Blog
Tuesday, May 27, 2025 - 18:00
Here's the next installment of our queer American women's suffrage movement.
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LHMP View comments (0)
Full citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Chapter 5: Queering Space
This chapter looks at a variety of ways that women associated with the suffrage movement “performed queerness” in public. Obviously, not all suffragists took part in the following, but those who did helped create the image of the transgressive “unfeminine” suffragist. The following is something of a catalog of these transgressive activities, which the book describes in connection with specific women who embodied them:
- Masculine dress
- Male-coded activities like drinking, smoking, and engaging in active sports
- Converting women’s clubs into activist spaces in both public and private venues
- Forming women’s clubs that had a multi-racial membership, including featuring Black speakers
- Short (male-coded) hairstyles
- Engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with other women and creating households more expansive than hetero-domesticity (as detailed in previous chapters)
The chapter moves to a discussion of racial issues that breaks the flow somewhat. Many white suffrage organizations and spaces excluded Black women. Black suffragists formed their own organizations, which were typically closely entwined with racial equality activism and general voting rights issues. Black women who crossed boundaries around gender expression and domestic relationships could face double-pushback, accused not only of damaging the public face of suffrage but also that of racial equality. Despite this, lesbian relationships and transgressive gender presentation were as common among Black suffragists as white ones.
Both live theater and the new movie industry were sites used by suffragists to promote and celebrate their views and values. Pro-suffrage speeches were incorporated into performances. Semi-comical songs and skits depicted traditional marriage as drudgery. Gender “impersonation” performances by both sexes sometimes deliberately pointed up “gender as performance” in support of women’s rights. (Anti-suffrage performances were also popular, of course.)
Two specific pro-suffrage plays (British in origin) are discussed: Before Sunrise and How the Vote was Won. The film 80 Million Women Want--? Documented the suffrage movement. In addition to suffrage propaganda, the plays featured “new women” who preferred career to marriage and had close same-sex relationships, although these themes did not always prevail at the conclusion of the scripts.
We return to the catalog of activities categorized as “queering space.” Parades were a powerful visual symbol of claiming public space, sometimes done in the face of official prohibition. But parade organizers sometimes issued “dress codes” to soften their image to the traditionally feminine. Those who defied these restrictions included a “suffrage cavalry” organized and led by Annie Tinker (who habitually wore male-coded clothing).
Returning to racialized examples, we get a mini-biography of Chinese-American suffragist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Chippewa attorney Marie Bottineau Baldwin. Historically-Black women’s college Howard University gets a lot of references in this book in connection with both faculty and students, and as a locus of connections and organizing.
Targeted protests and activism in Washington DC, especially by more militant forces associated with the National Women’s Party (NWP) kept the cause at the forefront of government attention, and could be met by forceful and violent police suppression, with methods reminiscent of the British hunger strike/force-feeding episodes that captured public attention.
Place:
Monday, May 26, 2025 - 09:00
I think this chapter is the weakest in terms of framing the topic as "queer" since it's basically "suffragists in the US and Britain talked to each other and sometimes had the same types of interpersonal relationships with each other that they did with their fellow contrytwomen. Also: there was a lot of Pankhurst fangirling.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Chapter 4: Queering Transatlantic Alliances
US and British suffrage movements existed at roughly the same time, but different approaches created a context for sharing tactics and experiences. This chapter looks at how US suffragists learned techniques and created alliances with their British counterparts in the early 20th century. These alliances also included transatlantic romantic relationships. The British movement included a wing focusing on more militant techniques (the “suffragettes”) and some US women hoped to spread these tactics back home, including public speeches and demonstrations that appealed to the public rather than only addressing politicians.
At the same time, the US suffrage elements that wanted to erase visible queer elements in the movement—feeling that “respectability” would have more success—also argued against these more militant approaches. The chapter argues that defying traditionally feminine stereotypes by speaking up in public and risking arrest fall into the definition of “queer” behavior.
The techniques, however, grew successful. British suffragists, like their US counterparts, had a pervasive element of female partnerships and gender-bending presentation.
As usual, this chapter has a large number of micro-biographies of women who relate to the theme. There is a particular emphasis on personal connections and inspirations involving the British Pankhurst family. While these connections included close friendships and hero worship, the blanket labeling of such connections as “queer” strains the definition somewhat. However the chapter provides essential details on the parallel connections between suffrage movements in the two countries.
Place:
Sunday, May 25, 2025 - 11:00
The last chapter looked at couples, this one expands to "extended families" among American suffragists and the ways in which they can be seen as "queer".
In the mean time, I'm writing up notes for the next book, which investigates the prevalence of cross-gender presentation in the American West, and the process of erasing or "normalizing" those who participated.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Chapter 3: Queering Family
This chapter expands on the previous. While chapter 2 focused on individual romantic/domestic relationships, this one looks at larger non-traditional households that might include couples (or not) as well as un-coupled women. The focus is on mutually supportive arrangements, not simply people sharing an address. These chosen families (to use a modern term) provided emotional, financial, and medical support for each other, as well as mentorship for younger suffragists. They might include biological or adopted children of the members. The author points out that such arrangements both challenged and assimilated to traditional social structures, providing the image of domestic respectability while adapting the model to their own situations.
Such chosen families were especially valuable for those who had separated from their birth families due to their political activism or life choices, such as resisting marriage, pursuing a profession, or wearing not-traditionally-feminine clothing. As usual for this book, many specific illustrative examples are given.
One factor that made it socially acceptable for unmarried women to adopt children was the formation of Children’s Aid Societies, created to place abandoned or orphaned children. This willingness did decrease later, as public suspicion of female couples became more widespread. Such adoptions did meet some resistance from those who charged that they didn’t represent a “proper family.” [Note: And for another view of the dynamics of such adoptions—although depicting Canada rather than the USA—see the facts underpinning the Anne of Green Gables story, where children might be adopted out into situations where they were treated as servants.]
These chosen and blended families sometimes demonstrated their close connections by re-naming the adoptees following familial practices: naming a child after one of the parents or combining the names of both parents.
Young suffragists that had broken with their birth families might “adopt” an older parent/mentor figure, thus establishing family in the other direction. One example of this dynamic also features the biography of trans man Albert Eugene De Forrest, who was supported in his transition by mentor Dr. Alida Cornelia Avery, as well as by his partner in a platonic marriage of convenience. Quotations from 1890s newspapers regarding him show a willingness to accept and use his chosen name and pronouns, with some exceptions. De Forrest’s mentor Dr. Avery initially framed her support in terms of dress reform, and it isn’t clear whether she fully embraced his transition, though supporting De Forrest personally. De Forrest and Avery worked together in a variety of reform movements, including suffrage and temperance. De Forrest briefly married a woman, but a second engagement resulted in arrest and estrangement from his fiancée. Through all this, he was supported emotionally and professionally by a chosen family of activists. (The author points out that his successful outcome to the arrest owed much to white professional-class privilege.)
The discussion moves on to the situation and supportive community experiences of non-white suffragists, such as Dr. Margaret Chung. Chinese-American women faced dual barriers to voting. Dr. Chung also adopted “mannish” clothing for her profession, and the social acceptance of her is seen in how this factor is downplayed in the media of the day, instead emphasizing her support for her extended family—an image she cultivated as well by “mothering” many of her male military patients in the 1930s and 1940s.
These “queer households” also existed in a context of larger queer communities and enclaves. Such communities might be geographically anchored, as in Greenwich Village, or networks centered around specific couples or educational institutions. But moving into the 1930s, single-sex colleges and faculty consisting of unmarried women began to be considered suspect, as medical theories of homosexuality became more prevalent. This shift also affected informal communities built up among faculty members and their students.
The chapter now moves on to how “free love” philosophy could shape ideas of family and community among feminist and suffragist circles. Such communities walked a tightrope between suffrage activism and being viewed as giving the movement a bad image. The communities themselves might manage their public image to avoid undermining the political movement.
Place:
Saturday, May 24, 2025 - 16:00
If the content in this chapter feels very modern, maybe we need to reanalyze how "modern" the idea of chosen/found family is!
As a separate aside, I'm planning to crank up the content on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project's Patreon account, including special content about new projects that will be for paid patrons only.
In particular, I'm thinking of providing "behind the scenes" progress reports on the LHMP book. If you're interested in this and other premium content and have a dollar or so to spare every month, consider signing up.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Chapter 2: Queering Domesticity
This chapter looks at the personal lives of some prominent suffragists. It was not uncommon for such women to have been married to men at some point, and they might leverage their status as a widow to deflect concern about domestic partnerships with women. These arrangements disrupted heterosexual norms regardless of whether the women involved considered them to represent a specific “identity.”
Carrie Chapman Catt was twice married, and her second husband agreed to let her do suffrage work. During that marriage, she traveled with and sometimes lived with Mary Garrett Hay, with whom she lived permanently after her husband’s death.
