User:Kenirwin/odd girls

Excerpts from articles on Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

from NY Times

• "Out of the Closet and Into History"
• by Jeffrey Escoffier
• New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1992, Section 7, p1 == BR1)

"Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers" pulls together memoirs, literary work, personal correspondence, journalism and 186 interviews to create a social history. Lillian Faderman, the author of "Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present," uses her sources to show us how liesbian identity has changed over the last 100 years -- from the "romantic fiendships" of college educated women in the early 20th century to the rural communities of lesbian separatists of the 1970's and the fashion consciousness of the so-called lipstick lesbians of the present.

Her grand narrative also identifies definite cycles of improvement and decline in teh status of lesbians; she shes tolerance in the 1920's and 60's and periods of repression in the 10's 30's and 50's. She also finds that the forms of lesbian experience differ strikingly in different classess and different racial communities. For instance, in the 40's, working-class lesbians tended to meet in bars, whereas upper-middle-class women would meet on college campuses and at gatherings of formal social organizations.

One limitation of Ms. Faderman's sweeping interpretation is that it often overwhelms the rich material she has gathered. For Ms. Faderman, lesbianism is always primarily emotional; exuality plays a less significant role. Even while she argues that the growth of sexual freedom is one of the conditions for the improvement of lesbian life, she maintains that it has also undercut romantic friendship, an important and publicly sanctioned kind of relationship between two women. She believes that romantic friendship -- which was common in the late 19th century among middle-class educated women like the social reformer Jane Addams, the feminist leader Carrie Chapman Catt and M. Carey Thomas, who was president of Bryn Mawr College for many years -- was destroyed by Freudianism in the 20th century. After Freud, it was impossible for two women to live their lives together without the public assuming they were in a sexula relationship, and censuring them for it.

from NWSA Journal

• from "Reviews" NWSA Journal, by Kathryn Kominars
• NWSA Journal. Summer93, Vol. 5 Issue 2, p273. 2p.

The heart of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers is a decade-by-decade analysis of the growth of lesbian cultures/ubcultures in the twenthith century. Faderman chronicles the development of small, isolated lesbian communities formed in the 1920s when lesbians came to be regarded as "pariahs." Although this homophobic attitude was intended to discourage female homosexuality and diffuse any challenge to heterosexuality, there arose in the 1930s small circles of women who supported choices of same-sex lifestyles. Lesbian culture of the 1940s, according to Faderman, was informed by certain consequences of the Second World War. Demand for the skills and talents of women was so high that female independence and female homosexuality were temporarily tolerated. ALthough mainstream social intolerance returned after the war, some changes endured. Population shifts to major cities supported the creation of a lesbian subculture, and an awarenesss of lesbians as a "minority" led to an "incipient lesbian political consciousness." However, Faderman reports that postwar conservatism created a need for secrecy that increased further with McCarthyism. The harrassment and persecution during this era may, ironically enough, have helped establish lesbian subcultures. Faderman examines the subsequet development of these subcultures and teh conflicts that arose within them. Also, she captures a sense of the present character of lesbian culture through her analysis of the AIDS epidemic and its consequences. She believes that the epidemic has fostered greater unity and connection between gays and lesbians and suggests that this may have future political and social consquences. (273-374) ... The decade-bydecade analysis of the interaction of these [social, political, and economic] forces is particularly successful as it helps to clarify the development of enduring attitutdes among individuals raised during specific eras. Faderman's grasp of the intricacies and subtleties of both the dominant culture and the lesbian culture/subculture, combined with her grasp of the historical and sociological forces, is evident throughout the book. (274) ... One of the strengths of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers is that it depicts the transitory nature of societal attitudes and shows clearly the implications of htese attitudes for the formation of lesbian identity and culture. (274)

from Burleigh

• from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-10-13/features/9104020641_1_romantic-friendships-lesbian-college-women
• In A Kinder, Gentler Era, Lesbians Had A Different Acceptance
• October 13, 1991|By Nina Burleigh
• Chicago Tribune

Faderman`s analysis of lesbian history suggests that the relative acceptability of lesbian lifestyles coincides with periods of more or less economic and political freedom for women in general.

During the liberated 1920s, Faderman describes how lesbianism gained a certain cachet in certain circles. During the Depression, when jobs were scarce, working women were encouraged to return to traditional, domestic roles and lesbianism was again socially unacceptable.

