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Lesbian American history |
Longstanding denial of the very existence of Lesbianism frustrates the exploration of Lesbian American history. As much of early American sensibilities were fashioned by Victorian English colonization, it is no coincidence that for a great while Lesbianism was denied, and fringe discussion of the very possibility of Lesbianism was tabled in both legislatures and academic circles. Hence, few resources exist making more detailed study of certain eras impossible. The study of Lesbian American history might thus be described as embryonic. Certain resources have survived and are discussed below.
Imported from England
England’s attempted criminalization of sexual acts between women paralleled the American attempts to amend sodomy codes to include Lesbianism. During consideration of the Labouchere Amendment, brought before Parliament in 1885, whose language had already banned any male homosexual conduct as a capital crime, any attempts to include prohibition of intimacy between females were smothered, both by Queen Victoria’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of Lesbianism and the honest dread in the House of Lords that criminalization thereof would actually alert women to the possibility of female sexual relations and thus indirectly encourage lascivious behavior. Nearly forty years later, The House of Lords again blocked criminalization of Lesbianism on the same premise. [1] Likewise, in the colony of Massachusetts, John Cotton’s attempts to include Lesbianism in the colony’s original sodomy legislation was frustrated, the defeated definition as follows: “Unnatural filthiness, to be punished with death, whether sodomy, which is carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman, or buggery, which is carnal fellowship of man or woman with beasts or fowls. This version of the law was never adopted and scarcely considered. The statutes remained gender specific.
Early historical records
The earliest American historical records concerned with female homosexual conduct were not drawn from sources sympathetic to Lesbians, or women in general. Although it is through early records of colonial legislatures and writings that clearly consider Lesbians a social outgroup, the sparse material shows mainstream attitudes towards Lesbianism, and the opposition to homosexual women during the years prior to the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement.
Kate Richards O'Hare in 1913.
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Kate Richards O'Hare in 1913.
Some of the earliest published studies of female homosexual activity were written from observations of, and data gathered from, incarcerated women. Margaret Otis published “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted” in the 1913 Journal of American Psychology, coupling a decidedly Puritanical moral foundation with an almost revolutionary sympathy for Lesbian relationships; her focus revolved more around her revulsion for sexual contact between those of different ethnic backgrounds, yet offered an almost radical tolerance of the lesbian relations themselves, as Otis noted “…sometimes the love [of one young woman for another] is very real and seems almost ennobling. This document provided a rare view from a tightly controlled setting monitored by a corrections supervisor. Kate Richards O’Hare, imprisoned in 1917 for five years under the Espionage Act of 1917, published a firsthand account of the life of incarcerated women In Prison complete with frightening accounts of Lesbian sexual abuse among inmates. So wrote O’Hare:“…A thorough education in sex perversions is part of the educational system of most prisons, and for the most part the underkeepers [sic] and the stool pigeons are very efficient teachers…”
O’Hare then recounted a systematic induction of women into a cycle of forced prostitution to which authorities turned a blind eye: “…there seems to be considerable ground for the commonly accepted belief of the prison inmates that much of its graft and profits may percolate upward to the under officials…the…stool pigeon…handled the vices so rampant in the prison…she, in fact, held the power of life and death over us, by b |
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