If someone told you there was a sustained conspiracy to suppress lesbian history, would you believe it? Or would you consider the idea a bit paranoid? When you look at the history of how words for f/f sexuality were handled across the long history of dictionaries of the English language, it's hard to find a more accurate word than "conspiracy" to describe the systematic obscuring, suppression, and censorship involved.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 303 - Interview with Margaret Vandenburg - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/15 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 302 - On the Shelf for December 2024 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2024.
I’m formatting this guest blog as an LHMP entry so that it can be picked up by search tags.
This is the last article I had flagged to finish before writing the "Lesbians and the Law" episode for the podcast, though of course there are many more publications relevant to the topic that I haven't yet read. One of the eternal truths of this project is that I can never wait to know "everything" before writing on a topic. That's going to be a real pain point when I work on my sourcebook--there will always be "one more thing" I want to research.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 01 – A Very Long Malaise by L.J. Lee - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/11/30 - listen here)
This article fits in well with the question of what the actual legal issues are when lesbianism is part of the context of a legal case. When you dig into it, the central usefulness of Pirie & Woods vs Cumming Gordon is not what it says about whether two specific women had a lesbian relationship, but rather the amount of detail it provides about legal and social attitudes toward lesbianism at the time.
Sometimes tracking down a key publication can take a bit of work. This one was published in a journal that my local university library doesn't subscribe to, and the isn't in JSTOR (the online portal for academic articles). In the end, I had to temporarily subscribe to the journal to be able to download this one article. (The subject of the journal doesn't have directly to do with gender or sexuality, so it's unlikely that any other content is going to be relevant.) The things I do for my Project!
This finishes up Derry with the final chapters and my overall thoughts on the book.
One fascinating thing that Derry's study demonstrates is that with respect to the English legal treatment of lesbianism, the situation got steadily worse across the 20th century before it got any better. So much for the illusion of a progressive century!
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