LHMP #137x Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men III.B.1 The Rise of Lesbian-Feminism

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6

A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).

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Faderman moves into the modern political era with a consideration of the parallel movements for women’s rights and gay/lesbian rights starting in the mid-20th century. Both the strength and the weakness of attempts to associate feminism with lesbianism was the underlying truth of the association. Historically, feminism had arisen among women who directed their primary reform efforts and emotional connections to other women. Those connections ranged along a continuum from friendship to romance to sex. Conversely, lesbians had strong reasons to support a movement freeing women from the expectation that their social, political, and economic lives required connection to a man.

The sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s began eroding at the stigma of non-normative sexuality in general. Organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and its newletter The Ladder that had originally organized as social support moved into activism and began attacking expectations that their members should consider themselves psychologically ill or that they should live lives of apology and guilt. Similar organizations and publications arose in France and Germany around the same time.

In 1970, The Ladder announced a policy shift that fully embraced feminist solidarity: rather than seeking to achieve for lesbians the same rights that striaght women had, their goal was to achieve for all women the rights that human beings should have. [Those goals were limited in some ways by the same limitations that prominent feminist organizations of the time had: they were founded by otherwise politically-moderate middle-class white women and prioritized solving the problems that they, themselves encountered.] Another way in which the two movements overlapped was in the “political lesbian”, i.e., feminists who felt that it was--at that time--impossible to live a life of true equality while in intimate relationships with men.

Overlapping concerns, however, did not prevent a wide variety of political fractures and realignments within the two general movements. But here I’m going to skip the detailed history of feminist/lesbian politics in the 1970s. It’s well outside the scope of the current project and is probably better studied from more politically-oriented sources. Suffice it to say that, in some ways, the merging of lesbian and feminist communities and interests re-invented the concept of “romantic friendship” in the sense of women whose primary emotional and romantic bond was with each other, whether or not it was also inspired by gender-directed sexual desire.

LHMP #137y Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men III.B.2 Writing Lesbian

Two short entries today, setting up to finish Faderman on the traditional LHMP day tomorrow.

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Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6

A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).

* * *

This chapter surveys positive lesbian literature of the 20th century and the circumstances that allowed for its publication at various times, including a lot of ambiguity. This is well outside the scope of the LHMP and involves a great many literature citations. I’ll just note that there’s a lot of material there for those who want to see what else was available besides the depressing stuff. [It feels like the book has lost some of its through-line in the 20th century chapters. The general theme of the place of passtionate female friendships pops up now and then, but the content has largely moved from “literature as a source of information about social attitudes” to “literature survey for its own sake.”]