as discussed by Laqueur, Park notes that the reality is contradictory and complex. [Note: This is a general issue with treating the one-sex/two-sex models as some sort of strict divide. Pretty much all eras treated sex/gender in both ways, depending on context and purpose.]

The article circles back to a detailed review of the contents of various French works and their relationship to classical texts. I think this is going to be easier to summarize using a bullet-point approach.

Paré (Des monstres et prodigies 1573): see above for topics

1556 French translation of Leo Africanus: women in Fez who have sex with women (fricatrices) Jacques Daléchamps description of enlarged clitoris

Daléchamps (Chirugie Françoise 1570): discussed sex between women in a chapter on hermaphrodites

Itself a translation and commentary on Paul of Aegina Surgery (fl. 640) Also referencing: Aetius (Greek, early 6th c), Caelius Aurelianus (5th c.) And Arabic sources: Avicenna, Albucasis Says some think that the tribades of Caelius Aurelianus were “female hermaphrodites who abuse human nature” Cites Paul’s discussion of “nymphotomia” (clitoridectomy) in Egypt, due to the common presence of an enlarged organ that “erects like a male penis and indeed they use it to play with other women, as their husbands would do.” [Note: Daléchamps was confused over whether the clitoris or labia were being discussed, as both were sometimes called “nymphe”.] However Paul makes no reference to f/f sex, and Caelius Aurelianus, though he describes tribades as women who “practice both kinds of sex and desire women more than men” makes no reference to anatomy. The connection is Daléchamps’ addition.

Jean Liébault (Trois lires apparenant aux infirmitez et maladies des femme 1582)

Adopts Daléchamps’ connection between clitoral hypertrophy and f/f sex.

Charles Estienne (La dissection des parties du corps humain Latin 1545, French 1546)

Describes the clitoris as “a little tongue (languette)” but thought it was used in urination.

 Gabriele Falloppia (Italian, Observations anatomicae written 1550, published 1561)

Generally considered to be the first post-classical anatomist to note the erotic purpose of the clitoris.

Realdo Colombo (Italian, De re anatomica 1559)

“[the clitoris] is the principal seat of women’s enjoyment in intercourse…so that if you not only rub it with your penis, but even touch it with your little finger, the pleasure causes their seed to flow forth”

Andreas Vesalius (Italian, Observationum anatomicarum Gabrielis Fallopii examen 1564)

Rejected the idea that all women have a clitoris and claimed it was only found in women hermaphrodites. “It is unreasonable to blame others for incompetence on the basis of some sport of nature you have observed in some woman, and you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part, as if it were an organ, to healthy women.”

 

The key element in resistance to Falloppia’s conclusion was the idea that the clitoris was a direct analogue to the penis, whereas the traditional “one-sex” anatomical theory held that the female analogue to the penis was the uterus/vagina imagined as an “inside out” penis. Thus, if all women had a penis-analogue in addition to a uterus/vagina, then all women could be viewed as “hermaphrodites” bearing both male and female genitals and the category of hermaphrodite (as an intermediate sex category) disappeared, but only comprised some women with larger clitorises than usual.

The second consequence of this understanding was to undermine the idea of the tribade as a distinct category apart from “normal women” who desired sex with women due to having a (large) clitoris. If all women have a clitoris, and can enjoy sexual pleasure apart from being penetrated, then all women are potential tribades (and potential penetrators).

The earlier confusion between labia and clitoris was quickly sorted out.

Séverin Pineau (De integritate et corruptionis virginum notis 1597)

The clitoris is “that part with which imprudent and lustful women, aroused by a more than brutal passion, abuse one another with vigorous rubbings [confricationibus], whenc they are called confricatrices.”

Jean Riolan (Anthropographia 1618)

Described the clitoris as potentially being as large as a goose neck, but from personal observation noted only one “as long and thick as my little finger.” Included a list of authorities condemning f/f sex. (possibly in a different publication) women with enlarged clitorises “in the lascivious can grow and thicken to the size of a finger, [and they] can abuse it to give themselves pleasure, by having sex [habitant] with each other.”

While the earliest French references associating the clitoris with f/f sex had localized it in northern Africa (Fez, Egypt), early 17th century texts begin to cite cases in France, such as Marie/Marin le Marcis who was accused of female sodomy but claimed to have a hidden penis and, after several invasive examinations, was judged to be a “predominantly male hermaphrodite” thus escaping the death penalty, after which Marin lived as a man. Jacques Duval, the examining physician, later engaged in published arguments with Jean Riolan regarding the correct diagnosis of Marcis. In essence, both considered Marcis a hermaphrodite, but disagreed as to gender classification and therefore what sort of sexual partners were approved. [Note: as in many such cases, Marie/Marin de Marcis was quite likely intersex, possibly with male attributes appearing in early adulthood, as they were later described as having a beard.] The theoretical basis of their disagreement relied on two equally incorrect theories of fetal development that different in whether they allowed for actual “intermediate” forms on a spectrum between male and female, or whether all bodies were clearly male or female but might have misleading anatomical deformations. Duval not only considered true intermediate forms to exist, but considered this variation to be natural and part of the diversity of divine creation, arguing for the validity and acceptance of those who didn’t confirm to the sex binary.

Park notes that Duval’s attitude was hardly typical for his age and that “his position was in some respects idiosyncratic and extreme.” But also notes that Duval’s acceptance of a sexual spectrum didn’t extend to approving individual choice of sexual partners, but rather that such people should have legal and medical professionals determine which sex was prevalent for heterosexual purposes.

[Note: Compare to the hints and implications in the early 16th century entry in the Zimmern Chronicle regarding Greta, who was examined to see if she were a “proper woman” because she openly expressed same-sex desire. Although text doesn’t say it explicitly, the examination would either be to see if she were a man in disguise (unlikely, because these were neighbors who had presumably known her all her life) or more likely to see if she had ambiguous anatomy, suggesting “hermaphrodite” status. This would fit in with the earlier model discussed by the French medical writers, where a noticeable clitoris would be understood as an anomaly, and a driver of same-sex desire, rather than being normal female anatomy.]

Early modern French medical writings noted classical authors’ discussion of clitoridectomy in the case of hypertrophy and there are a few references indicating this was sometimes done, or at least requested. (One citation is in 1560 when a woman rejected a request to have the operation at which her husband sought and received an annulment. But the two other cases cited involved a request from an individual or authority to perform the operation but the surgeon refused.) This discussion was not only in the context of unusual anatomy: Riolan (possibly not seriously) suggested that universal removal of the clitoris could be useful for controlling female sexuality.

The image of the penetrative clitoris became entangled in politics via gender stereotypes and the sexualization of political power in the French court when it was dominated by Catherine de’ Medici acting as regent for Henry III. Henry was seen as weak and effeminate and satirized as a passive homosexual. In contrast, Catherine was satirized as masculine and thus connected with images of phallic women.