“Queer domesticity” among suffragists also encompassed singlehood and sharing living space without romantic partnership. But this chapter focuses on women in “Boston marriages.” The nature of the partnerships within Boston marriages could be varied—professional, creative, romantic, platonic, sexual, or combinations thereof. The common factor is a long-term committed pairing who shared a home and were viewed by their community as a couple. At the same time, such women might strategize how to present themselves as normative, in order to act more effectively in the political realm.
Simply choosing not to marry was a queer act, especially when motivated by feminist principles, but was available only to those with economic independence. The “new woman” who was identified as a type starting around the 1890s was college-educated, oriented toward a career, and—necessarily at that time—not married. This made them vulnerable to accusations of being anti-family, and were targets not only of anti-suffrage forces but also of eugenicists. This could be countered by framing singlehood as a personal sacrifice (for the sake of the movement). But some embraced a positive rejection of marriage as being an inherently unjust institution, claiming the title “Mrs” without a husband, and advocating against double-standards for married and unmarried women. Such views put them at risk of being marginalized by their fellow suffragists. Others chose singlehood after an unsuccessful marriage.
Alternatives to the nuclear family were common in Black communities, relying on networks and extended family relationships. Angelina Grimké provides an illustrative example. With her father working abroad, she lived with various relatives while attending school and developed a romantic friendship with fellow student May Burrill, with whom she exchanged passionate correspondence, although they later separated. She had several other crushes on both women and men while boarding with a family while continuing schooling. Grimké’s poetry illustrates her passions for women, which may have motivated her decision not to marry. But these passions were generally kept out of her correspondence and published work. Grimké’s political activism was a family affair, working on racial equality with Black relatives and on suffrage inspired by her (white) Grimké aunts. She generally lodged with relatives and never found a permanent partner.
Alma Benecke Sass and Hazel Hunkins may or may not have been lovers at Vassar and when their itinerant lives intersected later (both were traveling activists), but Hunkins felt the need to defend their habit of sleeping in the same bed, and their later correspondence is filled with longing for their time together. Neither married and they lived in all-woman environments when traveling. Their heyday in the 1910s and later was an era when advice literature for girls and young women was beginning to warn against co-sleeping, physical affection, and causal touching—warning of unspecified dangers. Their friendship and support continued despite differences over Hunkins’ more radical activities.
Non-normative domestic lives among suffragists also included overlap with free love advocates, and some of these, such as Margaret Foley, had relationships with both women and men.
Some women, such as Black suffragist and racial activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, used marriage strategically to create the image of heteronormative domesticity, which she used rhetorically to frame suffrage activism as a type of “housekeeping.” But her marriage lasted only 4 years and she had sexual relationships with both men and women, including a long-term, if sometimes stormy, partnership with fellow educator Edwina B. Kruse. Her diaries detail multiple affairs with women through 2 further marriages.
The “Boston marriage” was the most classically queer arrangement among suffragists. On the one side a radical rejection of patriarchy, these relationships were sometimes also strongly conforming to traditional images of domestic femininity, and a denial of sexual aspects to their relationship. Such women took a wide range of openness with respect to their private lives, even while presenting publicly as a committed couple.
This tension between desiring an intense, exclusive relationship while presenting it as a type of friendship could fracture some couples. The image of asexuality was a defense against criticism when they were—to all appearances—married.
For women not in heterosexual marriages, framing their public service as a type of maternal care was another defense. The privilege enjoyed by wealthy white activists could also take the form of policing the movement of radical elements, and discouraging the participation of Black women in order to seek the support of racist whites. One couple who took the opposite tack—actively supporting the inclusion of Black suffragists—was Nora Houston and Adele Goodman Clark, who also leveraged their image as “eccentric artists” to defuse scrutiny of their domestic partnership.
Place:
Friday, May 23, 2025 - 11:30
Continuing the coverage of Public Faces, Secret Lives about queer presence in the US women's suffrage movement.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Chapter 1: Mannish Women and Feminine Men
Opposition to suffrage was largely fueled by fears that if women engaged with the male-coded world of politics, it would be to the detriment of female-coded concerns and activities. Home life would suffer. This ideal of “separate spheres” was never more than a stereotype, especially among the working classes. But all manner of social woes were pinned on the upending of the “natural order” in which women were excluded from public life.
The extreme version of this disruption was the specter of mannish women and feminine men. Suffragists were not the only women targeted by this view, and not all women who were breaking gendered rules did it as a political statement. But the conjunction came to be viewed as a weak point in the movement’s message.
Pop culture push-back against women who adopted male-coded dress or behavior included warnings that they made themselves unmarriageable, and even direct accusations of lesbianism. This last had roots in the imagery promoted by sexologists of the “mannish” lesbian. Much of the supposed identification and criticism of such women focused on physical appearance, but a desire for independence, education, and social freedom were also identified as symptoms of “degeneracy.” Such views were especially pernicious when applied to Black women, who were already subject to racialized stereotypes of hypersexuality and criminality.
At the other extreme, suffragist leaders were sometimes labeled as sexless, using epithets like “Amazon,” “hermaphrodite,” or “third sex” for supposedly rejecting a traditional domestic role. A more neutral term for women exploring freedom and independence (and eschewing marriage) was “new women.”
Mainstream suffragist leaders, rather than dismissing these images, tried to highlight those members of the movement who embodied traditional roles, citing children and husbands, and emphasizing the value of suffrage to middle-class married women.
The mirror concern was that if women invaded masculine spheres, men would automatically become feminized. Men who directly supported suffrage were mocked.
Suffragist messaging turned gendered insults back on their opponents, arguing that it was anti-suffrage women who were the real “manly” women. Conformity to normative feminine ideals was clung to as a protection against anti-feminist sentiment.
[Note: The chapter reiterates these points with a great deal of supporting data from media and correspondence of the time. I’m not going to summarize that level of detail.]
This strategic promotion of the image of the affluent, white, femininely-beautiful, married, maternal suffragist also sidelined the presence of non-white activists, who were sometimes entirely excluded from parades and imagery. Black suffrage organizations launched separate campaigns, focusing not only on gaining Black women the vote, but protesting Jim Crow efforts to deny it to Black men.
Place:
Tuesday, May 20, 2025 - 09:22
Back to my focus on US-related history for a bit. This current book is lovely and useful, as the author's goal was to track down and document all sorts of details of individual lives that speak to the thesis "The American women's suffrage movement was thoroughly queer."
Taking note of the publication number (479) it occurs to me that I should start thinking of what publication to schedule for #500. I do so love my round numbers. And since I'll be stepping up the pace on the Project, that number will come around sooner than I expect. I did another UC Berkeley library day last week and downloaded a bunch of articles from JSTOR. At best estimate I have about 175 downloaded articles that I haven't blogged yet, though some will no doubt go in the bin "not relevant." It took me a while to realize I needed to track those in the database as well, so that I'm not constantly tracking down articles that I've already looked at. The database is up to 1100 titles. Some day I hope to start reducing the percentage of "to do" items out of the total, but today is not that day.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
Publication summary:
For anyone who wishes to write sapphic fiction set in the American suffragist era—whether your characters are participating in that community or not—this book is absolutely essential. It provides many varied and concrete examples of women’s lives that can in some way be classified as “queer” which will expand your understanding of the possibilities and their reception.
From a structural point of view, the book’s arguments feel very repetitive, but its strength is in “bringing the receipts” with multiple specific biographical examples for each topic. Usually, for a work like this, I’d add blog tags for each specific individual mentioned, but that would rapidly become unmanageable in this case (in addition to the problem of categorizing each individual as to where they fall on the queer map).
Introduction
Part of the overarching theme of this study is the tension between “respectability politics” and the essential reliance the suffrage movement had on women willing to disrupt social norms, specifically including norms of sexuality and gender presentation. The resonances with the “lavender menace” confrontations of the 1970s are inevitable (and noted specifically in the conclusion).
As the author points out, the suffrage movement was very queer, as well as more diverse than popular mythologizing often admits. The author notes that she will use “queer” as an umbrella term to avoid getting bogged down in details of identity definitions. [Note: Though I think she does occasionally get overly expansive in what gets classified as “queer.”]
The early embrace of dress reform movements by leaders of the suffrage movement, such as Stanton, Stone, and Anthony was abandoned to avoid associating the public mockery of “bloomers” and similar reform styles with suffrage. At the other end of the scale, some prominent suffragists such as Dr. Mary Edwards Walker adopted masculine dress as part of their rejection of strictures on women’s lives, and were persecuted for it, both within and outside the movement. Walker’s social privilege and personal history as a Civil War surgeon who had been awarded the Medal of Honor only slightly mitigated the attacks on her, and she recorded the toll it took to remain true to her principles, especially the attacks and snubs from fellow suffragists. Early histories of the suffrage movement were written to exclude Walker and other queer figures, as well as erasing the participation of non-white and non-elite women.
