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ETA: See also Part 1, link to the combined Camestos Felapton/Heather Rose Jones analysis.

ETA 2024/01/25: I've added cross-links between the related posts and will continue to update as needed. I'm not used to people actually coming to read my blog! If you like the numbers geekery, consider checking out the rest of my website. I've written some books! I run the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog and podcast! I natter on about all manner of writing and fannish things!

Introduction

Accessibility Note: I acknowledge that by using images of the graphs and of some tables, the full analysis is not accessible to the visually impaired. For this I apologize, however my time and the abilities of my website are limited.

This is a further exploration of population-level patterns in Hugo Award nomination data. While the first installment was primarily aimed at asking the question, “is there something hinky going on in this data and if so, what?” this second installment is stepping back and asking, “are there different typical nomination patterns for different categories, and are the anomalies in 2023 general or focused on specific categories?”

The spreadsheet with the data will be available on Google Drive. Feel free to play with it for yourself, but be warned that I haven’t bothered to add much explanatory apparatus in the file as it wasn’t designed for public consumption.

My analysis here is not aimed at examining nominees, although in some cases the outliers are perfectly understandable and rational once you look up what the specific item/person was. Instead, I’m interested in patterns of behavior independent of the specific content.

One variable that I can’t really control for is any differences in nomination behavior due to the combination of two different literary populations, either in the specific (i.e., different population behavior due to a specific literary culture) or in general (i.e., the interactions of combined nominations from two distinct literary cultures). To the best of my knowledge, even when Worldcons have been held in non-Anglophone countries previously, there has not been a significant presence of non-Anglophone works in the nomination pool. (On an individual basis, one can see some “favorite son” effects among the people categories, but I think these are negligible on the level I’m examining.) When I selected the comparison dates, I wasn’t specifically aiming to include or exclude non-Anglophone Worldcons. By chance I did include Helsinki (2017) because it was the first EPH year, which adds a mild confounding factor, but my perception is any unusual behavior in 2017 is more attributable to post-Puppy reactions.

Methodology

To repeat the methodology as described in the previous installment:

Using the nomination statistics provided by each Worldcon, I tabulated the total number of nomination ballots cast for each category and the number of ballots that included each of the top 16 nomination-recipients. (Note: There were not always 16 items listed. Some years reported more than 16 items, but I truncated at 16 for a consistent comparison.) I ignored the question of "disqualifiations" or withdrawals -- the numbers represent what is reported as the raw nomination numbers.

From this, I calculated the percentage of the possible nominations that each of those 16 items received. That is, the number of ballots that listed an item, divided by the total ballots for that category, reported as a percent. This data is displayed as groups of columns, clustered by category. Because the data is reported as a %, the distribution is more easily comparable between categories with different numbers of total nominations.

Scope

I selected the following years to analyze:

• 2011 - the earliest year I happen to have data for
• 2012 - the last year before any Sad Puppy activity
• 2015 - the year of the most intense Sad Puppy activity with known nomination slates
• 2017 - the first year of E Pluribus Hugo
• 2021 - a recent year
• 2022 - a recent year
• 2023 - the current year

I considered adding more years into the mix, but the project was getting a little unmanageable, and sometimes larger amounts of very similar data detract from understanding rather than adding to it.

This time I’m looking at all award categories. Of those, Series, Fancast, and Lodestar have less data due to being added at various points during the scope of my data.

In addition to examining the percentage of ballots that works appeared on, I also consider the percentage of available ballot slots in each category that can be accounted for by the long-list nominees, as presented. I may also be making reference on occasion to the total nomination ballots in a category. I would have liked to compare the total number of different works nominated in each category however, as that data was not available for 2023, this was not a priority.

Review of Patterns: 2022 vs 2023

To begin with, let’s review the most obvious distribution differences between 2023 and a comparable year, for which I’ve picked 2022. I’ll put the two graphs next to each other for easy comparison.

The 2022 data demonstrates across the board the sort of pattern we expect from a population-based popularity poll. We have a consistent and continuous falling off from the most-picked nominees to less-picked ones. It isn’t uncommon for there to be one or sometimes more runaway favorites that make the initial part of the curve fairly steep. For example, in 2022 we can see this particularly in Drama-Long, in Fanzine, and in Fan Writer. In general, however, the bulk of the long-list nominees have a highly similar percentage distribution with respect to ballots having any nominees in that category. (Not shown in this graph is the significant variation in the number of ballots with data in each category, with the most popular category having 6x the participation of the least popular category.

In contrast, the 2023 distribution patterns are more variable. Some resemble the “standard” pattern (e.g., Short Story, Editor-Short, Astounding) although the overall percentages uniformly run higher. Some show an extreme “cliff” phenomenon (e.g., Novel, Series, Fanzine) where a group of nominees appear on a high proportion of the ballots, with a substantial gap in distribution between them and the less popular nominees. We still see the phenomenon where there may be a runaway favorite (e.g., Novelette, Drama-Long) but there are fewer of these than in the 2022 data.

It’s a bit hard to make out the details when all 19 categories are on display so let’s move on to look at the data from another angle.

Patterns Evaluated by Category

I’m going to group the nomination categories by my evaluation of whether they fall in the following:

• “Typical” distribution with nothing particularly interesting going on
• “Typical” distribution but with something else interesting
• Extreme “cliff” distribution
• Non-typical distribution of other types

Typical distribution – not much interesting

Historically, the distribution for graphic story has been highly consistent in terms of percentages. There is a slight tendency for years with larger overall numbers in this category to also have higher percentages – that is, when more people nominate, they have a slight tendency to cluster on the most popular works. 2023 shows a skew toward the more popular works being on a higher proportion of ballots than usual, but the long tail also falls off more steeply. 2023 did not have the largest number of ballots in this category. 2023 did have the highest proportion of available slots used (37%), but this is simply another way of stating that the percentage of appearances is shifted higher.

As we see, this category often has a standout favorite, but otherwise the distribution is relatively consistent from year to year. 2023 is slightly skewed towards the top picks, with the tail being lower than typical, but there isn’t any obvious discontinuity in the distribution. The combination of higher favorites, but lower percentage appearances for the tail means that the percentage of nomination slots used in 2023 is in the middle of the historic range at 26%. The total number of nominating ballots in 2023 is also in the middle of the historic range.

Editor (long form) is an interesting category, not so much for 2023, but for changes across the scope of the study. In 2015 (peak Puppy) there’s a definite skewing towards the more popular picks and a slight flattening of the end of the tail, but in the years after there’s also an increase in the proportion of nomination slots filled. People seem to be more engaged with the category and familiar with more candidates. In 2023, there’s a strong shift upward for the most-mentioned candidates, resulting in 61% of the nomination slots being filled. But the distribution is still relatively smooth and continuous.

The story for Editor (short form) is very similar to long-form editor, even to the slight shift upwards in 2023. The proportion of available slots filled in 2023 is highest of all the years, but not by much (48%).

Semiprozine is interesting because there’s a shift in the basic pattern that is continued in 2023. Across the years studied, the concentration of interest in a group of “top picks” increases, resulting in a sort of “two mode” distribution curve – an initial higher cluster (that still trails off) then a less steep tail at the lower end. In isolation, the 2023 distribution might almost look like it’s edging toward a “cliff” distribution, except that 2017, 2021, and 2022 all have a similar pattern. I would suggest that this is a function of a relatively small number of semiprozines being exceedingly well known, in comparison to the general population. The percentage of slots filled in 2023 is, again, higher than other years (56%) but only slightly.

The Lodestar only began being given in 2018 so it only shows up in the three most recent years of my data. This makes comparison more tricky, but I’d say that (once more) the 2023 distribution is similar in shape to previous years, but with a shift upward in the percentage of ballots the most popular titles appeared on. One might speculate about what these consistent higher rates mean. (For example, is it the case that the people who are nominating are more “dedicated” that usual and therefore more likely to fill in more items?) Insufficient data to do more than guess.

The Astounding nominations generally have low percentages (which makes sense, because when you’re nominating brand new authors, you tend to be dealing with a more broadly distributed familiarity among nominators). The fall-off for 2023 is a bit more convex than in other years, but there isn’t a discontinuity in the distribution.

Typical distribution – but something interesting

So let’s move on to the next group: categories where the distribution is relatively typical (no gaps or cliffs) but there’s something more interesting going on.

In novelette, the “interesting” year is 2015. In the top group of highly similar (but still falling off) nominees, we’re seeing the effects of the slate nomination that year. In subsequent years the pattern returns to “normal.” In general, the nomination slots in this category are sparsely filled in, even though overall ballot numbers are high. 2023 has the highest percentage filled at 38%, but the trailing off from the clear favorite shows no gaps. And we can see that it isn’t unusual for there to be a standout favorite for novelette.

Short story is notoriously a category with a very long, low popularity tail. We see the same slating effect in 2015 that we saw for novelette, but once again it simply pumps up the higher end of the distribution rather than creating a discontinuity. The distribution for 2023 is “typical” but the overall percentage appearances are relatively very high compared to previous years, even at the low end of the tail. This is striking because it suggests that people are nominating from a relatively smaller pool of familiar works (and therefore more people are mentioning the same works). In most years, the short story long-list only accounts for 15-20% of the available slots (and here I suspect that we aren’t necessarily seeing incompletely filled ballots, but lots of nominations that are farther down the long tail). But in 2023 the long-list nominations accounted for 66% of the available nomination slots for the category. (This is a place where it would be very interesting to compare the total number of individual works that got mentioned.)

Dramatic (long) is in the “typical but interesting” group almost solely for demonstration that having a “runaway favorite” can be part of the typical distribution. It’s more common than not for more than half the nomination ballots in this category to include one particular title for that year. Otherwise, not much to say except that 2023 once again has a slight shift upward in popularity for the most popular titles, but a suppression of popularity for the bottom of the long-list. Once again, it leads in percentage of available slots filled by the long-list (58%) but not by a significant margin over previous years.