Increased medical awareness of the clitoris and its function also affected attitudes towards f/f sex. Female homoeroticism that did not involve penetration was typically not classified as a sex act at all, or at least not as “sodomy,” which attracted legal scrutiny. Stimulation by rubbing (which, as Park notes, is the etymological origin of many words for practitioners of f/f sex, such as tribade, fricatrix, confricatrix, etc.) might involve the clitoris as a locus of pleasure, but didn’t invoke it as a penis-analogue. Outside of the image of clitoral hypertrophy, penetration by a woman required an artificial device. Up through the 16th century, anecdotes that make reference to a dildo for f/f sex generally are associated with gender-crossing, where the extreme social and legal reaction doesn’t really distinguish between the gender and sexual aspects of the transgression. A more general use of dildos is referenced by Brantôme. Brantôme, in fact, illustrates the context in which clitoral penetration became a concern, as his extensive discussion of f/f sex doesn’t mention it. But these various writers on dildo-facilitated f/f sex in the 16th century illustrate the context in which anxiety over clitoral penetration was created.

In a context where there is an existing concern about women committing sodomy (i.e., engaging in penetrative sex) using instruments, a newly recognized potential for women—all women—engaging in penetrative sex using their own “normal” anatomy raised new concerns. One reason for dismissing the importance of f/f sex (by authors such as Brantôme and the emerging genre of pornographic works describing f/f sex) is the fiction that only penetrative sex can provide true pleasure. But if women could provide each other with “true pleasure” then not only are women’s interactions a topic of moral and legal concern, but men might be rendered irrelevant. The existence of the clitoris, therefore, threatened the “natural order” of male supremacy. This ties back to Riolin’s comment on clitoridectomy: it wasn’t only about controlling female sexuality but about maintaining the gender status quo.

Time period: 16th c17th cPlace: FranceMisc tags: clitoridectomy (as treatment for sexual deviance)clitorisenlarged clitorishermaphroditismsex between womenpenetrationEvent / person: Ambroise ParéLeo AfricanusDiscours sur les hermaphrodits (Discourse on hermaphrodites) (Jean Riolan)Chirugie Françoise (Jacques Daléchamps)Lives of Gallant Ladies (Pierre de Bourdeille seigneur de Brantôme) View comments (0)

"Homoadventuring" -- I like the sound of that

Thursday, August 7, 2025 - 10:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

There are some historians whose field of interest overlaps the focus of the Project very solidly. Susan Lanser is one of them. I have 13 publications under her name in my database and have now blogged 10 of them. I have another in my files, but two are yet to be tracked down. And I should probably hunt down her full bibliography and see what else I haven't stumbled across yet. In fact, now that I've asked mysefl the question the only authors who come close are Valerie Traub with 12 (7 blogged) and Marthia Vicinus with 11 (7 blogged), though there are a handful in the 8-10 publications range. Sorry, I can't help counting things!

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #502 Lanser 2001b Sapphic Picaresque About LHMP Full citation: 

Lanser, Susan. 2001. “Sapphic Picaresque: Sexual Difference and the Challenges of Homoadventuring” in Textual Practice 15:2 (November 2001): 1-18.

In this article, Lanser examines the intersection of changing conceptions of sexual difference (i.e., the difference between male and female) and changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 18th century, specifically with regard to how female homosexuality plays a part in these processes. Various theories have identified the 18th century as an inflection point, with Laqueur claiming it as the era when “sex as we know it was invented,” various authors including Trumbull identifying it as when male homosexuality became an identifiable identity, and Foucault as the beginning of institutional concern over how people used their sexuality. But Lanser argues that most of this work is disrupted and complicated when women’s sexuality, and especially female homoeroticism, is given adequate consideration. For example, rather than Hitchcock’s assertion that the changing nature of heterosexuality caused a change in f/f relations from “mock heterosexual” to “romantic,” Lanser suggests that changing images of female homosexuality may have been a cause rather than a result of other changes.

For this article, Lanser focuses specifically on England, the 18th century, and the genre of “sapphic picaresque” to illustrate her interrogation of the principles proposed in Michael McKeon’s “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760.” McKeon connects the emergence of “modern patriarchy” in England with changes to ideas about class and sexuality. The change from viewing sex difference as a matter of hierarchy (women are inferior men, i.e., the “one-sex” model) to difference (men and women are a different species, i.e., the “two-sex” model) he argues connected to the emergence of the system of heterosexuality, which then automatically presupposes the existence of homosexuality. The increasing importance of identity based on sex, was accompanied by a shift in class identity from being based on familial inheritance to being based on socioeconomic status. The disruption of class identity is then stabilized by the importance of gender difference. As class becomes more mobile and permeable, gender (in the form of gender performance) becomes more rigidly enforced.

But Lanser points out that women don’t figure very strongly in McKeon’s theory—something particularly evident when considering same-sex topics. McKeon follows Trumbach in asserting that in the 18th century it was assumed that sapphic women also desired men, and therefore did not disrupt patriarchal dynamics. But this position rests on the erroneous conclusion that lesbianism had, historically been ignored as unproblematic. Here Lanser summarizes work on medical theories of sapphic anatomy and legal records of prosecutions. Earlier medical/anatomical theories of sapphic desire relied on the image of “masculinized” bodies—bodies that fell more toward the male side on the sliding scale of “one-sex” anatomy. But establishing the “two-sex” model that denied any overlap between male and female removed the basis for a physiological distinction between sapphic and non-sapphic female bodies. In the 18th century, this shift occurred in parallel with the rise in celebration of female intimate attachments. And in this context, there arose a literary genre that Lanser names “sapphic picaresque” at the same time that male homoerotic culture was manifesting as “molly culture” and generating its own cultural backlash. The space opened for sapphic picaresque texts was brief and was followed by an era of compulsory heterosexuality, manifesting not only in personal relationships but in an entire social structure of women positioned in complementary roles to men. Within sapphic relationships, this pressure returned to positioning female same-sex desire as “masculine”—not in terms of biology this time, but in terms of behavioral attributes.

The “sapphic picaresque” genre as defined by Lanser involves a same-sex connection within a non-domestic context, especially involving movement. It tends to have an episodic structure and presents the illusion of a realistic “true narrative.” Drawing from the traditional picaresque genre, the protagonist often fits the “loveable rogue” image—morally ambiguous and unconventional. The protagonists challenge not only the patriarchal status quo but interplay between class and sexuality.

