The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women. In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.
20th c
The strict scope of this project cuts off at the 20th century, but this tag will occasionally be used when a source spills over.
LHMP entry
The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.
This section discusses other dictionaries contemporary with or subsequent to the publication of the OED, and the ways in which they were indebted to it. This debt included reproducing some of its deficiencies.
This chapter focuses on the philosophy, history, and development of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) specifically. The creation of the OED was a monumental project, delivered alphabetically in fascicles (separate installments of a larger work, meant to be bound into a single volume when complete). The fascicles were released beginning in the 1880s and completed in 1928, followed by a supplement in 1933 to catch up with developments in the previous half century.
This chapter compares the dearth of entries for f/f sexuality in general dictionaries in the 1750-1850 period with the wealth of discussion on those topics in medical dictionaries. The appearance of medical dictionaries as a genre aligned with an explosion of vernacular publishing in the health field in the 16-17th centuries. These were aimed not only at non-specialists, but at health workers outside the academic elite—people who didn’t have access to Latin literature. The publishing establishment operated as gatekeepers in terms of what material got published and how it was presented.
This chapter opens discussing how dictionaries explicitly presented themselves as censoring inappropriate language when aimed at an audience that included women. This sort of comment shows up as early as the later 18th century. Even the nature of what was being censored is censored, with explanations that it is aimed at “inelegant” words, rather than objectionable or obscene ones.
This chapter looks at how words are defined and cited, and the semantic frameworks they’re associated with, using “sodomy” and “buggery” as the working examples. [Note: my summary is going to give undue attention to discussions relevant to women.]
The book begins with an anecdote about the OED updating its entry for “marriage” when the (British) marriage equality act was passed, and how this was framed in the press as participating in a “change of definition”. This is followed by an anecdote from a slander case in 1942, which argued that “lesbian” could not be slanderous, as it was (incorrectly) asserted that the word didn’t exist in English when the relevant law was passed--an argument based on citations in the OED entry for “lesbian”, which was not included in the first edition published in 1908.
Chapter 7- Allen: Sexual Offences Prosecutions in the Late Twentieth Century
[Note: I think I’m succeeding in a briefer, high-level summary for the remaining chapters. These notes may be more random and unconnected.]
[Note: it is actually rather hard to do a very condensed overview of these chapters that are of less interest to the Project. I’m trying to get much more high-level for these last few chapters.]
A 1957 committee considered potential changes to the legal treatment of “vices”. One goal of the changes was to keep activities in this category, such as prostitution and homosexuality, out of public view. Even decriminalization was not intended for the benefit of the accused, but to suppress knowledge of the activities.
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