Fan Writer, much like several previous categories, has a similar “shape” of distribution in 2023 compared to earlier years, but the percentages are significantly elevated, resulting in the long-list accounting for 61% of available nomination slots (compared to a more typical 30% or so). In some years, Fan Writer has a clear favorite, but just as often no specific candidate stands out.

Extreme Cliff

Now let’s jump over to the most anomalous distributions – the ones with a “cliff” or “gap” in the distribution. When I posted my previous article, I had narrowed the analysis down to the fiction categories and the fan categories simply because it felt like they’d make a tidy comparison group. But as it turns out, all the “cliff” distributions are in these two groups.

Compared to some other categories, novel usually has a rather flat and low distribution. My interpretation would be that this is an expected outcome of a large number of titles and a very wide range of tastes in nominators. It’s rare for there to be a clear favorite, and even the slates in 2015 only gave a slight bump to the top end of the group. All that makes 2023 highly unusual. Rather than the most commonly mentioned titles barely making 20% of the ballots, seven titles each showed up on 47-21% of nominating ballots in this category, with the next title down only appearing on 9%. In previous years, the novel long-list titles accounted for 26-37% of the available nominating slots, but in 2023 they accounted for 77%. If you subtracted 600 nominations from each of those seven titles, you’d get a typical-shaped distribution that is elevated above the historic percentages about the same as for other 2023 categories. Seven unusually high titles, and with one invalidated, that gives us the six finalists.

Novella has been fairly consistent in the past, with the most commonly mentioned titles appearing on more ballots than the most common novels. This makes sense, given that fewer novellas get published than novels, so we wouldn’t expect the distribution to be quite as flat and long-tailed. And it’s a little more common for the most frequently mentioned novellas to stand up a bit above the crowd. But in 2023, five titles break away from the (otherwise typical) crowd, leaving a distribution gap of around 450 nominations. The 2023 long-list titles don’t take up quite as much of the available space as for novel, only 61%, but far and away higher than any other year. As only five titles are in this abnormally elevated group, all of them are finalists.

Series (for which I only have 4 years to compare) is the most extreme example of the cliff phenomenon. The three prior comparison years are all highly similar (differing only in the popularity of the top contender). But in 2023, we have six items each appearing on 58-66% of the ballots for this category. The gap between that group and the next item is around 750 nominations. And the 2023 long-list accounts for 81% of the available nomination slots. (For that matter, those top six items account for 77% of all available nomination slots in the category.) Coincidentally (?) “six” is the number of available places for finalists.

If you discount 2015 when slating more than doubled the expected numbers for a group of titles, and you discount 2023 (which we’ll get to), Fanzine nomination distribution is remarkably consistent, with a nice easy slope and usually one stand-out title at the top (though rarely the same title repeating). And then we get to 2023, where we have a whopping 7 items elevated above the crowd with a gap of about 150 nominations between them and the next candidate. Unlike the fiction categories, this group doesn’t quite dominate the available nomination slots, accounting for only 54%. But the “cliff” is still striking. And because none of the seven were invalidated for any reason, one of them didn’t get boosted onto the finalist list by that effect.

Fan artist is the last category that I identify as having a significant “cliff” in the distribution. As you can see, the nomination distribution is usually very consistent in percentages, the only unusual thing about this category being that it’s not uncommon for a couple of people to be stand-outs at the top. Although absolute nomination numbers tend to be low, the percentage of available slots taken on the ballots that do address this category tends to be a respectable 20-35%. In 2023, the 6 “elevated” candidates (all of whom end up finalists) push that percentage to 41% of the available slots, but due to the overall low numbers, the gap is only around 35 nominations. This is one of the curious aspects of this “cliff” phenomenon: the gaps aren’t consistent, either in absolute magnitude or in proportional relation to the number of nominating ballots in that category. The “cliffs” are clearly artifactual, but they don’t give a good clue to the nature of the underlying cause.

Non-typical, Other

This brings us to the final analysis group “not typical, but interesting for other reasons than having a distribution cliff.”

Related Work has Seen Some Things. In 2015, slating gave it the closes thing to a distribution cliff seen in previous years. I think part of this is that Related Work – being so diffuse in concept – has similar patterns to Novel in having a fairly vast field of candidates, is susceptible to stand-outs for whatever reason. We see this in 2017 when one particular work is massively popular relative to the rest of the field. But even so, 2023 has a discontinuous distribution, thought the high end of the field is a bit more sloped than in many of the “true cliff” distributions. The gap is only about 80 nominations, and overall the percentage of available slots taken isn’t vastly more than in other years.

Professional Artist is somewhat similar to Related Work, in that there is a slight discontinuity in the distribution (with a gap of maybe 60 or so nominations) with 8 people in the upper group, but that group has a clear gradient, rather than being tightly clustered relative to the whole. The shape is reminiscent of the slate pattern in 2015, but more exaggerated.

Fancast only started in 2012, so we’re missing one of my comparison years. At the beginning (including the 2015 slate effect) there’s a very subtle “cliff” pattern, but in more recent years (and presumably with a wider range of familiar and popular podcasts) the pattern has settled down into the much more typical “gradual tail.” So 2023 stands out as unusual, even though it has some similarities to the first two examples. To the extent that 2023 has something of a “cliff” it consists of a gap of around 40 nominations, with five items above the line, but as you can see, that upper group has a definite slope to it – so, not a true “cliff.”

Conclusions

Once again, I get to the end of this and don’t have any clear conclusions. Possibly I should stare at this data for a while longer, listen to what other people say about it, and then come back for some final thoughts. At this point, I’m no longer setting out to “prove” anything, but only to present the data in a form that might spark other people to come up with interpretative inspirations. A couple things that I wanted to jot down in the mean time:

• When there is a significant "cliff," the number of entries above the cliff is "around" the number of slots on the final ballot. Plus/minus. I counted seven categories that I classified as having a "cliff", with 5 (x1), 6 (x2), or 7 (x4) items above the cliff. Of those, there was only one category where, after invalidations, not all the "clifftop" entries were able to fit on the final ballot. However both in terms of the magnitude of the cliff and the type of category, there was no thematic consistency.
• Another interesting thing that happened in the voting phase is that, in six categories, the first place winner was obvious in one or two rounds (and if it took two, the item only needed a few votes to go over the finish line). Those six categories were all either in my "typical but interesting" group or my "non-typical for reasons other than a standard cliff" group. I have no idea whether this is meaningful. It's just an observation.

Note that I’m posting this late on a Tuesday evening and Wednesday is my “work on site” day. So I won’t have much opportunity to participate in discussions or moderate pending comments until tomorrow evening.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 278 – The Dildo Episode - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/01/20 - listen here)

Introduction

In reading published research on the social history of dildos—which was not a thing I had actually expected to find—what struck me was how the questions and themes felt similar to the discourse back in the ‘70s when I first entered the lesbian community. In fact, one of the papers I read made that very point.

What does a sex toy shaped like a phallus “mean” with respect to erotic desire, sexual orientation, and social dynamics? Does it emphasize a phallocentric view of sexual intercourse or does it emphasize the irrelevance of living men to women’s sexual pleasure? When a dildo is used, is maleness present or absent? If a woman uses a dildo to give another woman pleasure, does that masculinize her in some way? If so, what does it mean when she uses it all by herself? Does it make a difference if she uses a strap-on or holds it in her hand?

Some questions that are specific to historic discourse include: how confident are we that an object made to represent a phallus can be interpreted as a sex toy? Regardless of whether it’s used solo or by couples, did historic societies categorize the use of a dildo more with masturbation or more with sexual intercourse? And how did societies react to the use of this type of sexual aid? Did it matter who was using it…and on whom?

Liza Blake, in her article “Dildos and Accessories: The Functions of Early Modern Strap-Ons” focuses on an interpretation that, during the 16th through 18th centuries, the dildo was a fashion accessory—much like a hat or a walking stick. She argues against Freud’s view of dildos as a sexual fetish, on the logic that a fetish displaces erotic desire onto an unrelated object, while the dildo has a direct functional connection with the satisfaction of sexual arousal. Both Blake and Ula Klein (writing in Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature) note the awkward ambiguities when discussing wearable dildos in the context of people who trans gender presentation, as the object may be part of a masculine social presentation without being used for sexual purposes, or may be used as a sexual aid without necessarily being worn for everyday appearance. And even the presence of both functions may or may not coincide with a masculine gender identity. Furthermore, two women together may use a dildo—including a strap-on—for sexual purposes in the absence of any sort of masculine social presentation.

So in this presentation, rather than trying to categorize those various possibilities with respect to some sort of transgender continuum, I will include all evidence regarding the use of dildos by two assigned-female persons. But the question of combining that use with male presentation is salient because it strongly affected how societies reacted to such use.

As Klein notes, although the dildo, in one sense, emphasizes a phallocentric understanding of sex, it blurs the concept of sexual difference. Rather than people being divided into those who do, or do not, have a penis, the penis becomes an optional accessory. It contradicts the image of a “natural” body and becomes one more tool with which a constructed masculinity can be assembled.

Valerie Traub points out that Early Modern women’s employment of anatomical “supplements” does not result in an imitation of man, but a replacement that emphasizes the artificiality of the gender binary, and indeed of “man” as a concept. To the extent that the dildo did become a fetish object, it was not so much for the women who were using them, but for the authorities who fixated on the phallus precisely in the context of its absence and displacement. Early Modern discourse around the use of a dildo by female couples is not about sexuality, so much as it’s about gender; not about the pleasure the women experience, but on the usurpation of male prerogatives. And that usurpation of male prerogatives was precisely the reason why the presence or absence of a dildo became a flashpoint for how female homoeroticism was judged.