Examples of the proposed genre include:

Daniel Defoe “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” 1706 Delarivier Manley New Atalantis 1709 Giles Jacob Tractus de Hermaphroditus: Or, A Treatise of Hermaphrodites 1718 Eliza Haywood The British Recluse 1722 Jane Barker “The Unaccountable Wife” (in Patch-work Screen for the Ladies) 1723 Anonymous “Epistle from Signora F—a to a Lady” 1727 Giovanni Bianchi Breve Storia della Vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana 1744 Charlotte Charke Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke 1755 Anonymous Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu 1744

The common features include a f/f relationship that is both primary and chosen, though not necessarily sexual, presented as a viable alternate to marriage, not simply as “second-best.” If the story involves cross-dressing, it does not exist to provide plausible deniability for the same-sex relationship (in contrast to works like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Lyly’s Gallathea, or Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure). The same-sex desire is not negated or replaced by heterosexuality. And the plot involves movement and adventure. (This contrasts with sapphic poetry of the same era, which has a more static setting.) Movement through the world enables the protagonists to interact with additional women, not just each other, sometimes as women and sometimes in male disguise—at which they are always successful. These romantic encounters undermine the idea of fixed gender identities—indeed, undermining the nascent “separate species” theory of sexual difference.

This brief literary fashion points out that the course of social attitudes towards sapphic themes is erratic and contradictory. Historians have identified periods of hostility both before and after the era of the “sapphic picaresque,” and it was coincident with other genres of literature that showed similar hostility, such as the rise of anti-masturbation tracts. This makes the admiring and even celebratory nature of sapphic picaresque works even more striking.

Lanser argues that one thing enabling this acceptance is the presentation of the texts as personal narratives, framing their characters as central and even heroic, either using first person narration or a sympathetic observer. The existing theme of the morally ambiguous “picaro” figure gives the characters license to step outside social norms. But in addition, this admiration is allowed by being cagy about the erotic nature of the women’s relationship. It might be alluded to, or explicitly danced around, or denied in an over-the-top “wink-wink” manner, or simply identified as “unaccountable.” The cause of their preference for women’s company is vague, though their aversion to heterosexual marriage may be made explicit. The narratives leave large open spaces for speculation and imagination.

At the same time, the old one-sex model was flailing, in part from arguments that if there is no qualitative difference between men and women, then attraction between men and women is not solidly linked to difference, but could be experienced between similar types. And if women—ordinary women—can be attracted to other women, if they can have the experiences, feelings, and desires depicted in the picaresque texts, then perhaps men aren’t necessary to them. This represents a clear danger to patriarchal structures. A new concept of sexual difference was necessary to reinforce heterosexuality as normal and inevitable, with new arguments against the viability of same-sex attraction. In mid-century, we begin to see texts that echo the picaresque genre while redirecting the resolution, such as Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband. Mary Hamilton could have been a picaresque heroine, but fails and is punished for the attempt. Furthermore, she is framed as having inevitably failed due to the inability of a woman to successfully carry out a gender-crossing adventure. The English translation of Bianchi’s life of Catherine Vizzani adds an epilogue criticizing and condemning her, where the Italian original had been fairly neutral (if bewildered). Novels turn to emphasizing the insufficiency of f/f desire (Fanny Hill) or its menacing nature (Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison) and poetic jabs at sapphic desire label it unnatural (Satan’s Harvest Home, The Sapho-an). These works may not be responding directly to the sapphic picaresque, but clearly represent a shift in the zeitgeist. Even within conduct literature, there come reminders that women’s friendships must give way to marital fidelity.

Among the forces contributing to the “separate spheres” model of sexual difference are—ironically—Enlightenment ideals of equality. If women, as human beings, have a claim to equal social and political rights with men, just as they have an equal potential for sexually desiring women, then some new argument must be made in order to stabilize patriarchal hierarchies. This new argument boils down to “separate but equal”—yes, women are equal to men, but only in fulfilling their entirely separate functions. Functions that are private, domestic, and centered around being useful and pleasing to men.

But which are the chickens and which are the eggs in this complex of forces and effects? Lanser speculates that discourse around sapphism rises in response to specific types of changes in gender relations, especially women’s social, cultural, and economic mobility. And given that this mobility is associated with national power, in the 18th century it manifests most in the great international powers of England, France, and the Netherlands. (Although Lanser does acknowledge that this may be an illusion due to differences in the amount and depth of historic research into sexuality history.) In this era, women’s social mobility is tied to sexuality: upward mobility through marriage, downward mobility through sexual transgression. And sexual propriety becomes a major signifier of gentry class identity. (See Lanser 1998 https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/6813) Sapphic discourse becomes a means of managing one aspect of female propriety by defining the performative boundaries of acceptable same-sex affective behaviors. But those very boundaries then become a means for manipulating the acceptability of same-sex relationships, regardless of their underlying nature.

But sapphic picaresque narratives are a background of instability for these principles. They destabilize official principles of sexual desire. They deny that gender can be fixed and known. And they suggest that even biological sex may be irrelevant. They offer alternate modes of economic and social mobility (due to escaping the restrictions of gender), and if mobility and disguise can successfully transcend gender boundaries, they can clearly transcend boundaries of birth and status. They make clear the economic basis for romantic freedom, placing significant emphasis on the financial arrangements necessary for female couples to be successful, at the same time pointing out how heterosexual marriage relies on female economic dependency for its success.

Time period: 18th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: emotional /romantic bonds between womenEvent / person: The New Atalantis (Mary Delarivier Manley)Tractatus de Hermaphroditus or a Treatise of Hermaphrodites (Giles Jacob)The British Recluse (Eliza Haywood)The Unaccountable Wife (Jane Barker)An Epistle from SIgnora F-a to a LadyThe True History and Adventures of Catharine Vizzani / Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani (Giovanni Battista Bianchi)Charlotte CharkeThe Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu (Erskine)Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare)Gallathea (John Lyly)The Convent of Pleasure (Margaret Cavendish)The Female Husband (Henry Fielding)Pamela (Samuel Richardson)The History of Sir Charles Grandison (Samuel Richardson)Satan’s Harvest HomeThe Sappho-an View comments (0)

Class and Sexuality in Competition

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 - 15:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

This article was cross-referenced in another of Susan Lanser's articles I blogged recently, so I took that as a cue to move it up in the queue. I'll follow it with yet another Lanser take on the long 18th century.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #501 Lanser 1998 Befriending the Body About LHMP Full citation: 

Lanser, Susan. 1998. “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts.” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (winter 1998-99): 179-98.

This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.

Some women, such as Butler & Ponsonby, could live together as a married couple, even using the language of marriage and sharing a bed, while being celebrated by society, while others such as sculptor Anne Damer and actress Mademoiselle de Raucourt were openly derided as lesbians. It wasn’t simply a matter of individual critics having a particular attitude, for Hester Thrale, for example, openly reviled “sapphists” both in England and France, while retaining friendships with other women in homoerotic relationships.  In the same era that Scottish courts proclaimed it unthinkable that Pirie & Woods engaged in a sexual relationship, Anne Lister carried on courtships and affairs with a wide circle of women in Yorkshire.