Queer suffragists adopted a variety of strategies, from Walker’s outright defiance, to a careful separation of public and private lives, to deliberately cultivating a conservative, conventional femininity.
Many prominent suffragists were in same-sex couples, varying from social partnership to friendship to romance to sexual relationships. But despite the documentary evidence of their personal correspondence, these relationships were usually flattened into “friend” or “secretary” in the public record. The book lists many same-sex romantic couples, but will focus primarily on the lesser known ones.
Despite the silence of the public record, these relationships were common knowledge at the time and could be used to disparage the movement as a whole. Black queer suffragists experienced a triple threat which made them especially concerned about outward “respectability”, such as Alice Dunbar Nelson, who emphasized her status as the widow of a notable poet, while engaging in romantic relationships with both men and women during the period of her suffrage activities.
Advocates of “free love” such as Victoria Woodhull argued against sexual double-standards that penalized women, but hit a wall when criticizing the hypocritical sexual behavior of supposedly “moral” leaders such as Henry Ward Beecher. The backlash then associated the suffrage movement in general with free love. Leaders and historians of the movement openly recorded ejecting those they felt were too radical.
The introduction closes with the plan of the book, describing what each chapter will cover.
Place:
Saturday, May 17, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 314 – Benedetta Carlini, Lesbian Nun - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/05/17 - listen here)
The definitive biographical work on Benedetta Carlini by Judith C. Brown cheerfully labels her “a lesbian nun.” Even setting aside the usual discussion of the applicability of the word “lesbian” to describe specific historic individuals, Benedetta’s story is complex to categorize. But it is absolutely clear that it is the story of a woman who engaged in sexual activity with other women within the context of a convent. So perhaps we should avoid quibbling.
The story, as I say, is complicated but also disturbing and a bit sad. It offers us an extremely detailed account of Benedetta’s life and activities, but can’t necessarily explain how Benedetta understood her own life and identity.
Benedetta Carlini was brought to the convent at Pescia (Italy) in 1599 at the age of nine, having been dedicated to the convent at birth. She was highly literate, intelligent, and articulate, which may help explain her unusually rapid rise in the convent hierarchy. By 1619, when she was only 30 years old, she had been named abbess of the convent. The other thing that helped was that she had also begun reporting mystical visions and experiences. The church authorities took mysticism rather seriously and began an investigation to determine whether Benedetta’s reports were genuine and of divine origin, rather than something more problematic. In the end, they got a bit more than they bargained for.
Being earmarked for the convent at birth was not that unusual, nor was the relatively young age at which Benedetta entered the institution. Based on her later reports, her childhood had been relatively happy and privileged. An only child, her largely-religious education was provided by her father. Stories with mystical resonance accumulated around her early. A mysterious black dog menaced her, then disappeared, assumed to be the devil in disguise. A nightingale sang and fell silent at her command, staying by her for two years and believed to be a guardian angel.
But at the convent, she wasn’t considered to be anything special. Entrance into one of the several convents at Pescia involved negotiations of status and affiliation. A dowry was required, just as it was for marriage, and some convents had strict rules about the eligibility of their candidates, whether in terms of family connections or town of origin or what skills the girls brought to the convent. Such social politics bred corruption, which in turn generated reformers, and it was the latter impulse that inspired the community that Benedetta joined. It was not, initially, a proper convent, but conducted itself as such under female leadership and was in the process of applying to become a regular order. That application was approved in 1619 and Benedetta was elected their first abbess.
Her election was most likely related to the reports of her mystical visions, which were a significant financial asset for the institution. Young Benedetta was outwardly conventional, but it later came out that she had repeated experiences that she interpreted as divine communications. The statue of the Virgin nodded at her during prayers and leaned over to kiss her. It wasn’t until years later—right around when the community was expanding in preparation for their status change—that Benedetta began reporting her visions to her superiors. She imagined herself transported to a garden where an angel told her to purify herself. She found herself surrounded by wild beasts who were driven away by Jesus. In a way, these visions were compatible with instructions to visualize key religious scenes and symbols during meditation. And the details of her visions were aligned with conventional imagery she would have seen in books and paintings. She reported worrying that her visions might be sent by the devil, but concluded that they were guiding her to be a better, more spiritual person. She began having visions in public, where she would be seen to go into a trance and speak unintelligibly. Her confessor instructed her to disbelieve her visions, which sent her into a profound psychosomatic crisis manifesting as pains and spasms.
Two years later, her visions began taking the form of imagining physical attacks by young men who tried to persuade or force her away from the convent. Because of this, Benedetta was assigned a fulltime companion to keep an eye on her and the leaders of the convent began to think how the presence of a holy visionary might be useful to the institution. The local community heard of her experiences, when she had visions of the Madonna and guardian angels during a public religious procession.
And then, while meditating on the crucifixion, Benedetta received stigmata (wounds) on her hands, feet, and chest. And this was witnessed by her companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, who shared her room. Stigmata are a big deal. And unlike her visions, these signs were visible to other people. It was shortly after this that Benedetta was elected to be abbess.
Unusually (for a woman), Benedetta was allowed to preach sermons, but only when speaking in a trance in the voice of her guiding angel. Next, her visions took an even more dramatic turn when Christ appeared to her as a handsome young man, accompanied by Saint Catherine and other figures, and explained that he had come to take her heart. Whereupon the vision reached into Bendetta’s side and she felt a great pain, then he showed her the steaming heart that he’d taken from her before placing the heart in his own chest. Benedetta’s companion was a witness to all this via Benedetta’s narration of what the vision of Christ said to her.
Three days later the vision of Christ returned, with a great retinue of saints, and asked Benedetta to disrobe so he could place his own heart into her, in exchange for the one she had given him. After that, Christ gave her strict instructions on living a pure life in order to protect his heart. At this point, a new character is introduced who will be significant. Benedetta is assigned the guardian angel Splenditello, who appeared as a beautiful boy. The vision of Christ instructed Benedetta to prepare for a wedding ceremony with him, giving highly specific and detailed instructions for the decorations and rituals. The convent and her confessor supported her in carrying these out.
In all the occasions when Christ is speaking through Benedetta, he is praising her and promoting her virtues, but when Benedetta is speaking as herself to her companions, she constantly worries that she is being deceived by the devil and protests that she is not worthy. Thus she has plausible deniability against suspicions that the whole experience is an act to gain attention and status. But after the marriage ceremony, some people started to voice doubts and concerns that some of what she voiced was bordering on heresy. An investigation was instigated and Benedetta was relieved of the office of abbess.
I’ve gone into a lot of detail about the build-up and context of Benedetta’s mystical experiences to set the scene for the sexual aspects. The church was always a bit nervous about mystics—especially female mystics—who slipped outside the bounds of convention and hierarchical control. But mysticism was an inherent part of the church and it was necessary to believe that Christ and the saints could appear to people, that miracles could happen, and that some fortunate few would be blessed with physical signs of divine approval. Investigations of the sort Benedetta underwent were how the fuzzy boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable manifestations were drawn. If the investigation had turned up nothing more extreme than visitations from a heavenly bridegroom and stigmata, it’s likely that the matter would have been approved and Benedetta might have ended up a saint. But there was more.
First Benedetta’s stigmata were examined, as the only concrete evidence. When her hands and head were washed of the blood, small wounds were found that bled freely and she reported that they pained her, but not as much on Sundays. Through several more visits, the wounds were seen to be healing, and Benedetta communicated while in trance that Christ had chosen the convent as his own special place and that the investigators and church officials were to take special care of it. After coming out of the trance, Benedetta said she was unaware of what she had written and said in Christ’s voice.
After this, the stigmata were observed to be bleeding again, and at one point, while being examined and questioned, Benedetta was allowed to step out of the room and then returned with wounds on her head bleeding freely. (The head wounds represent the effects of the crown of thorns.) Benedetta reported that Christ was angry with the people of Pescia for doubting her.
This first investigation lasted 4 months, with over a dozen individual sessions, most of which were either recorded or can be reconstructed from notes. The shape of the investigation is fairly ordinary in the context of claims of sanctity and visions. When Benedetta spoke in her own voice, her ideas and opinions were orthodox and repeated the investigators’ concerns that she might be deluded or imagining things. But within these conversations came hints that Benedetta’s relationship with her fellow nuns might involve a bit more conflict than her prior election might indicate. Just ordinary disagreements and punishments, but perhaps enough that some of the nuns wouldn’t mind seeing Benedetta taken down a peg or two. Benedetta’s companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, was questioned and at that time her testimony supported the events as Benedetta related them.
The investigation concluded with a judgment that there was nothing amiss and that Benedetta’s experiences were credible. She was reinstated as abbess and it looked like that would be an end of things.