It is inescapable that most (though not all) of the literature depicting dildo use was written by men for male consumption. As usual, this makes it difficult to evaluate to what extent it represents reality. Even when dildo use is included in legal testimony, one must consider that it was part of the social mythology around sex between women, and therefore was a point of scrutiny and perhaps even pressure on defendants to shape their narratives to those social myths. But all that said, there is sufficient evidence from multiple genres—including material culture—to conclude that dildos have been used for sexual stimulation for at least the last couple millennia, and were one of the options employed by women to control their own pleasure, both individually and in couples.

One theme that runs through the literature—especially from male authors—is the premise that, to count as “sex”, an act must include a penis or a penis substitute. Therefore, in some cultural contexts, penetration is the defining attribute for a sex act, though the use of a dedicated object is not required. Pleasure might be experienced without penetration, but it might not be classified as “sex.”

Contexts that focus on penetration as essential for pleasure often downplay any emotional relationship between the women involved and focus on the dildo simply as a sex toy. In this genre, there is also a strong theme of women finding the dildo inadequate or at least less satisfying than the biological equivalent. But it could be a “make do” when men are unavailable, as in the Restoration play Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery, when the men of the court turn to homosexual pleasures, and the ladies turn to using dildos on each other in frustration. Another example in this vein is the anonymous novel A New Atalantis for the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty-Eight where a sexually voracious woman is served by her French dildo-wielding maid who, on proving inadequate to the challenge, brings in a willing footman to finish the job more organically.

But even when the dildo is framed as a dispreferred alternative, there can be suggestions that women are using it in the context of a genuine romantic relationship, as in an anecdote in the 1718 A Treatise of Hermaphrodites where two young Italian women, having lost their male suitors, set up a house together as inseparable companions and take turns pleasuring each other with a strap-on dildo. When used by women in a solo context, the use of a dildo can be framed sympathetically (if with a certain amount of mockery) as in the doggerel verse Monsieur Thing’s Origin: or, Seignior D---o’s Adventures in Britain, detailing the trials and tribulations of a French dildo’s visit to London. Regardless of context, there’s sometimes a nod to the preferability of dildo use because it has no potential to result in pregnancy.

With that introduction, this discussion is going to take on four topics. First, a history of evidence for dildos and similar objects, regardless of who is using them. Then a brief look at some social attitudes toward their use, followed by legal issues specifically regarding female couples, and finally a discussion of terminology and construction.

A Brief History

In classical Greek art and poetry we find depictions and references to an “olisbos” which seems directly equivalent to dildo both in form and function. There is a possible reference to one in Sappho’s poetry, although the text is too fragmentary for context. More overtly, in a poem of the Hellenistic period, two women discuss an elaborate chain of re-gifting an olisbos from woman to woman. Sandra Boehringer concludes that this and several other representations concern the use of the olisbos for solitary gratification and is unconvinced that there is support for its use by female couples. But Nancy Rabinowitz’s article “Excavating Women’s Homoeroticism in Ancient Greece: The Evidence from Attic Vase Painting” identifies two such possible examples, one involving a woman approaching another wearing a “strap-on”, and a sexual scene in which a double-headed dildo is present.

Roman art and literature have similarly ambiguous references. One wall-painting from 1st century Pompeii may show a woman reclining naked in bed being approached by a woman wearing a dildo, but the image is damaged and faded and the interpretation is uncertain. In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, when Megillus tells Leaena about having “a substitute of my own” for sex, this may be a reference to a dildo. More clearly, in the 2nd-4th century work Forms of Love (attributed falsely to Lucian), the author suggests, “Let women, too, love each other. Let them strap to themselves cunningly contrived instruments of lechery, those mysterious monstrosities devoid of seed, and let woman lie with woman as does a man.”

The evidence for dildos in the early medieval period primarily comes from penitential manuals that prescribe what sort of penance should be assigned for using one. Women who “practice vice” together are punished less severely than heterosexual adultery and much less severely than male homosexual activity, unless the women use an “instrument”. As noted in the 9th century penitential of Hincmar of Rheims, such women “do not put flesh to flesh as in the fleshly genital member of one into the body of the other, since nature precludes this, but they do transform the use of that part of their body into an unnatural one: it is said that they use instruments of diabolical operations to excite desire.” A version of Iphis and Ianthe revised into a moral lesson in a medieval text converts Ovid’s divinely-mediated change of sex into the use of an artificial penis substitute by the female couple.

In the 13th century, in an Italian legal record, we have an unusually detailed and candid description of the device used by Bertolina Guercia. Court testimony accused her of “using a certain mancipium with two silk testicles, conducting herself lustfully with women with this mancipium as men do with women.” The witness said that Bertolina showed him her silk virilia (i.e., dildo) and explained that she used it for sexual purposes.

Until we get closer to the 17th century, the evidence is similar to Bertolina’s case: testimony in court records where the presence or use of a dildo is taken as evidence of criminal sexual activity between two women. (Note that this only applies in countries where such use was illegal, which wasn’t the case in England.) As we’ll discuss later, this could be the key element in whether the relationship was considered criminal, and influenced the fate of the accused. While Bertolina used her virilia for sexual purposes, she was not accused of cross-dressing. Whereas in 15th century Germany, Katherina Hetzeldorfer used her strap-on in the context of cross-dressing, passing for a man, and sexually assaulting a woman—for which she was executed.

A turning point in our evidence for dildo use was the rise of pornographic texts, starting in the 16th century. Aretino’s illustrated sexual “dialogues” included women pleasuring themselves with dildos. An illustrated edition of Nicholas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica shows a group of upper-class women shopping in a “dildo market” with wares hung up on display as if in a butcher’s shop. Brantôme’s Lives of Gallant Ladies goes into some detail about dildos at the French court, usually in a context that mocks the women or suggests that this practice will inevitably have negative consequences. He tells an anecdote about a ruler who, “having suspicions about two ladies of his court who made use of them, had them watched so well that he surprised them, so that one was found possessed of and fitted with a large one between her legs, neatly fastened with little bands around her body, so that it seemed to be a natural member.” In another story, the apartments of the ladies in waiting were being searched for contraband weapons, and “there was one who was found by the captain of the guards in possession in her chest not of pistols but of four large, neatly made dildos.”

Up through the 17th century, there was an expectation that women had an active sex drive and would naturally seek out a means of satisfying it. In this context, the dildo was depicted as a tool used by women of all classes and sexual orientations for their fulfilment. While court records highlighted the conjunction of dildos with gender crossing, popular literature was far more likely to associate them with femme women who simply happened to be over-sexed. Sexual practices of all types treated female pleasure as desirable and essential, both for successful impregnation and for a woman’s health. But the rise of interest in dildos, shifts the context from procreation to pleasure; from medical advice to bawdy humor. In this context, the image of two femme women instructing each other in the pleasures of non-procreative sex merges seamlessly with the image of lesbians, engaging in sex with each other for its own sake (though always—in the literature—for the purpose of the male reader’s arousal).

The early 18th century doggerel verse Monsieur Thing’s Origin: or, Seignior D---o’s Adventures in Britain, details the trials and tribulations of a French dildo’s visit to London, illustrating both solitary use by women frustrated in love, and one verse involving a female couple.

One of these girls tied Monsieur to her middle,
To try if she the secret could unriddle;
She acted man, being in a merry mood,
Striving to please her partner as she cou’d;
And thus they took it in their turns to please
Their lustful inclinations to appease.

In the anonymous 1735 poem “The Sappho-an” the Greek gods have been warned that the women of Olympus are sexually unsatisfied because the gods are all dallying with boys instead of paying attention to them. The mortal poet Sappho shows up and explains to the goddesses that there are other ways to get satisfaction. An extensive catalog of techniques and implements are discussed before Sappho settles down to displaying and demonstrating an ivory dildo.

While pop culture references to dildos were often simply salacious and mocking, there was also a streak of hostility. There is a running theme throughout western history that sex between women is inherently less satisfying because only penetrative sex is the “real thing.” But the use of a dildo raises anxieties that perhaps even that handicap can be worked around, making men entirely obsolete with regard to women’s pleasure. In some literature, anxiety about dildoes stands in for a shift in understanding that perhaps women don’t actually need men to have completely satisfying sex lives. The phallus becomes separated, not only from male bodies, but from the context of masculinity entirely.

But in the later 18th century, we begin seeing the notion that the idealized woman was sexually passive. In this context, active sexuality shifted to being viewed as inherently masculine (or low-class, or foreign) and the motif arises of the dangerous, masculine-appearing woman who seduces and satisfies her female lover with the aid of a dildo. We can see these contrasting themes co-existing in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (or Fanny Hill), where the instrument is primarily a sex toy, and in the biography of Catherine Vizzani (introduced to England via Cleland’s translation and adaptation), where a young Italian woman with an exclusive sexual interest in women, cross-dresses and enjoys multiple sexual relationships with women, using a leather dildo.

While Vizzani achieved an unusual degree of acceptance and success, it is far more likely for the records to feature lives gone badly awry, in which the presence of dildo-mediated sex is only one aspect, but becomes a locus of anxiety and an excuse for harsh measures. The strap-on dildo used by Catharina Lincken in her marriage to Catharina Muhlhahn (as well as in her other previous relationships with women) was a central feature of the 1721 court case against her, although violent interactions with her mother-in-law and her habit of switching back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism were of greater legal significance.

Another German trial in 1802 followed similar lines. Ilsabe Bunck joined the army and twice married women while presenting as a man. Bunck’s use of a dildo for sexual relations became a major point of contention in court to determine whether it fell in the category of sodomy, but her execution was most likely due to other contributing circumstances.

The dildo fades from view in popular culture across the 18th century as it shifts from being viewed as a sex toy to being viewed as more closely associated with lesbianism. But at the same time, as a focus of social anxiety, the dildo was being displaced by the image of the lesbian with an enlarged clitoris that was capable of penetration. It was as if, once the dildo had been firmly strapped onto a lesbian body, the next step was to envision it as growing there organically. The dildo would only re-emerge into public discourse with the rise of the decadent movement’s fascination with lesbian sex in the later 19th century.