The underlying question, Lanser argues, is whose interests it served to praise some female relationships while disparaging others. To answer this question, she traces the dynamics of female friendship in England from the 17th century through the early 19th following two themes: how female friendships served women struggling for “autonomy and authority” while simultaneously acted as a tool of the establishment of gentry sensibilities as a moral center. A reorganization of social hierarchies used perceptions of female intimacy as a way of drawing boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable in a context where both status and sexuality were being redefined.

The official philosophical literature of friendship up through the 16th century focused entirely on men, rejecting both the viability of male-female friendship and the existence of female-female friendship. Even as authors like Katherine Philips were creating a literature of female friendship in the 17th century, male authors were only grudgingly admitting that a few women might have the qualities to be true friends. But by the mid-17th century, women across Europe were creating and publicly performing intimate friendships as an inherent part of their social networks.

Regardless of gender, in the 17th century friendships were in the process of not only supplementing but supplanting kinship as the primary social “glue”. Several things were happening in parallel: the rise in power of the bourgeoisie, an emphasis on merit, and a de-emphasis on inherited hierarchies of power. Among the elite, male friendships were a public as well as a private act. For women, this destabilization of previous social hierarchies raised the possibility of destabilizing gender hierarchies as well. And women were getting access to social contexts where non-familial bonds could be established, such as boarding schools, salons, and an increasing urban migration. Female-dominated courts in England and Sweden, female-dominated salons in France (and later England), and circles of educated, literary women were a breeding ground for female friendships that could become of central importance in their lives. The importance of such context is clear from the male satire they attracted.

Adopting the models and rhetoric of male friendships ran into the problem of women’s different material and legal status. Male friends could promise to have “one purse” but most women had only tenuous control over their own purses, much less the power to share them. To counter men’s arguments that women weren’t suited to be true friends, women raised the point that marriage was often so oppressive that female friendship was obviously superior to that state. Even if marriage could not be avoided, women’s friendships were a bulwark against its hazards. And a few women openly proposed with varying degrees of seriousness that women would be better off rejecting men entirely.

Herein lay the danger of women’s friendships to the status quo. Men could prioritize their friendships without upending existing social hierarchies, but if women prioritized their female friendships, the world was turned upside down. This was amplified when the physicality of friendship was considered. Emotional bonds were expected to be reflected in physical affection—kisses and embraces that might border on the sensual but were expected and acceptable behavior. For men, focusing their physical affection on friends had little impact on their marriages, but for women to turn to other women for their physical desires risked making men obsolete.

And yet, as Lanser catalogs in extensive detail, the 18th century saw a flood of open, public expressions of embodied female friendship, expressed in terms of passion, caresses, kisses, the treasuring of physical tokens of love, and a celebration of the physical presence of the friend. So how did some women embedded in this culture escape the accusation of sapphism, while others didn’t escape it? There is plenty of evidence that people (in general, though maybe not universally) were aware of the potential for sex between women, especially in medical and legal contexts, and certain versions of it were persecuted and satirized. [Note: I feel like Lanser misses an angle by not noting that legal prosecution was almost always in the context of gender-crossing, not simply same-sex relations.] So if so many of these intimate female friendships seem obviously “lesbian” to us today, how were they viewed by their contemporaries? [Note: Here Lanser notes that she does not require “proof of sex” to consider a historic relationship sapphic.] The answer, she asserts is public relations. “Female intimacies were perceived as chaste or sapphic according to the conventions through which they could be read.” And the women involved in them could actively manipulate these conventions to their benefit.

In the long 18th century, Lanser asserts, class was the key factor in how potentially sapphic relationships were judged, but class itself was decidedly unstable in this era, meaning that all such relations and judgments were in flux. The “Ladies of Llangollen” are a case in point. The label “lady” was no longer a fixed category of inherited rank, but could be “earned” through behavior and accomplishment. A new class consciousness was emerging from the “gentry” who distinguished themselves not only from the unlettered and uncultured working classes, but also from an aristocracy increasingly framed as degenerate, debauched, and decadent. Membership in the gentry could be derived from birth, but that was not necessarily guaranteed, and it could be acquired in other ways as long as one achieved the symbolic necessities.

Female friendship came to function as one of those symbolic necessities. Not only did the ability to create and maintain female friendships serve as a marker of being “well-connected and well-bred” but it served as a context in which the class status of potential friends could be evaluated and either judged sufficient or found wanting. This was established even in 17th century female friendship discourse in aristocratic circles, and served the emerging gentry class by creating a definition of worthiness that aligned with class sensibilities. Thus “female friendship…served contradictory feminist and patriarchal purposes” establishing gender-based bonds while drawing class-based boundaries.

One attribute of “virtuous female intimacy” was a clear distinction from the images of aberrant sexuality associated with “tribades” and inheriting suspicions of abnormal anatomy. Even as older anatomy-based theories of lesbianism were increasingly displaced and segregated to “foreign” (and especially, non-Christian) women, more local models of lesbianism were treated as a moral failing, associated with the both the lower classes and with decadent aristocrats. Advice literature warned of servants “corrupting” well-born children by “teaching” them sexual practices. 18th century literature introduces the motif of the predatory working-class woman who sexually preys on or threatens to corrupt the virtuous heroine. Certain religious sects were also suspect, especially Methodists and Catholics. (Remember this is from an English point of view.) Travel literature locates lesbian practices in the Ottoman Empire. Even in the Pirie-Woods legal case, the blame for imagining the possibility of f/f sex is assigned to a biracial Anglo-Indian girl.

Within this context, the promotion of (chaste) female friendship as restricted to the gentry is not simply a byproduct of the context in which it emerged, but an ongoing deliberate strategy to maintain it as a class marker. In Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, only the “ladies” who establish the hall are allowed to be “friends” while the unfortunate and working class women who are benefitted by their charity are depicted as incapable of establishing such friendships. (While primary evidence taken from working women’s lives clearly contradicts this attitude.) By the 1740s, Lanser observes, the program of using female friendship as a marker and mechanism for gentry class membership was practiced by both men and women. Rather than attacking women’s friendships, patriarchal forces took on the task of helping write the rules for how they must be enacted, shaping those rules to benefit the hetero-patriarchy. Women’s friendships could be framed as bleeding off frustration and unhappiness with the lot of woman, without challenging the causes of that situation.

Within this context, Lanser identifies three strategies used to resolve the instability of the class-sexuality intersection: re-centering sapphic relationships within a heterosexual context; deliberate “compensatory conservatism” practiced by women at risk of scrutiny; and idealization of such relationships in a way that removed them from everyday life.