For the next two years, Benedetta worked as an able administrator of the convent, as well as continuing her role as resident mystic. Then—perhaps in reaction to news of her father’s death—Benedetta began to prophecy her own death and even experience some sort of event interpreted as death and revival. Her rhetoric around this event included threats that the convent and town could only be saved through her presence and intervention, which stirred up fear and resentment. To top it off, the standard three-year term as abbess was coming to a close and there was a serious movement to elect a different woman for the next term. Benedetta’s fame might be useful to the convent, but her autocratic control and rhetoric was beginning to grate.
What happened next is a bit confused, but the upshot was that a new investigation was opened, this time by the papal nuncio rather than the local authorities. The evidence and testimony were examined again, this time perhaps more critically, and a variety of contradictions and unorthodoxies were poked at. This time, the investigators concluded that her visions were demonic in origin. Several of the nuns came forward with testimony that they had witnessed Benedetta manufacturing evidence of supposedly “spontaneous” bleeding of statues and such. That when Benedetta claimed that Christ would kiss her forehead and leave a golden star as a mark, a nun had spied on her and seen her create the star and stick it on herself using wax. Two other nuns reported having spied on Benedetta and seeing her enlarging her stigmata with a needle. The golden ring that appeared on her finger to mark her marriage to Christ was found to be painted on using saffron.
Perhaps the nuns had previously been too intimidated to report these things. Perhaps they had genuinely believed in Benedetta at first but then began to notice the tricks involved. Perhaps Benedetta grew careless—and there’s also the question of Benedetta’s mental health and to what extent she initially believed in her visions and only later felt the need to reinforce the evidence artificially.
And then the papal nucio’s investigators heard some very unexpected testimony from Benedetta’s companion, Bartolomea.
For two years, about three times each week, after the two of them had retired to their chamber for sleep and disrobed, Benedetta would summon Bartolomea saying she needed her, and when Bartolomea came to her, Benedetta would grab her and pull her down onto the bed. “Embracing her, she would put her under herself and kissing her as if she were a man, she would speak words of love to her. And she would stir on top of her so much that both of them corrupted themselves.”
This was so startling to the investigators that the scribe’s handwriting—previously very neat—became sloppy and full of crossed-out errors.
Questioned further, Bartolomea reported that Benedetta told her their sexual encounters weren’t a sin because it was the angel Splenditello who was responsible. Splenditello promised Bartolomea that if she would be his beloved, some day she would see the same mystical visions that Benedetta did. Sometimes, instead of Splenditello, it was Christ himself speaking and acting through Benedetta.
The investigators were far more skeptical than Bartolomea had been. (Though we must keep in mind that Bartolomea had strong reasons to present herself both as an unwilling participant and as credulous about exactly who was having sex with her.) Bartolomea expanded on her unwillingness: sometimes she had refused to come and Benedetta had climbed into her bed. Sometimes Bartolomea succeeded in eluding her and then Benedetta would masturbate to orgasm.
Why had it taken so long for Bartolomea to come forward? The answer was a jumble of believing the voices that she hadn’t sinned, and being too ashamed, and having no confidence that her confessor would believe her or do anything about it. (The priest who served as confessor to the convent was one of Benedetta’s consistent supporters.) Bartolomea’s credulity had already been established during her witnessing to the heart removal and replacement. So it’s quite possible that she was ready to believe that an angel was responsible for the assault, while at the same time being uncertain enough to feel shame.
And perhaps, at some level, she enjoyed the sexual encounters. She reports that “both of them corrupted themselves,” i.e., had orgasms. And while it doesn’t negate the coercive aspect, it may be that pleasure and the enjoyment of being loved—whether by an angel or by a beloved abbess—contributed to her hesitation.
On Benedetta’s side, she clearly acted out of some degree of sexual desire, whether sublimated through a genuine trance state in which she believed she was channeling an angel, or whether she was deliberately using that cover story. (And keep in mind that this is during the same period when other nuns witnessed Benedetta manufacturing her physical symptoms.)
Physical relations between nuns—though rarely recorded overtly—were not unheard of. Convent rules often included restrictions to avoid the opportunity for private sexual encounters and penitential manuals clearly allowed for the possibility. Romantic correspondence and love poetry between nuns includes clearly erotic language. So the fact of Benedetta’s desires falls within familiar parameters, what’s unusual is the cover story she created for acting on them. It may have been the only way she could think of to get past her culture’s assumptions about gender roles, as well as the chastity required of her as a nun.
With this as the conclusion to their report, the investigators handed it off to the papal nuncio for action. For whatever reason, he was hesitant. He sent another visitation, who found that all physical signs of Benedetta’s experiences had vanished and she reported no longer seeing any visions, angels, or other apparitions. She agreed that she had been deceived by the devil and was now living as an ordinary nun, obedient to a new abbess. Her alignment with the conclusions of the investigation gave her an out for forgiveness and a new start.
How much of a new start? There is no formal record of the nuncio’s conclusions and actions, but a record from the convent much later reported Benedetta’s death at age 71 after serving 35 years in prison—i.e., having started her imprisonment 3 years after the final report from the investigation. Imprisonment may have been the most lenient option in front of her. Female sodomy was technically punishable with death by burning, though the number of recorded instances of that penalty are almost certainly a small fraction of the possible instances. There is evidence suggesting that Bartolomea experienced no penalty at all.
So how do we feel about Judith Brown’s labeling Benedetta a “lesbian nun?” To be sure, the book’s title is probably deliberately sensationalized. It seems reasonable to conclude that Benedetta experienced erotic desire for a woman and acted on that desire. Her partner may, in some attenuated way, even have reciprocated. Whether this desire was specific to a female object or whether a female object was a target of opportunity is not knowable—after all, her exposure to men was extremely limited. But it’s also clear that Benedetta experienced something reasonably labeled mental illness, though perhaps one encouraged by the anxieties and ecstasies of the hot-house religious environment she was thrust into at a young age.
From the point of view of historic research into same-sex erotic experiences, perhaps the most valuable aspect is Bartolomea’s report of her physical experiences. Benedetta kissed her. She climbed on top of her in bed and “stirred on top of her” until they both experienced orgasm. Benedetta put her face between Bartolomea’s breasts and kissed them. She took Bartolomea’s hand and placed it on her genitals then made Bartolomea insert her finger into her, and she put her own hand on Bartolomea’s genitals and inserted her finger. She would kiss her while doing this. She would make Bartolomea sit by her while they were studying and kissed her and put her hands on her breasts.
For those who argue the difficulty of identifying acts as “lesbian” without having a clear and specific vocabulary for them, or that women could have no conception of how to perform same-sex acts without having words for them, this record indicates that desire will find a way.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- The historic and religious context of Benedetta’s life
- Benedetta’s sexual encounters
- Sources mentioned
- Brown, Judith C. 1984. “Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Sister Benedetta Carlini” in Signs 9 (1984): 751-58. (reprinted in: Freedman, Esteele B., Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson & Kathleen M. Weston. 1985. The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-2256-26151-4)
- Brown, Judith C. 1986. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-504225-5
- Holler, Jacqueline. 1999. “’More Sins than the Queen of England’: Marina de San Miguel before the Mexican Inquisition” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-5931-X pp.209-28
- 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.
- Watt, Diane. 1997. “Read My Lips: Clipping and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. New York, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
- This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Benedetta Carlini
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)
Major category:
LHMPFriday, May 9, 2025 - 05:26
Coming to you live from Kalamazoo where I'm attending the annual medieval history congress. I decided not to live-blog the sessions this year. (It's become more complicated as the policy has shifted to recommending getting active permission to love-blog papers.) But I may do a sum-up post from the train as I'm returning home.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Brown, Judith, C. 1986. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-504225-5
This is a detailed study of the life of 17th century Italian nun Benedetta Carlini, and of the investigation into her mystical visions and experiences which also ended up uncovering her sexual encounters with another nun. Since I initially reviewed this work in preparation for a podcast episode on Benedetta, I’m going to give a brief overview of the structure of the book and then include a lightly edited version of the podcast script to provide the substance.
Introduction
Although the title of the book features the sensational phrase “lesbian nun,” the book works up to that revelation slowly, building a far more complex picture of Benedetta’s life and experiences that that single phrase implies. The introduction explains how Brown came across the records that lay document the subject, and provides a broad understanding of the historic context of f/f sex in the European middle ages and Renaissance.
Chapter 1: The Family
This chapter follows Benedetta’s early life and family context, especially as it relates to why and how she was dedicated to a convent at age 9.
Chapter 2: The Convent
This chapter goes into detail about the context of convents in Pescia and the founding of the institution that Benedetta was placed in (which was not yet formally approved as a convent at that time).