Social Considerations

As we’ve seen, social attitudes towards dildos shifted with changing perceptions of female sexuality, of the definitions of sexual acts, and of the ways in which female sexual independence challenged phallocentric assumptions and men’s relevance to women’s pleasure. When dildos are viewed as a “second-best” alternative for pleasure, used by femme-presenting women, they tend to be lightly mocked as harmless toys. But when they are viewed as a serious challenge to men’s position, the mockery becomes harsher and the spectre is raised that dildos will injure women’s reproductive systems—as Brantôme asserts—that their use will lead to licentious moral decay, or that their use represents an appropriation of male privilege.

The use of a dildo by women who transed gender placed them in the most heavily condemned group, even in places like England where the condemnation was social rather than legal. In contrast, even clearly articulated female same-sex desire was treated mildly as long as overt male signifiers were not present. At best, the dildo is depicted humorously as an independent male presence within women’s erotic space. Only occasionally, when appropriated more overtly as attachable masculinity do attitudes veer into unease. That unease becomes overt anxiety when the dildo serves as part of a more complete masculine presentation. Dildos destabilize masculinity from two angles: the ability to appropriate it, and the ability to render it irrelevant.

Another aspect of cultural response to dildos is in an element of xenophobia with the object being depicted as a “foreign visitor,” as in the poem Monsieur Thing’s Origin. This may partially motivate the peculiar fascination Europeans had with the use of dildos among secluded women in Islamic cultures, such as the story travelers told about the use of cucumbers in Ottoman harems. But such information is not limited to the writings of Europeans. In the 16th century, Ottoman scholar Deli Birader Gazali wrote, “In big cities, there are famous dildo women. They put on manly clothes, they ride cavalry horses, and they also ride kochis [covered wagons] for fun. Rich and noble women invite them to their houses and offer them nice shirts and clothing. These women tie dildos on their waist and grease them with almond oil, and then start the job, dildoing the cunt.”

Despite the focus of this present podcast, one important thing to keep in mind is that there has never been a fixed correspondence between dildo use and female homoeroticism. For every example of dildos in sapphic contexts, there’s a counter-example where the device explicitly stands in for a desired heterosexual activity that is unavailable or inconvenient. Furthermore, dildos are only one of a wide range of sexual techniques associated with female couples—though one that is highly salient because of the anxiety it produces in society. Nor is there always a close correlation between female masculinity and a preference for use of a dildo. Ann Lister—you knew I had to drop in a Lister reference at some point, right?—Ann Lister, for all that she envisioned her desire for women as partaking of some sort of inherent masculinity, never gives any indication that she used a dildo in bed and, in fact, expresses disdain for “sapphic artifices that create distance” which, in context, can be interpreted as a dildo.

Legal Considerations

Aside from social attitudes towards dildo use, depending on the era and context, there could be legal consequences that ranged from awkward to deadly. As noted previously, official anxiety around dildos was not so much about their sexual function as it was about gender appropriation. The church might frown on any sort of unauthorized sex—especially if it fit the shifting definition of “sodomy” at that moment—but the penances for women using an “instrument” for non-procreative sex demonstrate that this was considered more on the level of masturbation than adultery or fornication.

But when the use of a dildo was combined with other aspects of appropriating a male role, then both the religious and secular authorities brought out the big guns. Prosecutions for sexual activity between women are notoriously scanty in the records—far less common than for sexual activity between men. And, as noted previously, in some places such as England, there were no official legal prohibitions at all. But when we look at the legal cases addressing women’s sexual relationships, a common thread is that prosecution rarely occurs unless a penetrative instrument is involved, and the consequences are most severe when both a dildo and gender-crossing is involved.

In Louis Crompton’s classic study “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity,” reviewing legal cases in Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries, among the 6 cases he identifies where at least one of the women was executed, 4 involved both cross-dressing and the use of a dildo, one involved a dildo only, and one deliberately omits details of the sexual act from the record (but also involves other aggravating circumstances). Other researchers have added to this tally by searching legal archives. Sherry Velasco identifies a number of prosecutions for lesbian acts in Spanish records of the Inquisition, where a key element of the testimony and sentencing was whether an “instrument” had been used. If it was concluded that no instrument had been involved, there might be no prosecution, even when the women confessed to a sexual relationship. And if an instrument was used but there was no cross-dressing, the women were not always condemned. Further, cross-dressing alone—though penalized—does not appear to have resulted in execution in the absence of sexual elements. But when the two factors are combined, the default result was execution unless there were significant extenuating circumstances.

In countries where there was no legal basis for prosecuting “female sodomy,” cases where there was an intersection of gender-crossing and sexual relations using a dildo were usually categorized as “fraud” if someone took the trouble to make an accusation. In this context, the sexual aspect might be treated as a sensational “extra” but the primary concern was laying claim to a masculine gender role, including marriage to a woman.

Words and Materials

The earliest identified use of the word “dildo” for a sex toy is in Thomas Nashe’s 1592 poem “The Choise of Valentines.” Later references attribute the origin of the word to Italy, perhaps as an adaptation of diletto “pleasure.” But a competing theory notes that there’s a long tradition of English ballads using “dildo” and related words as “nonsense” refrains, including in sexual or suggestive contexts—a tradition that continued through the 17th century. This ambiguity between nonsense-rhymes and sex toys is sometimes deliberately employed to create innuendo.

But earlier, and outside the English-speaking world, what else were these objects called?

We’ve already mentioned the classical Greek olisbos. In Latin, a phallus-shaped amulet was called a fascinum from its other purpose in protecting against magic or witchcraft, but the word also appears when its used as a sex toy, as in the Satyricon of Petronius. Medieval Latin sources tend to describe it simply as an instrument or device, and we see this tradition continued in Bertolina’s mancipium using a word meaning “possession, property.” Bertolina also describes her sex aid as a virilia, simply indicating a male sex organ, and this is another strand of vocabulary where the object may be labeled with the same language used for the body part. Catharina Vizzani’s instrument is described in Italian as a piuolo which appears to mean “peg or stake.” A late 19th century source indicates that other Italian terms are passatempo (past-time) and diletto (delight), but it’s unclear how early these were used. In French the later term is godemiche, supposedly from Latin gaude mihi meaning “please me” and it may well be that this is the word represented by the abbreviation “g” in Brantôme’s late 16th century writings. Two lesbians in early 16th century Spain were called by their neighbors baldresera in reference to their dildo use—a word that (based on a very cursory search) may refer to a type of very soft leather, presumably meaning the material involved in the dildo’s construction. So, in general, terminology seems to be descriptive, with only a few contexts offering a dedicated word for the object.

We find a great deal more information on materials and even specific shapes in some cases. Leather is the most commonly-mentioned material. The early Greek poem that talked about a dildo being passed around among women described it as “beautifully stitched red leather.” The 15th century trial records of Katharina Hetzeldorfer include a fairly detailed description of her “instrument.” One of her female partners described it as “a huge thing, as big as half an arm. She thought it was like a horn and pointed in front and wide behind.” Katharina then confesses that after penetrating her partner first with her fingers and then with a “piece of wood what she held between her legs,” she said she then “made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round.” Spanish records of 1502 and 1603 describe an instrument made of lambskin and one of leather, though the user of the latter said she stopped using it because it was painful. In 1721, Catherina Linck engaged in sexual relations using “a penis of stuffed leather with two stuffed testicles made from pig’s bladder attached to it.” Also in the 18th century, Catterina Vizzani used “a nice leather dildo, stuffed with rags” which was belted on. An archaeological find of a leather dildo from an 18th century site in Poland is about 8 inches long, stuffed with hair, has a carved wooden tip, and has two testicles attached at the base. The trial records of Ilsabe Bunck in 1802 allege she used an artificial penis made of leather or fabric, though the testimony was contradictory.

Fabric of various types is the next most common material mentioned. In addition to Ilsabe’s fabric dildo just mentioned, Bertolina’s 13th century Italian one was made of silk, with attached silk testicles. Two late 17th century literary references describe a dildo sewn from velvet and stuffed with bran, and one made from satin and velvet. Liza Blake’s article includes a photo of a surviving cloth dildo with cords for attaching it to the body, but there is no provenance attributed to it.

Two records refer to wooden implements, not counting the use of wood as an internal stiffening agent. In the 15th century, Katharina Hetzeldorfer said she used a piece of wood held between her legs before making one of leather stiffened with wood. Two Spanish women in 1603 were said to use a dildo made of cane, although they testified they used leather instead.

At a higher level of luxury, ivory had its supporters. The reference to an ivory dildo in the 18th century poem The Sappho-an may have been literary hyperbole, but there is a surviving ivory artifact of the same century, possibly French, that is hollow and includes a “squirting mechanism” as well as coming with an embroidered cloth storage bag.

Similarly smooth, but less luxurious, there are several literary references to dildos made of glass. Thomas Nashe’s 1592 poem “The Choise of Valentines” describes one as “almost two handfuls high, straight, round, and plumb” with “one eye,” made of “congealed glass” and nourished with water or milk that spurts forth. At a similar date, John Marston’s poem “The Scourge of Villanies” describes a woman using a “glassie instrument.”

Some commentaries on dildos compare them favorably to alternatives such as candles, fingers, or vegetables such as carrots and parsnips. And then, of course, there’s the infamous reference to cucumbers in travelers’ tales about Ottoman Turkey. So if we’re being expansive, we can add vegetables and candles to the catalog of more temporary dildo materials.

Part of Liza Blake’s thesis about viewing dildos as dress accessories has to do with the shift to attaching them to the body with straps. Katherina Hetzeldorfer described a simple system with a string passed through a hole in the wooden handle of the dildo and tied around the body. The majority of references to attachment methods come from the 18th century, including the use of ribbons in the Treatise of Hermaphrodites, the “new-invented belt” mentioned in The Sappho-an, and Caterina Vizzani’s use of a belt for attachment. In Emma Donoghue’s book Passions Between Women she mentions a variation where the dildo could be attached with straps to the jaw rather than the crotch, perhaps suggesting it was designed for simultaneous oral sex. I haven’t been able to track down the source of this particular example.