Narratives of the 18th century embedded potentially sapphic relationships within heterosexual plots, as in Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse when two women, wronged by the same man, share their stories and join their lives together. Other similar stories don’t even allow them women a resolution together, but allow their friendship to mitigate what is otherwise a tragic story. In other cases, a passionate declaration of love unto death between the women is yet set aside for a marriage plot. Such devices “domesticated” intimate female friendships as a supplement to (not a displacement of) heterosexual relations, directly parallel to the way that Cleland’s Fanny Hill offers up pornographic sapphic encounters as long as the protagonist rejects the idea that they could be as satisfying as heterosexuality. The heterosexual resolution is required in order to acknowledge, then defuse, the danger of same-sex intimacy. This diversion practice is reflected in the real-life memoirs of women lamenting that marriage resulted in the death of friendship as the friend’s attention and energy was claimed and redirected by a husband.

As this heterosexual redirection became an established motif, women who continued to resist and avoid marriage for whatever reason became more visibly “odd,” especially if co-habiting with a female friend. Here Lanser invokes the concept of “compensatory conservatism”—the idea that sapphic women (or in some cases, simply those at risk of being thought sapphic) deliberately invoked the symbols of respectability and carefully policed their public performance to deflect suspicion. Both Butler & Ponsonby and Anne Lister are excellent examples as some of the traditional signs of class status were precarious (finances for Butler & Ponsonby, ancestry for Lister) and they left copious documentation of how they managed social interactions that can be read for strategies. Butler & Ponsonby were strict about controlling social access to them, rejecting overtures from people they considered would not add to their consequence (a frequent occurrence as they were something of a “tourist destination”). Lister’s private diaries document her thoughts on the acceptability of various women as potential partners, rejecting some as “vulgar.” We also have documentation that all of them had their respectable status challenged on occasion—the Ladies when depicted in a newspaper article as something of a butch-femme couple, and Lister in regular encounters with working class men and women who commented on her “mannish” tailoring and affect. It is unlikely to be coincidental that both households expressed politically conservative views and worked to maintain a conceptual divide from the “lower classes” or even simply from those who they felt were on equally shaky social ground. In some cases, sapphically suspect women dissociated themselves not only from politically liberal principles but from feminist principles, presenting themselves as uniquely distinct from the run of femininity.

The argument that this conservative turn is specifically associated with suspect status is bolstered by comparing the behavior and writings of women in more ordinary female friendships, who are more likely to be open to social mobility and inclusiveness. It’s also bolstered by examples of how association with suspected sapphists explicitly threatens the status of their associates, as in the “sapphic epistle” threatening those who associated with Anne Damer. Avoidance behavior not only affects personal relationships but the content of women’s writing about female friendship. Lanser notes that after about 1760, the depiction of physical affection within women’s friendships is more prevalent from male authors and married female authors, but less present in the writings of unmarried women, whereas the latter are more likely to focus on the female gaze, with women admiring each other’s beauty but no longer enacting that admiration in physical terms.

The third strategy, used by writers in all categories, was to defuse the danger implied by female friendships by framing them in idealized terms: as sisterhood, as set within an imagined pastoral landscape, or as being spiritual rather than bodily (including the emerging theme of union in death rather than in life). Pastoral imagery was a prominent motif from the 17th century and continues not only in the use of classical nicknames, but in fantasizing about setting up household in a rural retreat (something the Ladies of Llangollen achieved in reality). Increasingly as the 18th century came to a close, relations framed in terms of a marriage-like arrangement were seen as suspect, to be replaced by kinship metaphors. Relationships that were performed or perceived as competing with heterosexual marriage were more likely to attract criticism, as in the case of Anne Lister’s overtly marriage-like partnership with Ann Walker. Even the much lesser degree of criticism directed at Ponsonby & Butler focused on the marriage-like symbolism of their partnership. A century earlier Queen Anne’s simultaneously intimate and political relationships with her favorites were a focus of sapphic satires. Much of the animosity against Queen Marie Antoinette took the form of criticizing relationships that were perceived as displacing the king from both her bed and government. Indeed, the increased anxiety and animosity toward sapphism (real or alleged) at the end of the 18th century was related to concerns about the influence of intimate friendships on public power. In the 1790s we see many different signs of suspicion and concern about relationships that seem to have been protected by class status previously. This is when the suggestive newspaper article about Ponsonby & Butler appears, when Hester Thrale turns her poison pen on “ladies [who] live too much together” and when St.-Méry criticizes American women for seeking pleasures with their own sex, and also when there is a wave of lesbian prosecutions in the Dutch Republic. [Note: See Van der Meer 1991 { https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5384}] It is also the era when Mary Wollstonecraft, who had experienced female romance and featured it in her fiction, is found to be criticizing too great intimacies of that type.

Lanser notes that issues of class continued to impact the images of, and attitudes to, lesbians into the 20th century with working-class butch-femme culture considering itself distinct from the experiences of middle and upper class lesbians, as exemplified by Parisian salon culture of the 1920s.

 

Time period: 17th c18th c19th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: emotional /romantic bonds between womenfemale comrades/friendsromantic friendshipphysical affection (general)class issuesEvent / person: Eleanor Butler & Sarah Ponsonby (The Ladies of Llangollen)Anne Conway DamerFrançoise-Marie-Antoinette-Joseph Saucerotte (Mademoiselle de Raucourt)Jane Pirie & Marianne WoodsKatherine PhilipsMillennium Hall (Sarah Scott)The British Recluse (Eliza Haywood)Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (John Cleland)Diaries (Anne Lister)Marie AntoinetteMary Wollstonecraft View comments (0)

Celebrating LHMP Entry #500

Monday, August 4, 2025 - 08:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

Happy Big Round Number to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project!

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #500 Donoghue 2007 Doing Lesbian History, Then and Now About LHMP Full citation: 

Donoghue, Emma. 2007. “Doing Lesbian History, Then and Now” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 33, No. 1, Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality in Global Perspective: 15-22

Being a firm believer in celebrating Arbitrary Round Numbers, I determined to find something appropriate to schedule for publication #500. I'd come up with several candidates when perusing my database of publications, but when I read this article I knew I'd found my choice. As I note below, Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women was a major inspiration for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project (along with Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men). Although I didn't blog Passions Between Women itself until publication #100 (another case of scheduling for an Arbitrary Round Number), it was a constant presence in my mind in the decades between when I first encountered the book and when I published the first Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog back in 2014-06-09. So just as Donoghue takes this moment to reflect on where she started and where she was then (when the article was published), it makes a good publication to mark where we started and how far we've come.

Periodically I like to do a "check-in" on how I'm progressing through the blogging of publications I'd identified as potentially relevant. Currently, my database has exactly 1200 publication records. (That round number wasn't planned--I only realized it when I went to check for this write-up.) Of those, as noted, I've blogged 500. Another 107 have been flagged as not relevant after all, on consideration. (I keep them in the database because if I once thought they might be relevant, I don't want to duplicate the effort if I run into them again in someone's bibliography.) So that means I've reviewed almost exactly half of the citations I've logged. I've occasionally taken note of similar stats, so here's a comparison:

In September 2016, I had 400 entries of which I'd blogged 125 (31%). In April 2021, I had 882 entries, with 330 blogged and 35 marked N/A (41%) In December 2022, I had 974 entries, with 385 blogged and 40 N/A (44%)

I won't do a statistical analysis projecting when I can expect to be entirely caught up, because the amount of time I have to devote to the Project has been variable. I'll also reach a point when I have a substantial residue of references that someone else has cited that I don't have access to, however interesting they might be. And as I've noted on previous occasions, there are some subjects where I'm reaching diminishing returns in terms new information from reviewing additional sources. (I strongly suspect that there's nothing more to learn about Sappho, unless someone turns up new primary source material.)