Chapter 3: The Nun
This chapter traces Benedetta’s mystical/religious experiences (as later documented during testimony)
Chapter 4: The First Investigation
This chapter documents the context and content of the initial (local) investigation into Benedetta’s claims to mystical experiences, resulting in an acceptance of the truth of her claims.
Chapter 5: The Second Investigation
This chapter follows the testimony and results of a second investigation two years later, initiated at a higher level, which came to the conclusion that Benedetta’s experiences were diabolical in origin, rather than divine, including the testimony of Benedetta’s companion regarding their sexual encounters.
Epilogue
Fragmentary evidence regarding Benedetta’s eventual fate is provided.
Appendix
Extensive excerpts from the investigation records are provided (in English translation), including full details of the testimony regarding sexual relations.
Contents Summary (from the podcast script)
This definitive biographical work on Benedetta Carlini by Judith C. Brown cheerfully labels her “a lesbian nun.” Even setting aside the usual discussion of the applicability of the word “lesbian” to specific historic individuals, Benedetta’s story is complex to categorize. But it is absolutely clear that it is the story of a woman who engaged in sexual activity with other women within the context of a convent.
Benedetta Carlini was brought to the convent at Pescia (Italy) in 1599 at the age of nine, having been dedicated to the convent at birth. She was highly literate, intelligent, and articulate, which may help explain her unusually rapid rise in the convent hierarchy. By 1619, when she was only 30 years old, she had been named abbess of the convent. The other thing that helped was that she had also begun reporting mystical visions and experiences. The church authorities took mysticism rather seriously and began an investigation to determine whether Benedetta’s reports were genuine and of divine origin, rather than something more problematic. In the end, they got a bit more than they bargained for.
Being earmarked for the convent at birth was not that unusual, nor was the relatively young age at which Benedetta entered the institution. Based on her later reports, her childhood had been relatively happy and privileged. An only child, her largely-religious education was provided by her father. Stories with mystical resonance accumulated around her early. A mysterious black dog menaced her, then disappeared, assumed to be the devil in disguise. A nightingale sang and fell silent at her command, staying by her for two years and believed to be a guardian angel.
But at the convent, she wasn’t considered to be anything special. Entrance into one of the several convents at Pescia involved negotiations of status and affiliation. A dowry was required, just as it was for marriage, and some convents had strict rules about the eligibility of their candidates, whether in terms of family connections or town of origin or what skills the girls brought to the convent. Such social politics bred corruption, which in turn generated reformers, and it was the latter impulse that inspired the community that Benedetta joined. It was not, initially, a proper convent, but conducted itself as such under female leadership and was in the process of applying to become a regular order. That application was approved in 1619 and Benedetta was elected their first abbess.
Her election was most likely related to the reports of her mystical visions, which were a significant financial asset for the institution. Young Benedetta was outwardly conventional, but it later came out that she had repeated experiences that she interpreted as divine communications. The statue of the Virgin nodded at her during prayers and leaned over to kiss her. It wasn’t until years later—right around when the community was expanding in preparation for their status change—that Benedetta began reporting her visions to her superiors. She imagined herself transported to a garden where an angel told her to purify herself. She found herself surrounded by wild beasts who were driven away by Jesus. In a way, these visions were compatible with instructions to visualize key religious scenes and symbols during meditation. And the details of her visions were aligned with conventional imagery she would have seen in books and paintings. She reported worrying that her visions might be sent by the devil, but concluded that they were guiding her to be a better, more spiritual person. She began having visions in public, where she would be seen to go into a trance and speak unintelligibly. Her confessor instructed her to disbelieve her visions, which sent her into a profound psychosomatic crisis manifesting as pains and spasms.
Two years later, her visions began taking the form of imagining physical attacks by young men who tried to persuade or force her away from the convent. Because of this, Benedetta was assigned a fulltime companion to keep an eye on her and the leaders of the convent began to think how the presence of a holy visionary might be useful to the institution. The local community heard of her experiences, when she had visions of the Madonna and guardian angels during a public religious procession.
And then, while meditating on the crucifixion, Benedetta received stigmata (wounds) on her hands, feet, and chest. And this was witnessed by her companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, who shared her room. Unlike her visions, these signs were visible to other people. It was shortly after this that Benedetta was elected to be abbess.
Unusually (for a woman), Benedetta was allowed to preach sermons, but only when speaking in a trance in the voice of her guiding angel. Next, her visions took an even more dramatic turn when Christ appeared to her as a handsome young man, accompanied by Saint Catherine and other figures, and explained that he had come to take her heart. Whereupon the vision reached into Bendetta’s side and she felt a great pain, then he showed her the steaming heart that he’d taken from her before placing the heart in his own chest. Benedetta’s companion was a witness to all this via Benedetta’s narration of what the vision of Christ said to her.
Three days later the vision of Christ returned, with a great retinue of saints, and asked Benedetta to disrobe so he could place his own heart into her, in exchange for the one she had given him. After that, Christ gave her strict instructions on living a pure life in order to protect his heart. At this point, a new character is introduced who will be significant. Benedetta is assigned the guardian angel Splenditello, who appeared as a beautiful boy. The vision of Christ instructed Benedetta to prepare for a wedding ceremony with him, giving highly specific and detailed instructions for the decorations and rituals. The convent and her confessor supported her in carrying these out.
In all the occasions when Christ is speaking through Benedetta, he is praising her and promoting her virtues, but when Benedetta is speaking as herself to her companions, she constantly worries that she is being deceived by the devil and protests that she is not worthy. Thus she has plausible deniability against suspicions that the whole experience is an act to gain attention and status. But after the marriage ceremony, some people started to voice doubts and concerns that some of what she voiced was bordering on heresy. An investigation was instigated and Benedetta was relieved of the office of abbess.
First Benedetta’s stigmata were examined, as the only concrete evidence. When her hands and head were washed of the blood, small wounds were found that bled freely and she reported that they pained her, but not as much on Sundays. Through several more visits, the wounds were seen to be healing, and Benedetta communicated while in trance that Christ had chosen the convent as his own special place and that the investigators and church officials were to take special care of it. After coming out of the trance, Benedetta said she was unaware of what she had written and said in Christ’s voice.
After this, the stigmata were observed to be bleeding again, and at one point while being examined and questioned, Benedetta was allowed to step out of the room and then returned with wounds on her head bleeding freely. (The head wounds represent the effects of the crown of thorns.) Benedetta reported that Christ was angry with the people of Pescia for doubting her.
This first investigation lasted 4 months, with over a dozen individual sessions, most of which were either recorded or can be reconstructed from notes. The shape of the investigation is fairly ordinary in the context of claims of sanctity and visions. When Benedetta spoke in her own voice, her ideas and opinions were orthodox and repeated the investigators’ concerns that she might be deluded or imagining things. But within these conversations came hints that Benedetta’s relationship with her fellow nuns might involve a bit more conflict than her prior election might indicate. Just ordinary disagreements and punishments, but perhaps enough that some of the nuns wouldn’t mind seeing Benedetta taken down a peg or two. Benedetta’s companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, was questioned and at that time her testimony supported the events as Benedetta related them.
The investigation concluded with a judgment that there was nothing amiss and that Benedetta’s experiences were credible. She was reinstated as abbess and it looked like that would be an end of things.
For the next two years, Benedetta worked as an able administrator of the convent, as well as continuing her role as resident mystic. Then—perhaps in reaction to news of her father’s death—Benedetta began to prophecy her own death and even experience some sort of event interpreted as death and revival. Her rhetoric around this event included threats that the convent and town could only be saved through her presence and intervention, which stirred up fear and resentment. To top it off, the standard three-year term as abbess was coming to a close and there was a serious movement to elect a different woman for the next term. Benedetta’s fame might be useful to the convent, but her autocratic control and rhetoric was beginning to grate.
What happened next is a bit confused, but the upshot was that a new investigation was opened, this time by the papal nuncio rather than the local authorities. The evidence and testimony were examined again, this time perhaps more critically, and a variety of contradictions and unorthodoxies were poked at. This time, the investigators concluded that her visions were demonic in origin. Several of the nuns came forward with testimony that they had witnessed Benedetta manufacturing evidence of supposedly “spontaneous” bleeding of statues and such. That when Benedetta claimed that Christ would kiss her forehead and leave a golden star as a mark, a nun had spied on her and seen her create the star and stick it on herself using wax. Two other nuns reported having spied on Benedetta and seeing her enlarging her stigmata with a needle. The golden ring that appeared on her finger to mark her marriage to Christ was found to be painted on using saffron.
Perhaps the nuns had previously been too intimidated to report these things. Perhaps they had genuinely believed in Benedetta at first but then began to notice the tricks involved. Perhaps Benedetta grew careless—and there’s also the question of Benedetta’s mental health and to what extent she initially believed in her visions and only later felt the need to reinforce the evidence artificially.
