To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History

by Lillian Faderman

Overview

A unique and “often quite moving” look at gay women’s role in US history (The Washington Post).

In this “essential and impassioned addition to American history,” the three-time Lambda Literary Award winner and author of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers focuses on a select group of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century lesbians who were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Hoping to “set the record straight (or, in this case, unstraight)” for all Americans and provide a “usable past” for lesbians in particular, Lillian Faderman persuasively argues that the sexual orientation of her subjects may in fact have facilitated their accomplishments. With impeccably drawn portraits of such seminal figures as Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Eleanor Roosevelt, To Believe in Women “will raise eyebrows and consciousness” (Dianne Wood Middlebrook). As Faderman writes in her introduction, “This is a book about how millions of American women became what they are now: full citizens, educated, and capable of earning a decent living for themselves.”
 
A landmark work of impeccable research and compelling readability, To Believe in Women is an enlightening and surprising read.
 
“For those who need a dose of pride and a slice of history, Faderman’s portraits should strike a popular note. ‘To Believe in Women’ is a decent starting point for learning about these pioneers and their contributions to American life.” —The New York Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547348407
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	11/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Lillian Faderman is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Women, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, and Surpassing the Love of Men. Among the many honors her work has received are Yale University’s James Brudner Award for exemplary scholarship in lesbian and gay studies, three Lambda Literary Awards, and the Paul Monette Award. She teaches literature and creative writing at California State University at Fresno.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Not-men, not-women, answerable to no function of either sex, whose careers were carried on, and how successfully, in whatever field they chose: They were educators, writers, editors, politicians, artists, world travellers, and international hostesses, who lived in public and by the public and played out their self-assumed roles in such masterly freedom as only a few medieval queens had equalled. Freedom to them meant precisely freedom from men and their stuffy rules for women.

— Katherine Anne Porter, on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "lesbians"

This is a book about how millions of American women became what they now are: full citizens, educated, and capable of earning a decent living for themselves. It is also a book about how Americans developed a social conscience and adapted the goals of various reform movements into laws. But it departs from other such histories because it focuses on how certain late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women whose lives can be described as lesbian were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today.

For a variety of reasons, many of the women at the center of this book would not have used the noun "lesbian" to describe their identity, or even have been familiar with the word. However, using materials such as their letters and journals as evidence, I argue that that term used as an adjective accurately describes their committed domestic, sexual, and/or affectional experiences. I also argue that in their eras, lesbian arrangements freed these pioneering women to pursue education, professions, and civil and social rights for themselves and others far more effectively than they could have if they had lived in traditional heterosexual arrangements.

Lesbians Before "Lesbian Identity"

The emotional and sexual lives of many of the women discussed in this book were often complex. Most of them lived before the days when sexual identity was defined by clear-cut labels, and the noun "lesbian" would not in any case have been entirely adequate to identify all of them. Mary Dreier, for example, shared her life with another woman in a relationship that was almost certainly sexual, but she was also in love with a man she could not marry, and she probably did not consummate her attraction to him. Mildred Olmsted was married for most of her life and had a child with her husband, yet she was sexually uninterested in him, and throughout her marriage she continued a relationship with a woman that was emotionally and erotically intense. Still others loved and lived with women only. They may or may not have had sexual relationships with those women, but regardless, they saw them as their domestic spouses, partners, or lifelong loves. The binary paradigm of homosexual/heterosexual would probably have been baffling to many of them even if they had known those terms. However, what all these people had in common was that beloved women were centrally implicated in their emotional lives, and to a greater or lesser extent, their intimate relationships with other women helped enable their achievements.

To Believe in Women will perhaps be seen as being in opposition to postmodernism, which does not recognize the possibility of reclaiming women of the past as lesbians. Academic postmodernists might point to the precarious status of identity — the instability, indecipherability, and unnameability of sexualities — and conclude that lesbianism cannot really be discussed, particularly in regard to history. With their epistemological doubts, they would be suspicious of any attempt to construct a coherent pattern out of complex human lives in order to create a "grand narrative" of history. Grand narratives — indeed, any such theoretical speculations, they would argue — must ultimately expose themselves as "passionate fictions."

I believe that such arguments have merit and serve as an important corrective to a simplistic temptation to name the "lesbians" in history. As the postmodernists claim, it is impossible — especially when dealing with historical figures — to make safe statements about identities, which are so slippery in their subjectivity and mutability. However, if enough material that reveals what people do and say is available, we can surely make apt observations about their behavior. That is what I have attempted to do in this book. I use the term "lesbian" as an adjective that describes intense woman-to-woman relating and commitment. Thus, I will admit at the outset that my subtitle is somewhat misleading. If there had been more space on the title page, and if the phrase had not been so aesthetically dismal, I might have subtitled this book, with greater accuracy, "What Women of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Whose Chief Sexual and/or Affectional and Domestic Behaviors Would Have Been Called 'Lesbian' If They Had Been Observed in the Years after 1920, Have Done for America." When I slip into the shorthand of referring to these women as "lesbians," readers might keep my alternate subtitle in mind.