I constantly regret how skewed the Project has been toward the subjects most accessible through English-language research (and subjects of interest to those academics). When it comes to writing The Book, I'll have a focused section on the peri-Mediterranean Islamicate world and then maybe brief pointers toward information on the rest of the non-Western world, but the book's focus will necessarily be narrow (though in a way that corresponds to levels of interest in historical fiction).

I never aspired to doing new original research, simply to gather, collate, summarize, and synthesize existing reserach toward a specific and highly subjective purpose: the writing of historical fiction. So it seems fitting that the "patron saint" of my Project, if you will, is both a historian and a historical novelist.

# # #

Emma Donoghue takes the occasion of having been an invited speaker at a history conference to reflect on her own life, motivations, and accomplishments in the field of sexuality history. As such, it doesn’t present any new information but is a fun roadmap of a career (that is still in process).

[Note: Some day I would love to have Donoghue on the podcast. I once queried her agent on the occasion of a book release but got no response. I probably know someone who could put me in contact but I haven’t had the nerve to make it a serious project yet. Maybe for the 10th anniversary of the podcast. That gives me two years to work up to it.]

Donoghue’s inspiration was the initial publication of material from Anne Lister’s diaries that contradicted the accepted wisdom that there was no context for early 19th century women constructing a self-aware identity as a woman who was “too fond of women.” There was, for all practical purposes, no field of lesbian history at that time and the history of homosexuality was dominated by men.

Donoghue notes that she didn’t pursue a topic in lesbian history for her PhD, not having any confidence that she could find administrative support for it. But at the same time, she conceived of the idea of assembling a sourcebook of material on lesbian topics in Britain between 1668 and 1801. [Note: regular readers will be unsurprised that the publication of Passions Between Women in the early 1990s was a major force in the inspiration for my own project.] With no apparatus for finding relevant material directly, she cast a wide net, pursuing what might seem to be tangential topics. Rather than finding a desert, she was surprised at the volume of material that came to light, especially in the fields of medicine and journalism. She records her sense of betrayal at finding the Oxford English Dictionary’s unreliability on the usage dates for “lesbian.” The wealth of different terms for women who loved women in the long 18th century challenged the claim that such women had no context for understanding themselves as belonging to a “type” of person.

The resulting book was written in two years (during a break from her PhD), having become a personal passion project related very much to Donoghue’s own queer identity. While groundbreaking, she acknowledges that the book is very much a product of its time, existing in reaction to what came before (just as Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men was of its time a decade earlier and reacting to a different set of predecessors). In reacting against what she perceived as an overly uniform lesbian feminist culture of the 1990s, Donoghue emphasized variety, eccentricity, a lesbian-bisexual continuum, and aspects of sexuality (like pornography) that were considered taboo among feminist circles of the time. She also rejected the idea of conflating male and female homosexual history, seeing a need to view lesbian history from a woman-centered point of view. One aspect of the book that is very much “of its time” is the treatment of female masculinity, which was not yet informed by the work done and questions raised since then by transgender studies.

Donoghue discusses the tension between presentism [i.e., viewing the past in terms of how it relates to the present] and an excessive over-emphasis on the avoidance of anachronism only when it touches on marginalized topics, whose study is so often driven by personal connections to the material.

She concludes the article by discussing how her study of history has intertwined with her work as a historical novelist (with a side comment on how many of her historical studies have ended up involving women named Anne).

Time period: 18th cPlace: England View comments (0)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 320 - On the Shelf for August 2025

Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 17:32 lhmpodcast.jpg

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 320 - On the Shelf for August 2025 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/08/03 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2025.

I have a busy month or so coming up. In about a week I’ll be heading off to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle. Then a couple weeks after that, I’m headed off to New Zealand for my official, if belated, retirement celebration trip.

I have a couple of things to celebrate this year at Worldcon. The most exciting is my Hugo Award nomination in the category of Best Related Work. I’m just finishing sewing my outfit for the awards ceremony and looking forward to being able to fasten the little nominee rocket pin on the lapel.

But the second exiting thing is that after several years of promising myself that I’d get my act together and publish my story collection in time for release at Worldcon, I actually did it this year! The collection is Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven and includes all my stories from the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, plus a brand new novelette that finishes off the story arc. Official publication date is August 10 and I’ll have print copies with me at Worldcon. Skin-Singer is not historic fiction, except to the extent that the secondary world it’s set in is very, very roughly inspired by Iron Age Europe, but it does have a low-key sapphic romance that develops across the series. I’ve put a buy link in the show notes, though I’m still working on setting up with a couple of distributors.

Also on the excitement front, the Bella Books collection Whispers in the Stacks, which includes my Restoration-era short story “Bound in Bitterness” was awarded the Golden Crown Literary Society award for best fiction anthology or collection. So all in all, exciting times.

It's the time of year when I need to decide about whether to continue the podcast fiction series for another year. This year is the first time when finances are a consideration, what with the whole retirement thing. Although the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has a Patreon, it doesn’t raise anywhere near enough to cover story royalties, much less narrators’ fees. I’ve never wanted to tie the fiction series directly to fundraising, but I don’t feel able to continue funding it out-of-pocket indefinitely. But here’s the deal. I like round numbers, so I’ll commit to running the fiction series for another two years, to bring it to an even ten. But unless something changes drastically on the funding support, that will be it. I’ll update the Call for Submissions soon, but it will be functionally identical to last year, in case you want to get started.

Publications on the Blog

When blogging publications for the Project, I didn’t quite match last month’s count of 15 separate items, but I did manage 11 this month. After posting the 5 that I currently have queued up, I’m going to take a bit of a break, partly due to the upcoming travel, and partly because I need to spend time on some other writing projects.

This month, aside from a couple of articles on random topics—Ula Lukszo Klein’s “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers,” Tess Wingard’s “The Trans Middle Ages,” and Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History—I fell into a pattern of pairs of related articles. I finished up the research for the Sexology podcast with Allida Black’s “Perverting the Diagnosis: The Lesbian and the Scientific Basis of Stigma” and George Chauncey’s “From Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.” Then a pair on linguistics: Paula Blank’s “The Proverbial ‘Lesbian’: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice” and an early discussion of a 10th century use of “lesbian” in a homosexual sense, Albio Cesare Cassio’s “Post-Classical Λεσβίας.” Next a pair of articles on 18th century author Eliza Haywood by Catherine Ingrassia: “Fashioning Female Authorship in Eliza Haywood’s ‘The Tea-Table’” and “’Queering’ Eliza Haywood.” And finishing with two items from a special journal volume on the Bluestockings: Nicole Pohl’s “A Bluestocking Historiography” and Susan Lanser’s “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire.”