And then the papal nucio’s investigators heard some very unexpected testimony from Benedetta’s companion, Bartolomea.
For two years, about three times each week, after the two of them had retired to their chamber for sleep and disrobed, Benedetta would summon Bartolomea saying she needed her, and when Bartolomea came to her, Benedetta would grab her and pull her down onto the bed. “Embracing her, she would put her under herself and kissing her as if she were a man, she would speak words of love to her. And she would stir on top of her so much that both of them corrupted themselves.”
This was so startling to the investigators that the scribe’s handwriting—previously very neat—became sloppy and full of crossed-out errors.
Questioned further, Bartolomea reported that Benedetta told her their sexual encounnters weren’t a sin because it was the angel Splenditello who was responsible. Splenditello promised Bartolomea that if she would be his beloved, some day she would see the same mystical visions that Benedetta did. Sometimes, instead of Splenditello, it was Christ himself speaking and acting through Benedetta.
The investigators were far more skeptical than Bartolomea had been. (Though we must keep in mind that Bartolomea had strong reasons to present herself both as an unwilling participant and as credulous about exactly who was having sex with her.) Bartolomea expanded on her unwillingness: sometimes she had refused to come and Benedetta had climbed into her bed. Sometimes Bartolomea succeeded in eluding her and then Benedetta would masturbate to orgasm.
Why had it taken so long for Bartolomea to come forward? The answer was a jumble of believing the voices that she hadn’t sinned, and being too ashamed, and having no confidence that her confessor would believe her or do anything about it. (The priest who served as confessor to the convent was one of Benedetta’s consistent supporters.) Bartolomea’s credulity had already been established during her witnessing to the heart removal and replacement. So it’s quite possible that she was ready to believe that an angel was responsible for the assault, while at the same time being uncertain enough to feel shame.
And perhaps, at some level, she enjoyed the sexual encounters. She reports that “both of them corrupted themselves,” i.e., had orgasms. And while it doesn’t negate the coercive aspect, it may be that pleasure and the enjoyment of being loved—whether by an angel or by a beloved abbess—contributed to her hesitation.
Physical relations between nuns—though rarely recorded overtly—were not unheard of. Convent rules often included restrictions to avoid the opportunity for private sexual encounters and penitential manuals clearly allowed for the possibility. Romantic correspondence and love poetry between nuns includes clearly erotic language. So the fact of Benedetta’s desires falls within familiar parameters, what’s unusual is the cover story she created for acting on them. It may have been the only way she could think of to get past her culture’s assumptions about gender roles, as well as the chastity required of her as a nun.
With this as the conclusion to their report, the investigators handed it off to the papal nuncio for action. For whatever reason, he was hesitant. He sent another visitation, who found that all physical signs of Benedetta’s experiences had vanished and she reported no longer seeing any visions, angels, or other apparitions. She agreed that she had been deceived by the devil and was now living as an ordinary nun, obedient to a new abbess. Her alignment with the conclusions of the investigation gave her an out for forgiveness and a new start.
There is no formal record of nuncio’s conclusions and actions, but a record from the convent much later reported Benedetta’s death at age 71 after serving 35 years in prison—i.e., having started her imprisonment 3 years after the final report from the investigation. Imprisonment may have been the most lenient option in front of her. Female sodomy was technically punishable with death by burning, though the number of recorded instances of that penalty are almost certainly a small fraction of the possible instances. There is evidence suggesting that Bartolomea experienced no penalty at all.
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Tuesday, May 6, 2025 - 10:43
I'm testing the limits of what you can post by teathering a laptop to a spotty phone connection, because that's what you get on Amtrak crossing the vastness of Colorado...
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Bronski, Michael. 2012. A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History). Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807044650
(Before reading) I rather expect this book to be thin on information within the scope of the project, either in not focusing on women, or in focusing on the 20th century. And as the topic is “queer history,” the inclusion of gender-crossing by assigned female persons doesn’t necessarily fall in the category “lesbian.” Expect somewhat spotty coverage of the actual contents.
(After reading) The strongest aspect of this book is situating queer history within the broader social history of the USA. But that means that a lot of time is spent discussing that broader social history without reference to queer topics. This makes it almost feel like the author had very little actual queer history to work with and was trying to pad it out with context, but I don’t think that’s the case. There is a very strong focus on the northeastern part of the USA, with very little attention to the Midwest, West, and South to the extent that they might have had different contexts and experiences (except for the occasional nod to San Francisco). Well over half the book is focused on the 20th century. So overall I think my initial predictions panned out.
# # #
Introduction
The author points out that this is an inescapably political book and should be read in that context. He points out that the question of “who is queer” is not at all straight-forward [pun intentional] in a historic context, and that queer figures have been silently and invisibly embedded in US history far deeper than most people are aware.
He focuses on two concepts: that queer people have substantially contributed to our understanding of US history (even if we aren’t aware of their queerness), and that ‘LGBT history’ of the US does not exist as something that can be separated (dare I say, segregated) from the mainstream of US history. History should not be viewed as a chronological sequence of people and events, but as a complex interweaving.
LGBT history has its roots in a focus specifically on queer desire and its meaning within specific lives. There was a period when the goal of queer historians was to naturalize queer desire to achieve social and legal acceptance.
The author reviews a chronology of the language used to identify queer people and how it reflected and shaped social attitudes. [Note: as usual, he cites the completely false assertion that words for lesbianism only entered the language in the late 19th century.] He notes the limitations of vocabulary as a path to tracing queer history, and notes the importance of popular entertainment for finding expressions of queer identity.
A key struggle in US queer history is the conflict between “social purity” movements (beginning in the 19th century) and the right of individual self-expression and self-determination (long considered a foundational US principal).
The book is structured roughly chronologically, beginning with the European presence in the Americas and covers up through the 1980s and AIDS activism.
Chapter 1: The Persecuting Society
When European invaders began the project of forcing indigenous Americans into a Western, Christian mold, one aspect that came under attack was gender roles and sexual practices they considered unacceptable. This included people of both sexes taking on gender roles associated with the other sex. These roles varied considerably across various cultures and do not align necessarily with ideas of self-identity. (The examples given all involve assigned-male persons.)
A brief background is given for 16-17th century English attitudes toward sexuality and cross-dressing. (The author asserts “same-sex relationship were illegal” but is either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the fact that this only applied to men.) Legal attitudes toward same-sex activity and other sexual crimes in the colonies derived in part from English legal traditions and in part from Puritan moral attitudes. The author notes two law codes (Rhode Island 1647, New Haven 1655) that explicitly mention female same-sex activity. But law codes didn’t mean that the laws were consistently or universally enforced, and cases can be identified of men known for soliciting and engaging in same-sex activity but not prosecuted due to the specifics of the social context.
The author discusses the problem of how to interpret personal letters and papers that clearly express intense same-sex emotions. To what extent can we know or impute erotic feelings on that basis? If a writer records self-disgust at same-sex erotic desire, given the Puritan context, do we assign the reaction to the same-sex aspect or the erotic aspect?
A great deal of this chapter is an exploration of the general theme of enforcing social conformity and approved morals via persecution of “others.”
Chapter 2: Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions
Political revolution was accompanied by a revolution in ideas about how gender/sex related to “the citizen.” Puritan influence had faded, but while individual regions like Pennsylvania had relatively progressive ideas about religion, abolition, and indigenous relations, this didn’t translate directly to sexual liberty. Pennsylvania law briefly downgraded the official penalty for sodomy from death to mere corporal punishment, hard labor, and fines, but then reverted to the death penalty a generation later.
Overall, the colonies remained a very unequal and persecution-based society. Slavery embedded itself from being temporary indenture to permanent racialized status. There is an extensive discussion of how slavery shaped and affected the entirety of US society, including sexual imagery. This includes “Indian captive” narratives that helped shape the image of the “innocent white woman in sexual peril from the Other.”
The Enlightenment was an essential foundation of the American experiment but erased and skipped over entire populations. The Continental Enlightenment led to decriminalization of homosexuality in France, whereas this interpretation of individual rights with respect to sexuality did not take root in the US. A new, specifically American, model of masculinity evolved: a rugged, aggressive, independent stereotype specifically developed in opposition to the stereotype of the English man as refined, weak, and effeminate. The American male was also stereotypically white, propertied, and free (it goes without saying).
The development of the ideal image of the American woman was less coherent. Women’s strength and independence were essential to surviving in the early colonies, and many US women adopted Enlightenment principles and applied them to gender, but this was met by strong pushback from men and contrasted with the “vulnerable/innocent white woman” stereotype that was developing.
Strong gender divisions in society give rise to homosocial practices, which in turn could be a breeding ground for same-sex relations of various types. The book moves on to a discussion of “romantic friendship”—the importance, the range of expressions, evidence for its significance to those who participated, and how it developed a political flavor.