While most of these women appear not to have had what we in the later twentieth century have called a "lesbian identity," they somehow recognized each other. On what basis? Perhaps it was because they fought together to expand women's possibilities, they were usually not living with a husband, and, most important, they were ostensibly engaged in a romantic and committed relationship with another woman. They often knew each other well. Anna Howard Shaw, the suffrage leader, was close not only to other suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and the woman Anthony called her "lover," Emily Gross, but also to women such as M. Carey Thomas, the college president, and her partner, Mary Garrett. Thomas was also friends with Jane Addams, the social reformer, who, along with her partner, Mary Rozet Smith, was friends with the suffragist and politician Anne Martin and her partner, Dr. Margaret Long. When Addams and Smith visited Boston, they often dined or stayed with the writer Sarah Orne Jewett and her partner, Annie Fields.

These women seldom wrote to each other without also sending regards to the partner of the correspondent; "Love from both of us to both of you" was an oft-repeated phrase in their letters. When female couples traveled with other female couples, it was taken for granted that each woman would be sharing a room with her partner and not with another friend. Sleeping arrangements were understood to be as inviolate as they would be with husband and wife. Those qualities and lifestyles these women shared and recognized in each other apparently constituted an "identity" of sorts, though there is little evidence that they gave a name to it.

In the context of their day, the general absence of a name for their loves and lives is not surprising. I have found no articulated concepts of lesbianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with which they would have been entirely comfortable. "Inverts" were seen by most sexologists as pathological, and since these women believed their discontent was not pathological but rationally based on the unjust treatment of females, they would not have dubbed themselves "sexual inverts," no matter how much sexologists' definitions of the invert fit them. The term "homosexual" too would probably have felt foreign to most of them, since regardless of whether their relationships were specifically sexual, they were also much more than sexual. Nor would other nineteenth-century views of lesbianism, such as the images of the lesbienne in French decadent fiction and poetry, have seemed acceptable to most of them.

However, though most of the women discussed here may not have articulated, even to themselves, that their choice of a female mate instead of a husband was "lesbian," sexologists writing at the end of the nineteenth century made the point emphatically, characterizing the leaders of the women's movement as "sexual inverts." In his 1897 work, Havelock Ellis even laid the blame for what he said was an increase in female homosexuality on the "modern movement of emancipation," which encouraged women's "intimacy with their own sex" and taught them "disdain" for women's conventional roles.

Ellis's supposition ran counter to a theory proposed several decades earlier and generally accepted by him that homosexuality was congenital. The true homosexual, sexologists insisted, suffered from a hereditary neurosis. But Ellis explained an apparent contradiction by asserting that the homosexuality of women who came to that "aberration" through the emancipation movement was only "a spurious imitation." However, he continued his argument, the true homosexual often assumed leadership in women's rights movements, where she made other women "spuriously" homosexual. She could intellectually seduce other females because her "congenital anomaly" of homosexuality "occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others." Despite the charm of this supposition, I will not argue as Ellis does that the leadership for women's rights and re-form came from lesbians because of the "high intelligence" associated with their "anomaly." Rather, it seems that women of this time who formed domestic partnerships with other women were much more likely to be effective as social pioneers than women who lived with husbands.

The Virtues of Lesbian Domesticity

Almost all of the women discussed in the pages that follow had a primary relationship with another woman that lasted for twenty years or more. However, there was no one model of domestic and affectional arrangements among them. In some cases, such as that of Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony, one member of the couple mostly kept the home fires burning while the other traveled the continent to procure women's rights. Lucy Anthony, who would surely have been called a "femme" if she had lived in the mid-twentieth century, had no interest in a public role for herself, yet she believed ardently in the women's movement and felt that by taking care of the charismatic and politically effective Shaw, she was contributing to the cause.

In contrast, other women worked together with their partners to advance women's position. Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier were both pioneering doctors in the New York infirmary that Emily founded. Frances Willard and Anna Gordon both led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay were both suffrage leaders on a national level. Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon both worked on issues of peace and civil rights.

In other cases, one woman made her considerable fortune available to the reform work in which her partner was engaged, thereby empowering the beloved partner while promoting a cause in which she too believed. Jane Addams was able to put Hull House on the map in part because of the many excellent projects that the generosity of her wealthy partner, Mary Rozet Smith, permitted her to pursue. M. Carey Thomas became one of the first female college presidents in 1894 because Mary Garrett, with whom Thomas lived until Garrett's death, in 1915, told the trustees that she would give Bryn Mawr a large yearly endowment if, and only if, Thomas headed the college. Miriam Van Waters became a powerful women's prison reformer with the help of the purse and political clout of Geraldine Thompson, with whom she had a long-term committed relationship.

In Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, I traced how the successes of the women's rights movement by the late nineteenth century meant that so-called romantic friendships of earlier eras could become "Boston marriages": committed relationships between two women who, having gone to college and then found decent-paying jobs, could set up a household together rather than marry men out of economic need. In To Believe in Women, I will show how many of those women also shared the excitement of pioneering. They went where no women had gone before — not only into colleges and universities, but also into the polls, the operating rooms, the pulpits, the legislatures, the law courts. It was often their same-sex partnerships and commitments that made those exciting explorations possible.

Why were women who lived in committed relationships with other women so apt to be the most effective early leaders in the movement to advance women and in many other reform movements? At the end of the long, strong first wave of the women's rights movement, in 1920, Crystal Eastman, who had had two husbands and numerous male lovers, characterized what she believed to be crucial differences between heterosexual relationships and female-female relationships. Heterosexual marriage, in her summation, posed a danger to certain women:

Two business women can "make a home" together without either one being overburdened or over-bored. It is because they both know how and both feel responsible. But it is the rare man who can marry one of them and continue the home-making partnership. Yet if there are not children, there is nothing essentially different in the combination. Two self-supporting adults decide to make a home together: If both are women, it is a pleasant partnership more often than work; if one is a man, it is almost never a partnership — the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter over it, and finally perhaps gives up her outside work and condemns herself to the tiresome half-jobs of housekeeping for two.

In our post — second-wave-of-feminism era, when egalitarian heterosexual relationships are not as rare as they were several generations ago, the fears of women such as Eastman may seem overwrought; but they clearly mirrored those of many of her cohorts and predecessors. For example, in a 1906 essay for Harper's Bazaar, "The Passing of Matrimony," Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed great relief that women no longer had to strive desperately to find a husband and that more and more women were in fact choosing to remain single. As Gilman phrased it, they were "refusing to be yoked in marriage," which demanded that they "give up the dream of self-realization." While there were marriages that were exceptions to these complaints, even with cooperative and well-meaning husbands, women often felt conflicts over attempting to balance professional and domestic life.

Because many women's rights leaders believed that an unmarried woman could be more committed to the cause than one with a husband and children, they not infrequently hoped to encourage young women not to marry. As Susan B. Anthony phrased it on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday party, at which an army of movement women demonstrated how greatly they revered her, "I am so glad of it all because it will help teach the young girls that to be true to principle — to live to an idea — though an unpopular one — that is to live single — without any man's name — may be honorable." But did the loneliness of single life not appear formidable to many pioneering women? If a woman chose not to be "yoked in marriage," was she not condemned to solitude? The women who are the subjects of this book believed that through their intimate relationships with other women they found escape from loneliness while maintaining their "dreams of self-realization."

With regard to many of these women, it is impossible to determine which came first, the realization that it was important to remain single if they wanted to achieve or the desire to achieve because they knew they must since they did not want to marry. Did they fight for women's rights because they did not have the opportunity to marry? Or was their opportunity to marry foreclosed by their fight for women's rights? Or did they realize that they must fight for women's rights because they preferred not to marry? Whatever the case, their same-sex living arrangements permitted them far more time for social causes and other pursuits than was available to those who were busy running a multiperson household before the days of modern conveniences and with raising a family before effective birth control could limit the number of pregnancies. It is not surprising that in Frances Willard and Mary Livermore's biographical dictionary, A Woman of the Century, more than half of the 1470 biographies of women of achievement were of those who had never married or who were widowed young and never remarried. In the same vein, in her study of the twenty-six leading suffragists from 1890 to 1920, Aileen Kraditor talks about a number of women leaders who married "and then withdrew from activity because of family responsibility." It was not easy to be a wife and mother while one led a revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "To Believe in Women"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Lillian Faderman.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
HOW AMERICAN WOMEN GOT ENFRANCHISED,
The Loves and Living Arrangements of Nineteenth-Century Suffrage Leaders,
Bringing the Suffrage Movement into the Twentieth Century: Anna Howard Shaw,
Victory: Carrie Chapman Catt,
Two Steps Forward ...,
Photos I,
HOW AMERICA GOT A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE,
Mother-Hearts/Lesbian-Hearts,
Social Housekeeping: The Inspiration of Jane Addams,
Social Housekeeping Becomes a Profession: Frances Kellor,
Poisoning The Source,
HOW AMERICAN WOMEN GOT EDUCATED,
"Mental Hermaphrodites": Pioneers in Women's Higher Education,
Making Women's Higher Education Even Higher: M. Carey Thomas,
The Struggle to Maintain Women's Leadership: Mary Emma Woolley,
The Triumph of Angelina: Education in Femininity,
Photos II,
HOW AMERICAN WOMEN GOT INTO THE PROFESSIONS,
"When More Women Enter Professions": Lesbian Pioneering in the Learned Professions,
Making Places for Women in Medicine: Emily Blackwell,
Carrying On: Martha May Eliot, M.D.,
The Rush to Bake the Pies and Have the Babies,
Conclusion: Legacies,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,

What People are Saying About This

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Dianne Wood Middlebrook This book will raise eyebrows and consciousness.

Editorial Reviews

"This book will raise eyebrows and consciousness." -- Dianne Wood Middlebrook