Book Shopping!

No new book shopping for the Project, though I did pick up a fascinating history of women’s detachable pockets.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

Looking at the new fiction spreadsheet, I have startlingly few books to announce this month. These things come in waves: with some months very full and others not, but I worry that the books are out there and I’m just not finding them through my usual avenues. In particular, I’d expect more indie books than I’m currently seeing, and since I mostly have to rely on Amazon keyword searches for those, I’m concerned that the algorithms may be failing me. Once again, I’ll remind people that dropping me a note about your upcoming book, or pointing me to book you’ve heard about  can mean the difference in whether they get included or not.

It appears—maybe—that the flood of cookie-cutter series books that have hallmarks of AI generation has slowed, at least for historicals. A listener helpfully pointed out a couple titles that had made it through my filtering process, which is a hazard of trying not to be overly paranoid. I won’t intentionally promote a book generated using large language models, but we know that there’s no perfect way of detecting it.

So here are the 5 new titles I found since last month.

June gives us The Painter's Palette (The Legacy Lane Series #2) by Gina Everleigh. The series is all queer focused, but this is the only f/f title. The stories have cross-time plots, with the current inhabitants of Legacy Lane turning up evidence of older lives.

When restoration artist Jax Miller returns to his hometown to settle his late aunt’s estate, he expects a quick trip and a quiet goodbye. Instead, he uncovers a hidden mural behind the town hall’s walls—vivid portraits of forbidden love, erased by time and prejudice. As Jax peels away the layers, he stumbles upon something far more personal: a link to his own fractured family history.

With the help of Emma Winters, the town’s historical society director, Jax begins to unravel the mural’s story—and his own. A surprise email from the mural’s mysterious artist, long-lost family secrets, and letters from the 1920s ignite a search for truth that challenges everything Jax thought he knew.

As Jax uncovers the courage of those who came before him, he must decide whether to step into the light of his legacy—or leave it hidden forever.

There’s also one July book that turned up in this month’s search: The Needfire by M.K. Hardy from Solaris Books. I’m not entirely certain of the date of the setting, though the cover art suggests maybe late Victorian, which fits with the gothic mood.

You are afraid of the border places. You are afraid of the fork in the road.

Fleeing her mistakes in Glasgow for a marriage of convenience, Norah Mackenzie’s new home on an estate far in the north of Scotland is a chance for freedom, a fresh start. But in the dim, draughty corridors of Corrain House, something is very wrong. Despite their warm correspondence, her distant, melancholic husband does not seem to know her. She is plagued by ghost ships on the sea, spectres at the corner of her eye, by winding, grasping roots. Her only possible companion, the housekeeper Agnes Gunn, is by turns unnerving and alluring, and harbours uncanny secrets of her own.

As the foundations crumble beneath her feet, Norah must uncover the truth about Corrain House, her husband, Agnes, and herself, if she is to find the freedom she has been chasing.

August gives us three titles. The Worst Spy in London (The Luckiest With Love #2) by Anne Knight is another series where the previous book is not sapphic.

Damaris Dunham doesn't understand what all the fuss about love and marriage is all about. Annette de Morand is aching for a chance to show her love for Damaris, but knows it can never be.

When the two young women discover a secret plot to further Napoleon's cause against the English crown, they band together to defeat the threat. As the conspiracy grows more dangerous, they both realize it's not the only threat--their hearts are on the line, too.

You almost expect a book with “heiress” in the title to be a Regency Romance, but The Unexpected Heiress by Cassidy Crane from Bold Strokes Books is set during the Depression—a time when an inheritance would definitely be a plus.

All Clara Cooper wants is something exciting to happen to her for a change. She chafes against the constraints of her society, which would rather see her married off than achieve her artistic dreams. A surprise inheritance turns her life on its head, opening doors she’d never dreamed of.

Addie Barnes is nothing if not pragmatic. Getting by on nothing but her wits and her looks, she turns her savvy eye to Clara and her secret fortune. If she can become Clara’s companion, she’ll be set for life. She initially sees Clara as a means to an end, but as their connection deepens, she grapples with conflicting emotions.

Amidst the tumultuous backdrop of the Great Depression, can they find redemption and love in the face of adversity?

It feels like there’s quite a fashion lately for books re-telling versions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter.  This Vicious Hunger by Francesca May from Orbit Books is at least very reminiscent of that story about a poison garden and the woman who tends it.

Thora Grieve finds herself destitute and an outcast after the sudden death of her husband, but a glimmer of hope arrives when a family friend offers her the chance to study botany under the tutelage of a famed professor. Once at the university, Thora becomes entranced by a mysterious young woman, Olea, who emerges each night to tend to the plants in the private garden below Thora's window.

 Hungry for connection, Thora befriends Olea through the garden gate and their relationship quickly and intensely blossoms. Thora throws herself into finding a cure for the ailment confining Olea to the garden and sinks deeper into a world of beauty, poison, and obsession. Thora has finally found the freedom to pursue her darkest desires, but will it be worth the price?

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading? I could have sworn that I read more than two books in the last month—and one of them more like a novelette. But evidently not. At least they were both sapphic and historical.

The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield is a historic fantasy set during World War II focused around the war efforts of a family with various psychic powers who are connected in some way to the Bayeux Tapestry. Told through multiple viewpoints, the novel gradually builds up a fragmentary picture of how all the parts relate until it all comes together. There’s a fair amount of violence and peril, as one might expect in a wartime espionage story. Heartfield writes dense, twisty books that can take some concentration but I’ve enjoyed every one that I’ve tackled.