The revolutionary spirit in the late 18th century did create a context for some individuals to reject normative ideas of gender. One notable example is Jemima Wilkinson who had a religious revelation that expressed as non-binary (and possibly asexual) identity as “the Publick Universal Friend.” There were also many real and fictional women who took up a masculine role in war time, and sometimes retained it afterward, of whom Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff is probably the best known. Literary examples include The Female Marine, or the Adventures of Miss Lucy Brewer, by Nathanial Hill Wright, and Ormond, or The Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown. Although exceptional, these lives and stories created a space in the culture for envisioning non-normative lives for women.
Chapter 3: Imagining a Queer America
In the 19th century, America experiences several significant challenges to its sense of identity, including the abolition of slavery, a vast increase in non-British immigration, and territorial expansion that incorporated areas settled by other cultural groups.
The escape from laws and social rules represented by the frontier also allowed for an escape from sexual/gender norms and expectations. Gender roles were blurred due to simple necessity, and gender presentation often followed. For women, this could mean a greater acceptance of taking on “masculine” professions and adopting male-coded clothing to various degrees. On the flip side, to the extent that gender segregation (and extreme gender imbalances) persisted, it encouraged homosocial bonding and organizing as the expected pattern. Male bonding was valorized in the west, just as women’s romantic friendships were back east. The continuing paradox of American masculinity was being defined simultaneously by prominent heterosexual desire and a rejection of mixed-gender socializing, where men disdained to be constrained by women’s supposed “civilizing” influence. The Wild West was coded as masculine; the urban East as feminine. Women, in the Wild West, either assimilated to masculinity (see, e.g., Calamity Jane) or are seen as the encroaching force of civilization that would eventually destroy “cowboy masculinity.”
San Francisco in the mid 19th century is presented as an example of the cultural effects of severe gender imbalance on practices and norms around gender and sexuality (This discussion is necessarily focused on men’s experiences.)
The discussion now shifts to the urban east and the presence of romanticism in the writing and letters of male intellectuals, such as Walt Whitman. Here “nature,” rather than representing the rugged cowboy, reflects an Enlightenment sensibility of equality and freedom from traditional morals. This was also the heyday of women’s romantic friendships, documented in letters, poetry, and philosophical writing (see e.g., Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson). There is a discussion of the American literary tradition of male mixed-race homoerotic relationships.
Chapter 4: A Democracy of Death and Art
This chapter examines the influence of the Civil War on religion and social attitudes (and vice versa)—how wartime violence shaped ideas of masculinity. But intense homosocial bonding among men in wartime also prompted new types of affective behaviors.
There is a discussion of “passing women,” both in the army and afterward in civilian contexts. The combination of the common experience of hard manual labor by women, with the overall young age of soldiers, made gender-crossing more likely to be successful. The motivations of such women were varied. Popular media was fascinated with such stories, when they were made public.
The post-Civil War era also saw a growth in women’s rights activity including the suffrage movement. There was a growth in women’s colleges and this strictly homosocial environment encouraged and supported romantic friendships between women. In reaction, intellectual women were often disparaged as “unwomanly” regardless of their emotional relationships. Feminism encouraged women to see themselves as a community and to see same-sex relationships as a political act.
The life and career of actress Charlotte Cushman is given as an example of women in openly romantic relationships who formed woman-centered communities. The increased potential for economic independence aided resistance to marriage for those who were so inclined and made female couples more viable. Prominent figures like Cushman served as a model and inspiration for such choices. There is a discussion of the rise of the “Boston Marriage”—female couples openly living in marriage-like arrangements and socially recognized and accepted as such. Most of the evidence for these relationships comes from literate middle-class women, but glimpses of more marginalized couples, such as Black working-class women like Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, show that such relationships were prevalent regardless of class and race. Female same-sex couples were common among the faculty of women’s colleges, in part due to requirements that those women be unmarried. The text discusses too many specific people to list or tag.
Inherited wealth and social position helped women have the privilege of designing their own lives. [Note: There are some relevant consequences for women’s financial independence in the differences in inheritance practices between England and the US.]
There is a comparison of how female and male sculptors differed in how they shaped images of American masculinity in the post-Civil War era. Women chose monumental depictions of progressive American statesmen, while men returned to classical aesthetics.
International conversations began around male homoeroticism and the beginnings of positive sexological models (relatively speaking). This male-focused material treated women as an afterthought and valorized specifically m/m relations, not same-sex relations in general. The author points out that artistic and philosophical celebration of m/m relations did not always translate to an open embracing of men’s own desires.
Chapter 5: A Dangerous Purity
The second half of the 19th century saw rapid social and economic change, including the establishment of a capitalist upper class, characterized as the “Gilded Age.” Social movements were prominent, but not focused on sexuality except in the negative (e.g., misandry among women’s movements). The cause of social problems was sometimes characterized as male lust versus female virtue. This generated “purity” movements such as temperance and anti-masturbation. Such movements made little distinction between same and opposite sex activity.
The Comstock Act of 1874 banned “obscene” material from the US Mail (the only practical distribution system for publications), and covered personal correspondence as well as published material. Although most morality laws focused on heterosexual activity, the tone was anti-sex in general. These morality-centered movements also supported abolition of slavery and promoted women’s suffrage and labor organizing. It is a mistake to try to interpret them in terms of modern progressive politics. The various movements clashed over the question of “protecting” versus “empowering” women, and abolition was not automatically aligned with anti-racism. Feminists could be racists and anti-Semitic. Abolitionists could oppose suffrage. Labor activists could scorn concerns they considered only relevant to the upper class. And women involved in romantic same-sex relationships did not necessarily view that as a revolutionary act that implied support for other revolutionary movements. Indeed, some women in f/f relationships viewed the arrangement as the pinnacle of “purity culture” as long as they could understand their relationships as not involving “sex” by their own definition. Movements to reform racial and sexual attitudes both found themselves struggling against the prevailing “social reform” movements.
European sexological discourse began appearing in the US in the last decade or so of the 19th century, and often followed the trend of linking homosexuality with criminality and mental illness, even when no direct causal relationship was proposed. The anarchist movement was the most compatible with, and supportive of, sexual liberation, and early leaders of the latter often came out of the former. “Free love” when embraced as a principle, necessarily included same-sex relationships. (A lot of this chapter focuses on the general atmosphere of social movements, especially labor and racial movements.)
Sexological theory of the time basically defined everyone as heterosexual, but some as transgender. I.e., gender was defined in opposition to the object of desire. This framing dominated medical discourse (and infiltrated popular imagination) for at least half a century, promulgating the stereotypes of the effeminate gay man and the mannish lesbian.
In contrast to the allegedly sexless image of romantic friendship, the “mannish lesbian” was viewed as inherently sexual. But she was also considered separate from the older image of the “passing woman.” (In actual practice, f/f sexual relations could be part of any of these framings—it is only the stereotypes that make the distinction.)
In the early 20th century, along with medical discourse, we begin to have personal memoirs of people expressing same-sex desire. One of the few authored by a woman mentioned here is Mary Casal’s The Stone Wall (1930).
Rising movements in the early/mid 20th century to separate the connections between sex, pleasure, and reproduction did not necessarily support broad ideas of sexual liberation, often being entangled in purity culture and eugenics. Medical “sex manuals” began to emerge, but were focused on sex within heterosexual marriage and typically condemned other types of activity. Even those with relatively tolerant attitudes attributed lesbianism to “boredom and loneliness” rather than viewing it as a viable option.
Chapter 6: Life on the Stage/Life in the City
This chapter steps back in time a little and shifts from social politics to entertainment and urban contexts, with coverage of the 19th century and later. Examples are given of transgressive gender and sexuality in the theater (both performers and performances) that included bisexuality, cross-dressing, and deliberately mixed-gender costuming. Gender-bending performances parodied dominant attitudes toward homosexuality and normalized the latter in a space set apart from “real life.”
Urban spaces around the turn of the 20th century were shaped by the normalization of unmarried adults of both sexes living apart from their families of origin. Living spaces included boarding houses, rooming houses, and single-gender hotels, as well as independent apartments. In group living situations, gender segregation was most typical, but immigrant communities formed around charitable “settlement houses” that served both families and singles. These settlement houses were often founded by women’s charitable groups, and prominent leaders included female couples, such as the founders of Hull House in Chicago. [Note: The prominence if female couples in charitable work and social activism in the later 19th century can be directly connected to the expectation that married women would focus exclusively on their own families.]
There’s a discussion of how single-sex spaces unintentionally became meeting places for homosexual socializing and networking. This is a vague parallel to how racial segregation contradictorily encouraged the development of vibrant and thriving Black communities and subcultures.