In addition to the basic function of being stiff enough to insert and of an appropriate size and shape, dildos might have any of a number of additional features. Some are described as having attached testicles, which may be a design feature if used for gender crossing, but in other cases simply seems to be an aesthetic choice. One description mentions “rowels to heighten delights” which is somewhat hard to envision if we’re talking about something resembling spur rowels, that is, a rotating spiked wheel used to goad a horse. A regularly mentioned feature is a mechanism for squirting warm water or milk, perhaps held in a hollow reservoir in the dildo, to simulate ejaculation. The surviving possibly-18th century ivory dildo includes just such a mechanism, and this feature is mentioned in Nashe’s “The Choise of Valentines” and in the poem “Portsmouth’s Returne.”

There are a few mentions in the context of gender-crossing of phallic devices used for urination. Katharina Hetzeldorfer used an object “like a horn” that she was said to urinate through. In the 18th century, Christian Davies said that finding a “little silver tube” that a cross-dressing solder used for urination was the inspiration for Davies to do the same. But there seems to be no evidence that the same object would also be used for sexual purposes

Conclusions

Bringing this topic back around to the purpose of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, if you’re writing sapphic characters into history, would they have considered using a dildo for sex? What would they have thought about it? What would others think if they found out? Would it cause legal problems for them? As we can see, the answers are all over the map. Although there are large gaps in the nature of the historic evidence, there does seem to be a fairly continuous tradition of dildos being an available option, either for solitary use or for couples, and when used by couples, there seems to be a fairly continuous tradition of attaching them to the body for use. Although dildo use would fall outside of approved sexuality under the usual Christian emphasis on procreative sex, there were eras and contexts where it was considered nothing worse than a harmless amusement, if perhaps one that a woman might be teased about. Furthermore, throughout most of history there was no special association of dildos with lesbian sex. Not all lesbians used dildos and not all dildo users were lesbians. So possessing such an instrument would not be evidence about one’s sexual orientation as long as the user was not also cross-dressing. But in a significant subset of times and places, the combination of cross-dressing and dildo use could put the user in legal jeopardy, up to and including execution—not so much for the sexual transgression as for the challenge to male privilege. It’s up to you, the author, to decide where to go with all that.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• The cultural dynamics of dildo use
• A history of dildos in western culture
• The social and legal consequences of dildo use
• Terminology and materials of construction
• Sources used
  • Arvas, Abdulhamit. 2014. “From the Pervert, Back to the Beloved: Homosexuality and Ottoman Literary History, 11453-1923” in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature ed. E.L. McCallum & Mikko Tuhkanen. Cambridge University Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-107-03521-8
  • Auanger, Lisa. “Glimpses through a Window: An Approach to Roman Female Homoeroticism through Art Historical and Literary Evidence” in Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Lisa Auanger eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press, Austin. ISBN 0-29-77113-4
  • Benkov, Edith. “The Erased Lesbian: Sodomy and the Legal Tradition in Medieval Europe” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. ed. by Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn. Palgrave, New York, 2001.
  • Blake, Liza. 2011. “Dildos and Accessories: The Functions of Early Modern Strap-Ons” in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. University of Michigan Press. pp. 130-156
  • Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
  • Bon, Ottaviano. 1587. Descrizione del serraglio del Gransignore. Translated by Robert Withers (1625) as The Grand Signiors Serraglio, published in: Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes edited by Samuel Purchas.
  • Borris, Kenneth (ed). 2004. Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-1-138-87953-9
  • Brantôme (Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme). 1740. Vies des Dames Galantes. Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs, Paris.
  • Burshatin, Israel. “Elena Alias Eleno: Genders, Sexualities, and ‘Race’ in the Mirror of Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Spain” in Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-11483-7
  • Castle, Terry (ed). 2003. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-12510-0
  • Clark, Anna. 1996. "Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7(1), pp. 23-50.
  • Clarke, John R. 1998. Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100 B.C.-A.D. 250. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-20024-1
  • Crompton, Louis. 1985. “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791” in Licata, Salvatore J. & Robert P. Petersen (eds). The Gay Past: A Collection of Historical Essays. Harrington Park Press, New York. ISBN 0-918393-11-6 (Also published as Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 6, numbers 1/2, Fall/Winter 1980.)
  • Donato, Clorinda. 2006. “Public and Private Negotiations of Gender in Eighteenth-Century England and Italy: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Case of Catterina Vizzani” in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29. pp.169-189
  • Donato, Clorinda. 2020. The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual identity, science and sensationalism in eighteenth-century Italy and England. Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-78962-221-8
  • Donoghue, Emma. 1995. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 0-06-017261-4
  • Eriksson, Brigitte. 1985. “A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records” in Licata, Salvatore J. & Robert P. Petersen (eds). The Gay Past: A Collection of Historical Essays. Harrington Park Press, New York. ISBN 0-918393-11-6 (Also published as Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 6, numbers 1/2, Fall/Winter 1980.)
  • Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
  • Halberstam, Judith (Jack). 1997. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 978-1-4780-0162-1
  • Haley, Shelley P. “Lucian’s ‘Leaena and Clonarium’: Voyeurism or a Challenge to Assumptions?” in Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Lisa Auanger eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press, Austin. ISBN 0-29-77113-4
  • Hubbard, Thomas K. 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-23430-7
  • Karras, Ruth Mazo. 2005. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-415-28963-4
  • Klein, Ula Lukszo. 2021. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. ISBN 978-0-8139-4551-4
  • Krimmer, Elisabeth. 2004. In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800. Wayne State University Press, Detroit. ISBN 0-8143-3145-9
  • Lansing, Carol. 2005. “Donna con Donna? A 1295 Inquest into Female Sodomy” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Third Series vol. II: 109-122.
  • Lardinois, André. “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos” in Bremmer, Jan. 1989. From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02089-1
  • Linkinen, Tom. 2015. Same-sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. ISBN 978-90-8964-629-3
  • Matter, E. Ann. 1989. “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, eds. Judith Plaskow & Carol P. Christ. Harper & Row, San Francisco.
  • Michelsen, Jakob. 1996. “Von Kaufleuten, Waisenknaben und Frauen in Männerkleidern: Sodomie im Hamburg des 18. Jahrhunderts” in Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 9: 226-27.
  • Mills, Robert. 2015. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-16912-5
  • O’Driscoll, Sally. 2010. “A Crisis of Femininity: Re-Making Gender in Popular Discourse” in Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Beynon, John C. & Caroline Gonda eds. Ashgate, Farnham. ISBN 978-0-7546-7335-4
  • Phillips, Kim M. & Barry Reay. 2011. Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History. Polity Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-0-7456-2522-5
  • Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. “Excavating Women’s Homoeroticism in Ancient Greece: The Evidence from Attic Vase Painting” in Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Lisa Auanger eds. 2002. Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press, Austin. ISBN 0-29-77113-4
  • Rowson, Everett K. 1991. “The categorization of gender and sexual irregularity in medieval Arabic vice lists” in Body guards : the cultural politics of gender ambiguity edited by Julia Epstein & Kristina Straub. Routledge, New York. ISBN 0-415-90388-2
  • Schleiner, Winfried. “Cross-Dressing, Gender Errors, and Sexual Taboos in Renaissance Literature” in Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-11483-7
  • Traub, Valerie. 1994. “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England” in Queering the Renaissance ed. by Jonathan Goldberg. Duke University Press, Durham and London. ISBN 0-8223-1381-2
  • Traub, Valerie. 2002. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-44885-9
  • Van der Meer, Theo. 1991. “Tribades on Trial: Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 1:3 424-445.
  • Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0
  • Wahl, Elizabeth Susan. 1999. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Stanford. ISBN 0-8047-3650-2
  • Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3
• This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Dildo

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
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• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 277 - On the Shelf for January 2024 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2024/01/06 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2024. While writing up the script and notes for this episode I kept having to correct the year, so I guess I’m not quite ready for this. What I am ready for is receiving submissions for the 2024 fiction series. If you’re listening to this at any time close to the release date, then you still have most of the month of January to submit a story. Heck, if you’re motivated, you have time to brainstorm, write, revise, and then submit! Since I’m recording this episode late in December, I’m still at the point of worrying about getting enough good submissions. (I always do, but I always worry about it.) Given the timing, I won’t have decisions made and contracts signed in time to announce the acceptances in the February On the Shelf episode, so check the blog for updates.

It is quite possible that this may be the last year I run the fiction series. There are a number of factors I consider each year when I make that yes/no decision: the enthusiasm of the submissions, whether the fiction shows get a good listener response—either in terms of download numbers or in terms of audience feedback. But the factor that will change in 2025 is that I’ll be retiring and will be making a number of decisions about controlling expenses. I don’t expect the show to pay for itself in any meaningful way—it’s a labor of love and I want to keep it that way. But royalties and narrator fees are a big line-item expense that may need to be re-evaluated. That said, I’ve gotten a lot of personal satisfaction out of publishing sapphic historical short stories on the show and encouraging authors in the field in a very concrete way. So a lot will depend on how the books balance on both the monetary and satisfaction scales.

Publications on the Blog

The blog didn’t see any new books or articles in December, even though I read several things that will be written up eventually. My day-job has been really hectic, which means that my allegedly “free” time gets squeezed. (See my previous comment about upcoming retirement. I love my job, but I’m eager to see the end of it.) I did fit in another session of downloading articles from JSTOR at the U.C. Berkeley library, so in theory I have enough material for the next year just from that source. Maybe one of my New Year’s resolutions will be returning to a schedule of at least one publication per week on the blog, rather than the boom-and-bust schedule I’ve managed recently.