Murder by Post by Rachel Ford introduces her detective couple, Meredith and Alec Thatch, set in the wake of World War I in England. Alec is passing as a man in order for them to marry, but is not presented as transgender as far as I can tell. This adds an extra element of risk and danger when the resident of a neighboring flat is found dead with signs of poison. This is a classic cozy-style mystery, with lots of clues and red herrings, allowing the reader to think just one step ahead of the characters. This initial story—really just a novelette—is free on the author’s website. I hope that some day she’ll decide to release the rest of the series more widely than just Kindle Unlimited. It deserves a wider audience.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Upcoming travel and events My new book Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven by Heather Rose Jones Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog Klein, Ula Lukszo. 2021. “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers” in Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 edited by Misty Kreuger. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press. Wingard, Tess, 2024. “The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality”, The English Historical Review. Black, Allida M. 1994. “Perverting the Diagnosis: The Lesbian and the Scientific Basis of Stigma.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 201–16. Chauncey, George, Jr. 1982. “From Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance” in Salmagundi 58-59 (fall 1982-winter 1983). Blank, Paula. 2011. “The Proverbial ‘Lesbian’: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice” in Modern Philology 109, no. 1: 108-34. Cassio, Albio Cesare. 1983. “Post-Classical Lesbias,” The Classical Quarterly, n.s., 33:1, pp. 296-297. Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. “Fashioning Female Authorship in Eliza Haywood’s ‘The Tea-Table’” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 287–304. Ingrassia, Catherine. 2014. “’Queering’ Eliza Haywood” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond: 9-24 Katz, Jonathan. 1978. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Avon Books, New York. ISBN 0-380-40550-4 Pohl, Nicole, and Betty A. Schellenberg. 2002. “Introduction: A Bluestocking Historiography” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1/2, pp. 1–19. Lanser, Susan S. 2002. “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings: 257-275 Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction The Painter's Palette (The Legacy Lane Series #2) by Gina Everleigh The Needfire by M.K. Hardy The Worst Spy in London (The Luckiest With Love #2) by Anne Knight The Unexpected Heiress by Cassidy Crane This Vicious Hunger by Francesca May What I’ve been consuming The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield Murder by Post by Rachel Ford

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/ Twitter: @LesbianMotif Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

Website: http://alpennia.com Email: Heather Rose Jones Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop Bluesky: @heatherrosejones Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)Major category: LHMPPublications: Skin-Singer: Tales of the KaltaovenTags: LHMPpodcastSkinsinger

Queerness Among the Bluestockings

Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 07:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

A look at female relations within Bluestocking circles and what sorts of evidence exist that some relations were queerer than others.

Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #499 Lanser 2002 Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire About LHMP Full citation: 

Lanser, Susan S. 2002. “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings: 257-275

This article examines the question “were the Bluestockings queer?” Also the converse “were Bluestocking and ‘lesbian’ mutually contradictory?” On the Bluestocking side, Lanser places 5 women generally considered the movers and shakers: Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, Hester Mulso Chapone, and Sarah Robinson Scott. The Bluestockings weren’t a clearly defined group and membership was sometimes assigned from outside, rather than being a self-identification—a process in which historians have participated. (The article goes into some of the complexities of how either their contemporaries or historians have sorted out the question.) When it comes to a question of how scholars have considered the potential queerness of Bluestockings, the same reflex towards protection that the Bluestockings themselves exhibited can come into play, with scholars arguing that the close friendships among Bluestocking women cannot be considered sapphic as they did not avoid friendships with men, their friendships were not exclusive, and that the sometimes passionate language they used toward each other was simply the ordinary way women expressed themselves at the time.

Lanser points out that in the 18th century a distinction was beginning to appear between “chaste female intimacies” and problematic relationships, and that the Bluestockings used stereotypes of class and gender to keep their own friendships within the “acceptable” group. What Lanser challenges is whether that line of acceptability is aligned with a line between sapphic and non-sapphic, or whether we can identify evidence for a middle space where relationships could be primary and potentially erotic while still being treated as within acceptable bounds.

As examples, Lanser offers the relationship between Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu that was acknowledged as significant by their contemporaries. The question of whether it could have been erotic runs up against the “extraordinary evidence” fallacy. If a similar relationship had existed between a man and woman, it would be assumed to have a sexual component even without a shred of evidence, but between two women, positive evidence is demanded. Positive evidence for sexual relationships is rarely forthcoming for any historic individuals, aside from pregnancy. Anne Lister is an incredibly rare exception in the candidness (and survival) of her diaries. Even Butler and Ponsonby—considered by their contemporaries to have been a married couple—left no positive evidence of a sexual relationship, despite recording that they shared a bed their entire lives. When looking for sapphic relationships in history, Lanser argues, we need to stop expecting or demanding proof of sex.

If that standard is adopted—i.e., that a range of erotic possibilities always exist—then we can more equitably compare how Bluestockings managed their potentially erotic relationships with both men and women. When compared to the generality of women of their era, most of the Bluestockings were clearly more invested in primary relationships with women than the average woman was, or than they were invested in relationships with men. And for those Bluestockings where this wasn’t the case, as with Hester Chapone, we can compare how Chapone wrote about her female friendships compared to how other, more-invested Bluestockings wrote. Lanser goes into some detail making these comparisons and identifies systematic differences in intensity and tone.

Focusing specifically on Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu, she notes their long cohabitation, combined finances, and perhaps most tellingly, cautionary letters from Elizabeth Montagu alluding to a different female couple, saying “those sorts of reports hurt us all…one cannot have men intimates and at this rate the women are more scandalous…I cannot think what [the female couple] can mean by making such a parade of their affection.” (Somewhat confusingly, Elizabeth Montagu is Sarah Scott’s sister and is not closely related in any way to Barbara Montagu, as far as I can tell.) So there was clearly an awareness that the public affection between two women could reclassify their relationship as suspect. Other references in Scott’s correspondence suggest an active managing of how people perceived their relationship, and Lanser suggests that the avoidance of a degree of verbal and physical affection between the protagonists of Scott’s Millenium Hall that would have been expected and normal between women of that era may be another sign of overcompensating out of concern for how her own relationship might be perceived.

Bluestocking friendships were performed in a variety of ways. The one between Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter played out through letters and temporary visits, not cohabitation, and appears to have received less scrutiny, despite the intensity of emotion that Montagu’s letters convey. Carter, on the other hand, recorded her “passion” (using that word) for writer Catherine Talbot, and their letters expressed deep frustration with their inability to spend more time together.

Examining the language in these several correspondences, Lanser identifies several strategies they used to manage the expression of their desires. A significant method was to create an imagined time and place when they could be together—a reality often frustrated by finances and family obligations. There is also an emphasis on “signs and tokens” of the relationship—ways of connecting through shared objects (including the letters themselves, but also keepsakes) or shared parallel activities (such as reading the same book). The third method is a displacement of bodily connection from pleasure to distress. The letters rarely express appreciation or desire for the other’s physical body, but frequently reference shared or empathized pain and illness.

What is solidly absent from the correspondence of these women is any sort of longing or regret for men in their lives (and several were, at some point, married). Well before meeting Talbot, Carter expressed a disinclination—indeed a horror—for ever marrying. And she had repeated close attachments to women throughout her life, complaining when she “loses” them to marriage. After they had become a couple, Talbot would tease her about “falling in love” with other women.

In conclusion, Lanser suggests (referencing another article of hers, that I have now moved up in the queue) that the reputation Bluestockings had for virtue and propriety, rather than being in conflict with sapphic desires, could have been over compensation—performing conservatism in order to deflect suspicion from the ways in which they departed from acceptable behavior.

Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: female comrades/friendsfemale mentorsemotional /romantic bonds between womenEvent / person: Sarah Scott & Barbara Montagu View comments (0)