The pendulum swung once more during World War II, when women filled traditionally male jobs, and the military had policies advising tolerance toward intimacy between women in the Women`s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Faderman notes that following World War II, lesbians were targets of the McCarthy anti-communist purges: They were removed from their jobs, and their homes and gathering places were raided by police.

In the late 1960s, Faderman describes how the women`s and gay liberation movements once again made lesbianism, if not acceptable, at least less stigmatized. The 1970s saw the rise of lesbian separatism, and the 1980s witnessed more acceptability of love between women, with more conservative lesbians choosing to live ``middle-class`` lifestyles within the mainstream.

Faderman says that although lesbians today are freer to express their sexuality than at the turn of the century, there is new antagonism brewing in the 1990s, part of a general, post-AIDS backlash against homosexuality.

``In the late 20th Century,`` Faderman said, ``lesbianism is obviously far more threatening than it used to be because it`s no longer a rehearsal in girlhood for the great drama of woman`s life. It can really be the great drama of woman`s life.``

from the LA Times

• Los Angeles Times:
• Women Without Men : ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America, By Lillian Faderman (Columbia University Press: $29.95; 361 pp.)
• June 09, 1991|Francine Prose
• http://articles.latimes.com/1991-06-09/books/bk-730_1_odd-girls-and-twilight-lovers

As one reads this compelling history, a chilling pattern emerges: Until the 1960s, each decade of liberalization and (relative) sexual freedom was followed by a decade of punishing repression. So the chic, glittering subculture that thrived in the clubs of 1920s Harlem and Greenwich Village was dimmed by the dreary homophobia accompanying the Depression.

from Washington Post

• Women In Love
• The Washington Post
• June 23, 1991, Sunday, Final Edition
• Section: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X1; REVIEW
• Byline: Susan Brownmiller

Lesbian feminists in the 1970s grew increasingly committed to the utopian ideal of community, which meant various things according to who was doing the propounding. Utopia was a passage beyond the abolition of outdated, stereotypical roles to the promulgation of a "woman's culture": lesbian-oriented book stores, an interest in goddesses and spirituality, and attendance at celebratory women's music festivals across the country. There were, as well, occasional and shortlived separatist communes in a rural setting and, in confounding contradiction, tireless exhortations to heterosexual feminists to leave men behind and "come out." That numbers of straight feminists did respond to the call, at least briefly, cannot be questioned, inspiring a new phrase in the lexicon, the political lesbian, for someone whose choice was not primarily dictated by sexual preference.

Faderman is at her most informative when she describes the unforeseen pressures that tore the idea of lesbian utopia apart, the immutable divisions of class and race, each with its clamorous insistence on the ultimate severity of its particular oppression, and the deeply emotional debates regarding pornography and sexual practices as they were put on the table with roguish delight by a vociferous sadomasochist faction that brought back the distinctions of butch and femme, top and bottom. Eventually, she writes, the S&M furor died down to a simmer when gay men were required to drop their protestations of delirious fun in the confrontation with AIDS. Priorities shifted toward a new seriousness and responsibility in keeping with the frightful epidemic, and today's socially conscious lesbians are most likely to be found at meetings of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers uses homosexual men as a frequent reference point, prompting some interesting questions about male promiscuity and female monogamy, which Faderman sees as a matter of social conditioning. On the very tricky class question, she reminds us that gay men have a long tradition of seeking out sex for money across the economic divide -- while, I might add, leaving the class structure firmly in place -- but their female counterparts have tended to stay within their familiar milieu. She is reticent, however, on the noticeable difference between homosexual upward mobility and lesbian downward mobility in lifestyle, although she would probably attribute the downward factor, which was something of a point of honor for lesbian activists during the 1970s, to a lack of economic opportunity for women rather than to preference or inclination.

A social history inevitably invites quibbles with the author's emphases and ellipses. Odd Girls devotes nearly 20 pages, pro and con, to the sadomasochism debate, but reserves a mere couple of pages to the problem of alcoholism within the lesbian community and avoids the disquieting incidence of battery altogether. Even more surprising, the current boom in lesbian motherhood is dispatched in two pages flat. But the achievements in this calm, thoughtful volume far outstrip any putative flaws.