If you have favorite topics that you’d love to see prioritized, drop me a note, either in comments on the blog or in social media. I probably have publications on almost any subject you’re interested in! For that matter, if you ever have ideas for a podcast topic, I’ve done a number of shows in the past that were inspired by a listener asking a specific question. I’ve been trying to intersperse the trope shows with other content to keep things varied. I’d love to know what you’d find interesting.

Interviews

I had meant to get caught up with my pending interviews this month (at least, caught up with recording them, but spacing out their release). It didn’t happen. For reasons peculiar to how my brain works, interview scheduling is one of the hardest parts of this job. Don’t despair—there will be interviews. Eventually.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

But let’s move on to what has become the meat of the On the Shelf epiosodes: the new book listings! Things are very clustered in the Regency-to-Victorian era this month, with a scattering of later settings.

We start out with a topic near and dear to my heart: Jane Austen re-tellings. In The Lady's Wager by Olivia Hampton, Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice gets a chance to break out of her shell.

Mary Bennet is in London to try to sell the novels and the conduct book she has secretly written over the last few years. She has to sell them. The threat of being left penniless by her father's death grows larger every single day, and Mary cannot stand the idea of being dependent upon her family. The family who doesn't seem to see her as a real and valuable person. Then she meets Miss Gemma Hart, a former governess with a beautiful face and a gift for music. Not to mention, Gemma has a habit of making Mary's heart sing.

Gemma's got a past filled with painful memories. She's desperate to wager on a horse that's running in a fixed race because if she doesn't get more money, and soon, she may very well be forced into taking another position, something she just cannot do. Mary Bennet, with her big dark eyes and habit of punching men in the nose is not a distraction that Gemma can afford.

As Gemma and Mary move from London to Longbourn they find themselves risking not just their money and reputations, but their hearts. Is love a gamble worth taking? Find out in The Lady's Wager.

Helen's House (School of Enlightenment series) by Maggie Sims is a sapphic spin-off from what looks like a primarily heterosexual spicy Regency series. Based on the cover copy of other books in the series, you may want to expect some BDSM content.

Regina Carlisle has found her forever home at The School of Enlightenment as the stablemistress. She can run the stables, wear men’s trousers, and love who she wants. Despite being surrounded by lovely women, only one woman tempts her—her employer, the headmistress. Too bad about the no-fraternization rule.

The School of Enlightenment is Helen Montague’s passion. As a widow, she focused her time building the school from nothing, but now it is established, she is lonely. When the stablemistress is injured in a fall, Helen steps in to help take care of her, discovering a new desire. Although she’s in charge of enforcing the rules, Helen is now tempted to break them.

Time-travel provides the framework for The Ease of Time by Charlotte Rowan from Spectrum Books.

If Max has learned one thing from life, it’s that nothing happens without a reason. Though the reason why she was transported from 21st century East London to the English countryside in 1813 might be a little difficult to comprehend…

But inexplicably, it’s the reality she finds herself in after an encounter with a mysterious portrait. And so what if she meets a family that makes her feel like she belongs? What if to return to her own time, she has to trust a woman who could be more than she seems at first glance?

It’s not like Max was meant to stay… right?

Jane Walsh’s “Spinsters of Inverley” series from Bold Strokes Books has a third installment in The Secret Duchess.

When the Duke of Stanmere’s will reveals a nasty secret, London Society is shocked—and so is his widow, Joan. Humiliated by the scandal, Joan flees to Inverley in disguise. Surely the quaint seaside town would be the last place anyone would look for a duchess on the run. After her mother’s remarriage, fashionable spinster Miss Maeve Balfour must make a living with hands whose only labor has been arranging her hair into the latest style. With nowhere to turn and nothing to lose, she persuades mysterious newcomer Joan to let her stay in her manor house. Although entranced by worldly and seductive Maeve, Joan doesn’t know if she can trust again. As Maeve learns Joan’s secrets, she yearns to protect her from the men who have sought to destroy her. But can a spinster and a widow dare to defy a dukedom—and win each other’s hearts?

I did something of a mini-round-up of sapphic stories inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre in my episode on gothic stories. Here’s a new entry in the field: Escaping Mr. Rochester by L.L. McKinney from Harper Collins

Jane Eyre has no interest in a husband. Eager to make her own way in the world, she accepts the governess position at Thornfield Hall.

Though her new employer, Edward Rochester, has a charming air—not to mention a handsome face—Jane discovers that his smile can sharpen in an instant. Plagued by Edward’s mercurial mood and the strange wails that echo through the corridors, Jane grows suspicious of the secrets hidden within Thornfield Hall—unaware of the true horrors lurking above her very head.

On the topmost floor, Bertha Mason is trapped in more ways than one. After her whirlwind marriage to Edward turned into a nightmare, he locked her away as revenge for withholding her inheritance. Now his patience grows thin in the face of Bertha’s resilience and Jane’s persistent questions, and both young women are in more danger than they realize.

When their only chance at safety—and perhaps something more—is in each other’s arms, can they find and keep one another safe before Edward’s dark machinations close in around them?

There are a vast number of possible set-ups for sapphic romance in the 19th century and I’m always delighted to see one I haven’t encountered before, which is why I’m definitely looking forward to Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking #1) by Emma R. Alban from Avon.

Gwen has a brilliant beyond brilliant idea. It’s 1857, and anxious debutante Beth has just one season to snag a wealthy husband, or she and her mother will be out on the street. But playing the blushing ingenue makes Beth’s skin crawl and she’d rather be anywhere but here.

Gwen, on the other hand, is on her fourth season and counting, with absolutely no intention of finding a husband, possibly ever. She figures she has plenty of security as the only daughter of a rakish earl, from whom she’s gotten all her flair, fun, and less-than-proper party games. “Let’s get them together,” she says.

It doesn’t take long for Gwen to hatch her latest scheme: rather than surrender Beth to courtship, they should set up Gwen’s father and Beth’s newly widowed mother. Let them get married instead. “It’ll be easy” she says.

There’s just…one, teeny, tiny problem. Their parents kind of seem to hate each other. But no worries. Beth and Gwen are more than up to the challenge of a little twenty-year-old heartbreak. How hard can parent-trapping widowed ex-lovers be? Of course, just as their plan begins to unfold, a handsome, wealthy viscount starts calling on Beth, offering up the perfect, secure marriage. Beth’s not mature enough for this…

Now Gwen must face the prospect of sharing Beth with someone else, forever. And Beth must reckon with the fact that she’s caught feelings, hard, and they’re definitely not for her potential fiancé. That’s the trouble with matchmaking: sometimes you accidentally fall in love with your best friend in the process.

This next book, Eve of Kilcargin by Susan M. Gaffney, has an interesting back-story discussed in the cover copy. It says “Originally written in rural New Zealand in the early 1950s, it would surely have been a landmark in lesbian fiction if it had ever seen the light of day, but was sadly incomplete at the time of the author’s death. The story of her brief and troubled life, and her only novel’s seventy-year journey to publication reads like a work of fiction in itself, with the manuscript believed lost in a fire until the 1990s, and finally completed in a posthumous collaboration between aunt and grandniece seven decades after its inception.”

It isn’t clear to me whether the credited author is the original writer or the grandniece indicated as having completed the work. I’d also be curious to know more about what aspects are the recent completion and which were original. (Alas, I can’t seem to find the author on social media or I might seek the answers to some of those questions.)

In 1919 Clara Bridewell, a widow of the Great War, receives an invitation to stay with her well-to-do aunt in the Irish countryside, to provide a stabilising influence on her unruly young cousin Eve. Upon arriving, she discovers that the family are destitute, and their sprawling country house is virtually a ruin. Clara soon finds herself embroiled in her aunt’s scheme to marry Eve to a wealthy young aristocrat in order to save the family home. But the romantic feelings she develops for her cousin, and the Irish struggle for independence from Britain, threaten to derail their plans.

 As usual, the two world wars provide gravity wells for stories set in the first half of the 20th century, for reasons explained in the cover copy for Don't Stop Me Now: Forbidden Love in Wartime by Roo Bannister.

Imagine if all the men in Britain suddenly disappeared. Imagine there was no clue as to when they might return. Imagine a world where the women were suddenly called upon to do the jobs that men have dominated for decades if not centuries.

At the outbreak of World War II, that is exactly what happened! the men were gradually all called to war while the women were encouraged to go to the factory gates, the farms, the military - anywhere they could to be of service to their country. Gladly they went, while their men were off fighting, the gals did their part to keep the country going. But what of love? What of romance?

Meet Stella, a boyish young daughter of an Irish couple settled in London. Raised on the streets of London, Stella grew up in fist fights with boys in the neighbourhood, wishing she had been born a boy and feeling out of place in her time and space. At the outbreak of war, her older brother Derek was first in line to sign up for army duty, now she feels she too must serve her country as bravely as her brother. Off to the factory she goes, meeting new friends and finding independence for the first time in her life - a whole new world in war! And then...

In walks Callie, a beautiful red head with almond shaped eyes and a cheeky grin. Stella is instantly speechless, on edge and awkward whenever she encounters Callie at the factory. What on Earth are all these squiggly tummy, burning face, tongue-tied feelings all about? And what is she to do about them? The two women encounter love in the most trying of circumstances, in a world at war with itself - how will this world treat this new love in an era when same sex relationships are still so very taboo? Illegal even. Certainly not what Stella was raised to believe in or consider as a life choice. But....how to resist this angelic, confident and brazenly attractive young woman?

In the first part of their story, Stella and Callie struggle to battle through this new land of confusion and unspoken expectations. With no one to confide in, who do the women find the right path through life in London...and then the Lakes and later still further afield. Will they ever find a moment in time to stand together honestly and truly? Or will their discovery of love, sex and relationship in the midst of global chaos be torn apart by circumstance?

You Stumble, I Fall (Generations of Love #1) by Christine Collins from Painted Hearts Publishing falls into that awkward zone of “is it historical fiction if I was alive then?” But I suppose that’s an unfair standard the older I get.

1961. Summer. At nineteen, Louise is oblivious to her attraction to women and a novice in matters of love. Living in the heart of the English countryside, she loves horses and spends her days looking after a feisty pony that needs schooling. Louise dreams of a career in medicine, but her studies have been put on hold after the sudden death of her father.

Mary, a twenty-year-old visitor to the countryside, is well aware of her own lesbian identity and is fascinated by Lou. Schooled in privilege, Mary has traveled across Europe with her family and pursued her artistic aspirations during two gap years in Florence, Rome, and Paris. However, her family's plans for her clash with Mary’s ambition to become a portrait artist, exacerbated by her father's contempt for homosexuals.

Opportunity, sexual tension, proximity, and the glorious countryside ignites their passion.

Other Books of Interest

One book falls in my “other books of interest” category. At first I thought this was another fantasy-Viking-era story, but the setting seems to be entirely the modern world. It’s the intrusion of ancient Norse gods that gives the historic impression—that and having a historic re-enactor as a protagonist. Check out Kiss of Death by Bryony Rosehurst.

Maeve thought she would have more time...

A seemingly unremarkable woman from the north of England struggling to make ends meet, she attends York’s Viking Festival every year to participate in a battle reenactment. But when she wakes up wounded and bloody in the middle of the empty battlefield, she finds the world to be a much darker place than she realised.

Hel has many names. The Goddess of Death is just one of them. Cast out by Odin, her duty is to take souls back to her kingdom of Helheim, where they can live out their afterlife peacefully. But when she sets out to claim a shield-maiden, it quickly becomes clear that something is wrong. Jorvik has changed drastically since the last time she was here, and Maeve is no ordinary warrior.

As the storm rages, they find themselves unable to get back to the gates of Hel and must question if the universe has other plans for them — plans that might have something to do with the volcanic eruption happening not far from Hel’s home. With the world crumbling and Maeve filled with grief, the strength of Maeve’s unclaimed spirit is dwindling quickly, but their relationship only develops as they battle through tempests and face the Norns, confronted by some harrowing truths and monsters along the way. Will the Fates allow them to reach Helheim in time, or will Hel lose the woman she is quickly falling in love with?

I’ll finish up the new release listings by taking a bit of license in mentioning a new French translation of an existing book. Because, you see, it’s L'Héritière des Secrets the first translated edition of my debut novel Daughter of Mystery. The translator is Anne Bénédicte Damon and it’s published by Homoromance Editions. I’ll include the French-language cover copy in the show transcript. I am totally over the moon to have the book translated and am grateful to Anne for her interest in pursuing this project.

Margerit n'attendait de son parrain, le baron Saveze, qu'un petit héritage, juste de quoi se constituer une dot. Au lieu de cela, le baron lui a laissé la majorité de sa fortune et les services d'une épéiste redoutable, ainsi que la haine de l'homme qui s'attendait à être son héritier. La nouvelle fortune de Margerit lui donne la liberté de réaliser son rêve d'étudier la thaumaturgie dans la ville de Rotenek, pour apprendre les Mystères des Saints. Barbara était fière d'être la duelliste du baron, mais pensait que sa mort la libérerait. Aujourd'hui, son destin est lié à celui de Margerit. Ce qui commence comme un devoir devient bientôt plus dangereux pour son cœur que la pointe d'une épée. Lorsque les études de Margerit les entraînent toutes les deux dans un complot impliquant la succession royale, il faudra un miracle pour les sauver. Heureusement, les miracles sont ce que Margerit est venue apprendre à Rotenek.

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading in the past month? Once again, it’s been all audiobooks. First up is Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart, a novelization of the schoolgirl romance between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine. As they say, there are no spoilers in history, and the sweet love story spun out in Donoghue’s always-elegant prose is inevitably tragic, with its hints of the story that might have happened.

I continued my collection of K.J. Charles’ gay historical romances with a couple of her earlier titles: Think of England and Wanted, A Gentleman. Both of them involve characters with marginalized ethnicities (Jewish in the first case, and Black in the second case) with a rather harshly unflinching look at the realistic prejudices of the times. Wanted, A Gentleman also has one of Charles’ favorite tropes: an unreliable protagonist—but I’ll leave the specifics alone to avoid spoilers.

I listened to a historic mystery, Death Below Stairs by Jennifer Ashley, as an introduction before reading a spin-off novella that features a sapphic couple in Victorian London. Alas, the premise of the series, with a cook to an upper class family as the amateur detective, was hard to swallow—at least as presented in this story. The protagonist spent so much time running around investigating, it’s impossible that she wouldn’t have been sacked the second day on the job. Other than the spin-off, I’m not likely to continue following the series but I have hopes to enjoy that one when I find time to read in print.

I hope you’ve all been finding books you’ve enjoyed, whether historical or not. I hope to post a blog about some of my favorites from this year. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make the time to get caught up on reviews.

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

• The Lady's Wager by Olivia Hampton
• Helen's House (School of Enlightenment) by Maggie Sims
• The Ease of Time by Charlotte Rowan
• The Secret Duchess (The Spinsters of Inverley #3) by Jane Walsh
• Escaping Mr. Rochester by L.L. McKinney
• Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking #1) by Emma R. Alban
• Eve of Kilcargin by Susan M. Gaffney
• Don't Stop Me Now: Forbidden Love in Wartime by Roo Bannister
• You Stumble, I Fall (Generations of Love #1) by Christine Collins

• Other Titles of Interest

• Kiss of Death by Bryony Rosehurst
• L'Héritière des Secrets by Heather Rose Jones (trans: Anne Bénédicte Damon)

• What I’ve been consuming

• Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
• Think of England by K.J. Charles
• Wanted, A Gentleman by K.J. Charles
• Death Below Stairs by Jennifer Ashley

• Call for submissions for the 2024 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
• Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 275 - Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 11: Employment Relationships - transcript

(Originally aired 2023/12/16 - listen here)

Introduction

This episode is part of our ongoing series “our f/favorite tropes,” examining how popular historic romance tropes apply differently when the couple are both women, rather than a male-female couple. As used in the romance field, a trope is a recurring literary device or motif—a conventional story element that carries a certain set of expectations, associations, and resonances that connect the story that uses the trope to other works that have used it. The trope can be a character type, a situation, or a sort of “mini script.”

Today’s topic is employment-related tropes—any situation in which one member of the romantic couple works for the other member of the couple. In addition to considering gender dynamics, we’re also going to talk a little about the historic context of “employment”—in various forms—and how that intersects with gender as well.

As usual, I’ll add the disclaimer that my generalizations and examples will largely be drawn from western culture, so if you’re writing outside that scope you’ll need to check the assumptions.

It can help to split up employment tropes into three basic categories. Using the term “employment” for the first category is misleading, because that category covers enslavement and similar not-at-all-voluntary associations. I’m not going to address this category directly, but it draws on many of the same dynamics as the other categories—just more intensely on the consent-related issues. The second category is domestic employment, where the employee works in the employer’s home and provides various personal support services. The third category is non-domestic employment, covering situations where the employer and employee don’t reside in the same household—although even this category can get fuzzy around the edges in certain time periods.

Regardless of the type of employment, the relationship—and an important part of the dynamic for people who like these tropes—involves the presence of power differentials and associated consent issues. This can make the subject tricky to discuss, because for some fans of employment tropes, problematic power and consent issues are a major attraction, while for other fans, those issues represent a hazard to be worked around carefully.

On a more generally positive note, employment tropes generally bring in dynamics of compulsory proximity, and often the overlap between dynamics of trust, loyalty, and support that operate on both a personal and professional level.

Situating the Trope in Time

The ways in which employment tropes play out are strongly shaped by the historic setting. What types of employment were available? How did one enter a particular job? What restrictions or requirements do the jobs have on who may do them? How does the job shape other parts of your character’s life? What are the social and legal expectations of the employment contract? These are all factors that will be part of your general historic background research before considering the specific dynamics of your characters’ relationship and there isn’t space here to consider them in any detail.

Furthermore, when considering popular examples of employment-based relationships, there ways in which the difference between contemporary settings and historic settings are far more relevant than the gender of the participants. As modern people, we’re accustomed to a situation where employees expect much more control over their workplace conditions than they had in pre-20th century settings. We have more legal recourse and the power differentials—though still significant—are nowhere near as serious as in previous centuries. An employee can walk away from a problematic workplace without automatically putting all future employment at risk. So placing an employer-employee romance in a historic setting isn’t just a matter of set dressing, but involves very different rules and expectations.

As some general guidelines, settings in the ancient world (for example, classical Greece and Rome) are going to involve the significant presence of an enslaved workforce, especially for domestic labor, but the social and legal dynamics will differ from those of later eras.

The availability of domestic versus non-domestic employment will vary significantly for women in different eras, and will often depend on location, with non-domestic employment generally being associated with urban locations. While there will generally be some types of non-domestic employment available to women in all times, in many eras the majority of female employment will be domestic. Restrictions of the types of work available to women will often be greater the higher one’s social status. Manufacturing and craft type jobs are different in scope and nature before the Industrial Revolution, and the possibilities for employer-employee relationships are drastically affected by that shift.

The types of occupations and positions available to women, as contrasted with men, have also changed across the centuries, though not always in the same direction. The options for women’s non-domestic employment narrowed significantly around the 17th century and only began to expand again in the later 19th century.

From another angle, when dealing with pre-20th century employment, the general expectation that a married woman’s primary employment is taking care of her own household, means that the default expectation for an employer-employee pairing is for the employee to be unmarried. Expectations on the employer side are more variable. A woman employing domestic help is statistically likely to be married, unless she has an independent household, either as a widow or due to being wealthy. A woman employing non-domestic labor—assuming she’s the primary employer—may be more likely to be single, depending on the exact historic circumstances. It’s complicated and variable, and it may be helpful to go back and review some of the previous trope episodes that touched on economic independence, such as the episodes on spinsters, widows, and billionaires.

It’s probably a good rule of thumb that social status and employment power differentials will align closely—employees are unlikely to come from a higher social class than their employers, unless we’re also dealing with concealed origins.

Gender Dynamics in Workplace Romances

And that brings us to one of the two most significant gendered differences in employment tropes, because for a male-female workplace romance, gender adds a third axis to traditional power differentials. So if your employer is male and your employee is female, then you have the triple whammy, of gendered power, economic power, and most likely innate social power being in alignment, placing the female partner at multiple disadvantages in negotiating the relationship. In a historic context, even moreso than a contemporary one, there can be a strong pressure for a female employee to consider fielding romantic or sexual advances from her boss as part of the landscape. This makes it challenging for her to recognize sincere interest. And as an author, it can be tricky to set up believable romantic situations in which genuine consent is possible.

Conversely, if your employer is female and your employee is male, then you’re dealing with a structural conflict between the expectations of gendered power and the expectations of economic and social power. Both of these alignments can bring strong flavors to how the romantic relationship progresses. Does the male partner feel “unmanned” by being the less privileged member of the couple? Does the female partner feel the need to cede other types of power to make up for it? And that’s without touching the common taboo against women partnering men of a lower status.

But if both characters are female, then there is no extra layer of power differentials based on gender. The expectations of who will have initiative and control are based entirely on the employment relationship. Though we’ll get back to this topic in some of the literary examples.

The second significant difference applies primarily to domestic employment situations. Employer/employee interactions in the domestic sphere are traditionally aligned with gender. A female employer will have more direct interactions with female employees, and even if the household is headed by a single woman, interactions with male employees are likely to be managed through a male subordinate. In a more direct context, a female employer will be expected have close physical and personal interactions with female staff, in ways that would be highly suspect for a male employer. She will be dressed by women, cared for by women, kept company by women, and perform everyday tasks in the company of women. This creates a context where emotional bonds can develop naturally, where professional loyalty can shade over into personal attachment unnoticed, and where types of physical and emotional caretaking that we often associate with romance may be an inherent part of the employee’s work. Depending on the specific time period, other tropes that may naturally align with domestic employment are forced proximity and even in some cases “only one bed.”

So while a male employer initiating highly personal interactions with a female employee (or vice versa) inherently violates social rules, resulting in heightened awareness of the romantic or sexual potential, a female employer or employee doing the same things is working within the system, not against it.

Employment-Based Tropes in History and Historic Literature

When we look for romantic or erotic potential within a female employment relationship in history and historic literature, we find two main themes—and this is where gender dynamics can sneak in by a back door. One manifestation is where the employee falls into the traditionally female role in the relationship: being supportive, submissive, perhaps silently yearning that her devotion will be recognized and rewarded, where her romantic role aligns with the power dynamics of her employment. The employer is not necessarily “masculinized” by this dynamic because the power imbalance can rest entirely on social and economic forces.

The other manifestation is where the employee takes a more active, assertive role in the relationship, perhaps where caretaking shades over to providing protection, or where the inherent problem-solving requirements of service shift into taking charge. The employer may be depicted as relatively helpless, perhaps leaning on motifs of female incapability where she is hyper-feminized in comparison to the employee. Or the employee may be overtly masculinized and depicted as adopting multiple signifiers of a male social role, in addition to taking the lead in the romance.

Neither of these is required, of course, when writing a historic romance—here I’m talking about historic examples where a romantic or erotic overlay can be identified. So let’s look at some of those specific examples. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive catalog of romantic same-sex employment motifs.

We can see the motif of the devoted lady’s maid being depicted using standard romance tropes from a very early date. In the early Christian Greek romance of Xanthippe and Polyxena, the story of the beautiful young Polyxena being devoted to her mistress, being abducted from her chamber, and going through many perils and adventures to eventually be reunited is directly parallel to the structure of male-female romances of the same era.

In the French medieval romance L’Escoufle or “The Kite,” the young noblewoman Aelis, when abandoned in the world, takes up with a young working-class woman Ysabel with their interactions described in romantic and erotic terms. But class and employment relationships are constantly shifting around the female pairings in this story. Despite Aelis’s social isolation, she takes on the role of employer with respect to Ysabel, with Ysabel promising loyalty and obedience and Aelis setting up an embroidery business that Ysabel works to support. Then Aelis’s roles are upturned when the noblewoman she supplies with embroidered goods takes Aelis into her household as a handmaiden and their interactions then turn erotic. In both of the pairings, the higher status woman (or the one in the position of employer) takes charge of initiating the intimacies, and those intimacies are treated as an inherent aspect of the employment.

In a medieval or Renaissance context, the relationship between a queen or noblewoman and her ladies in waiting often take on a romantic tinge. While this may not be the typical image of an “employee,” the role definitely included personal service and a power dynamic that was dependent on a fine balance between intimacy and hierarchy. This type of employment would generally involve women of quite similar social class, that would avoid some of the potential anxieties of cross-class romance. Such relationships might be of long duration, and often meant foregoing marriage. Loyalty was expected, though not always observed, given the complex politics of court life.

Within a context such as the household of Queen Elizabeth I, a never-married woman could achieve an influence and functional social status that ordinarily would come only through marriage. Emotional connections between the women of the court would not raise the same concerns regarding loyalty and influence that marriage sometimes did. In addition to services such as managing the employer’s wardrobe and household, the women serving female aristocrats were secretaries, companions, and confidantes. At the upper levels of society, women shared beds as well as secrets with their closest companions. Such close relationships could not avoid having an erotic component, and when society felt that the employee was pushing the accepted bounds of influence, one of the charges that might be brought was that of an inappropriate sexual relationship, as happened to some of Queen Anne’s circle.

Literature of the 18th century has some notable examples of relationships that begin as maid and mistress then develop romance-like elements as a key plot point. In Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, gender and class roles get blurred when the title character is abandoned by her husband and—when cast onto her own resources—makes common cause with her loyal maidservant to set up in business. The maid, Amy, is faithful beyond expectations due to the affection she feels for her mistress, even when the latter can no longer offer her any monetary compensation. The language of business and love are intertwined in their relationship, sometimes uncomfortably, as the business they engage in together is being courtesans.

The contrasting dynamic is seen in Jane Barker’s story “The Unaccountable Wife” in which a woman develops such an infatuation for her maidservant that she turns the social order upside down by allowing the serving woman a life of ease while she does the menial labor of the home. The two women eventually move out together, descending into poverty while the wife continues to try to provide a life of ease for the serving woman. It’s never entirely clear that the maidservant returns her employer’s affections, and the peculiarity of the social role-reversal is the lynchpin of the plot.

In addition to shifts in employment possibilities for women, the era in which stories are set affected shifting beliefs about sexuality and class. In the 19th century, both historic commentary and fiction could reflect the attitude that a female sex drive was more strongly associated with the lower classes. Thus employment-based romances might either support the motif of employee-driven eroticism, or the reverse motif might be used as a negative commentary on the upper class employer.

Kirsti Bohata’s article “Mistress and Maid: Homoeroticism, Cross-Class Desire, and Disguise in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” (which I’ll be covering on the blog shortly), provides a wealth of examples in which these themes intertwine, from which I’ll offer a few examples.

In Amy Dillwyn’s Victorian-era novel Jill, a well-born woman disguises herself as working class after running away from a bad home situation and takes a position as a lady’s maid. She falls in love with her employer and enjoys the sensual aspects of dressing her and caring for her, but Jill’s devotion is not returned, though she contemplates revealing her true origins so that she can declare her love openly. The apparent class barrier between them is temporarily removed when the two are abducted and imprisoned in a gothic scenario.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s story “Martha’s Lady” defers the realization of the yearning romance and near-chivalric devotion between Martha and her employer until late in life, after long separation, when they are at last reunited—though still as mistress and servant—and Martha is rewarded with a declaration of tenderness and a kiss.

The motif in which a female employee in love with her employer is portrayed as being masculine shows up clearly in Elizabeth Gaskell’s story “The Grey Woman,” where the servant Amante rescues her mistress from a murderous husband by cross-dressing and working as a tailor so the two can live together as husband and wife. Not only does Amante take up a male role for the public, but as the “husband” she now has social power over her former employer within the context of the masquerade.

The preceding examples of Victorian employment relationships flirt with eroticism, but in a sufficiently deniable way that the desire can be portrayed as positive. In the same era, stories in the sensationalist vein are more likely to use same-sex cross-class employment-related desire to signal the moral defects of one or the other character, especially of the employer, as in Thomas Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies where a mistress approaches her maid sexually and oscillates between leveraging her social power to obtain compliance and acting as a suitor who may be rejected and denied.

Workplace Sexual Harrassment

Because historic records (as contrasted with literary examples) are more likely to focus on toxic employment circumstances than mutually consenting relationships, our examples of unambiguously sexual encounters cannot be considered romantic, although they demonstrate circumstances in which homoerotic relationships might have developed.

18th century legal records from the Netherlands include legal complaints about a woman boasting that she had sex with her maid every morning, and that her maid preferred her to a man. In a different complaint involving a woman and her maid accused of having a sexual relationship, the maid was also accused of groping another serving girl against her will.

And since historic examples always seem to come around to Ann Lister eventually, we can note one of her diary entries where Lister is interviewing a girl for possible employment at Shibden Hall and, after commenting that she found the girl attractive, notes, “if I could contrive to have the house clear, might manage matters…”

Conclusion

This exploration of employment-based sapphic romance tropes has been a bit anecdotal, but those examples offer a glimpse of how such relationships might evolve, what difficulties and challenges they might face, and how their dynamics would differ from similar romance plots for different-sex couples. Romance in the face of fundamental power imbalances can be tricky to write, but the interplay of power, desire, and negotiating consent can be very sexy indeed.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Historic differences in employment-romance dynamics
• Gender differences in employment
• Some historic and literary examples

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
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• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)