Burlesque and vaudeville theater offered a context for performing diverse gender and sexuality, even when the intent was parody or mockery. Both male and female impersonation were popular genres, though in general the pop culture portrayal of the “mannish lesbian” was less common She was also more often seen as a threatening figure than an entertaining one. In the early decades of the 20th century, theatrical productions with lesbian themes were regularly suppressed for depicting “perversion.”
The overlap between theater and early Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s produced the occasional overt depiction of queer characters, such as Marlene Dietrich’s character in Morocco (1930), but though the sex lives of Hollywood performers were fairly freewheeling, the content of films was more restrained, even before the introduction of the Hayes Code in 1930.
Live stage continued to be the more common performance context where transgressive sexuality was on display to the public. And the stage acting community was full of networks of female same-sex lovers.
Urban centers with a strong tradition of transgressive performance gave rise to a tourist trade in “slumming’ (ostensibly straight, white, upper class visitors looking to be entertained by the Other), just as racialized performance communities in places like Harlem did. (Examples are drawn from the 1920s and 30s.) In the late 1930s, these communities and venues were disrupted by active morality panics and campaigns. By the 1940s, the stereotype of the homosexual child molester was being invented. Homosexual social movements shifted to focusing on a “right to privacy” rather than a right to exist in public.
Both male and female homosexual characters began appearing in novels in the 1920s and 1930s, typically echoing the theories of sexologists, even when relatively sympathetic to the characters.
Even though many homosexuals were prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, there was strong pressure in the Black community to keep sex lives out of public to avoid undermining racial progress.
Overall, this was the era when urban culture made it more viable for a “homosexual culture” to emerge and thrive, even through shifts in the permitted expressions.
Chapter 7 to 10
The rest of the book is solidly focused on the 20th century and—while fascinating—is out of scope for the Project. So in the interests of efficiency, I’m going to skip taking notes.
Place:
Event / person:
Saturday, May 3, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 313 - On the Shelf for May 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/05/03 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for May 2025.
At the time you listen to this, I will officially be retired from my job as a failure analyst for biotech pharmaceutical manufacturing. It’s not the most fun time to be retiring on a 401K, but I’ll be ok as long as I watch my expenses. Of course, at the time you listen to this, I still won’t have an answer to “what does it feel like to be retired” because my first act is to head off on the train to the medieval congress at Kalamazoo. I’ve always wanted to take the train rather than flying, but I could never justify it when I was hoarding my vacation days. So I guess that’s one way it feels different.
You probably won’t notice any changes in the blog and podcast at first, because those have been at the top of the priority list. Mostly I plan to spend a lot more time working on my fiction, as well as starting to put the Lesbian Historic Motif Project book together. (I’m going to need to come up with a better title for it, because simply titling the book “The Lesbian Historic Motif Project” would be too confusing.)
I do hope to have time for doing a bit more promotion around the blog and podcast. It would be nice to increase our listener numbers and maybe add some special content on the Patreon to encourage people to support the Project monetarily. And that brings me to another aspect of retirement. In the past when I’ve debated whether to continue the fiction series for another year, it’s mostly had to do with listener numbers and the level of engagement. But now I need to take a hard look at the finances of the series. If I buy four stories at the maximum of 5000 words, that’s $1600 in royalties. If I hire narrators, rather than doing all the narration myself, that adds another few hundred dollars. (And I’m not even talking about hosting costs and whatnot.) Currently the Project’s Patreon brings in $240 a year. I haven’t pushed the Patreon as strongly as most people do, because covering expenses out of pocket wasn’t a big deal. Well, going forward it’s going to be a somewhat bigger deal. So I’m going to start putting a more active emphasis on soliciting support. Whether or not the fiction series continues past next January is going to be influenced by whether listeners value it enough to support the show. So if you think it’s a good thing that the Lesbian Historic Motif Project exists, and especially if you enjoy our fiction series, consider whether you’re able to express that appreciation with cash.
That said, we’ll have our second story in this year’s series at the end of the month and it’s absolutely amazing. Make sure you don’t miss it!
News of the Field
One thing I hope to have more time for is analyzing trends in sapphic historicals. I used to do a year-end analysis of settings, publishers, and so forth, but I let that slide a few years ago. I want to pull up my database and fill in the missing years to get caught up. We are seeing more and more sapphic historicals from mainstream publishers, but what feels like a serious drop in historicals from the most prominent small queer presses. The greatest diversity of stories and settings tends to come from independent authors, but those books often have limited distribution due to an over-reliance on Kindle and struggle to find visibility. I want to bring the data to these questions and return to tracking the market more closely.
I hope to have more time to do reviewing and to have author interviews on a more regular basis. Any other ideas for things to add to the Patreon or the show will be cheerfully entertained.
Publications on the Blog
No recent book shopping for the blog. I’ve followed up on my impulse to start focusing on books on queer history in the USA, but haven’t put any of it up on the blog yet. Let’s just say that the past month has been a bit distracted.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
Before plunging into the new fiction, I want to return to a topic I’ve been discussing for the last couple of months. As you may recall, I’ve been noticing a new phenomenon flooding my book spreadsheet. It involves series of relatively short books, typically revolving around a specific theme but not usually a connected narrative. The series is all released in a very brief timespan. But there are a number of other features of this trend. The stories are typically only loosely rooted in history—more “vibes” than facts—and often involve ahistorical gender-neutral casting. Regardless of the author, the cover copy tends to all have a very similar feel, and when I’ve dipped into the contents previews, the prose also has a very consistent feel. Another consistent feature is that the authors have essentially no online presence outside of the book listings, and most commonly have published only series books, rather than also including stand-alones.
So: all of that being said. I have become increasingly more and more suspicious that this phenomenon represents books generated from large language models. (The covers have strong AI vibes, but that’s a more widespread issue.) Therefore I’ve made an executive decision not to include books that fit this profile in my new book listings. (I’m still tracking them in my database, but with annotation.)
If anyone listening to this show is, in fact, an author using this model and has additional information that might change my mind on this point, I’m willing to entertain it. But currently, I’m following my gut. My show, my rules.
On a more positive note, here are the new and recent books I’ve found this month.
There are two April books, one of which I held over to this month to coordinate with interviewing the author. This is The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod from Carina Adores. I’m always a sucker for a good Jane Austen take-off.
When Mr. Collins dies after just four years of marriage, Charlotte is lost. While not exactly heartbroken, she will soon have to quit the parsonage that has become her home. In desperate need of support, she writes to her best friend, Lizzie. Unable to leave Pemberly, Lizzie sends her sister, Mary Bennet, in her stead.
To Charlotte’s surprise, Mary Bennet is nothing like she remembers. Mary’s discovery of academia and her interest in botany (as well as getting out from under her mother’s thumb) have caused her to flourish. Before long, Charlotte is enraptured—with Mary, and with the possibilities that lie beyond their societal confines. With each stolen glance and whispered secret, their friendship quickly blossoms into something achingly real.
But when her time at the parsonage begins to dwindle and a potential suitor appears, Charlotte must make a choice—the safety and security of another husband, or a passionate life with Mary outside the confines of the ton’s expectations.
The other April book is Midnight Letters by Rowan Wilder.
In the gilded halls of Victorian London, Eleanor Blackwell's carefully arranged life is unraveling at the seams. Trapped in a loveless engagement to the controlling Lord James Harrington, she finds herself drawn to Vivian Foster, the rebellious portrait artist hired to immortalize their impending union.
What begins with a mysterious sketch and a provocative question—"You seemed trapped. Are you?"—soon blossoms into a secret correspondence that awakens desires Eleanor never knew existed. As midnight letters pass between them, Eleanor and Vivian risk everything to steal precious moments together in moonlit gardens and hidden alcoves.
But in 1890s London, two women daring to love is more than scandalous—it's dangerous. When their forbidden relationship is discovered, Eleanor must make an impossible choice: surrender to societal expectations or follow her heart into the unknown with Vivian.
From the rigid drawing rooms of aristocratic England to the bohemian artist cafés of Paris, Midnight Letters is a sweeping tale of courage, sacrifice, and the transformative power of love. As Eleanor and Vivian build a new life together against all odds, they discover that the most profound revolution can happen in the human heart.
There are six May releases, most of them from major publishers. (This has a lot to do with indie books not having advance publicity, so they tend to get identified only after they’ve been released.)
The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling from Harper Voyager had a note in my database to confirm the hints of sapphic content, but I was able to find advance reviews that satisfied me.
Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.
Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.
As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself.
The enthusiasm for books set in the Roaring 20s continues with Murder at the Cabaret by Dana Gricken from Bella Books.
In New York City, 1925, twenty-two-year-old Penny Fox has a lot on her plate.
After her father’s untimely death, she’s just inherited his cabaret club—The Primrose—complete with a speakeasy in the basement, made possible by local mob boss Sonny Hargrove. By night, she’s managing her father’s business while being hounded by a greedy crime lord, and by day, working as a private investigator at her agency called The Sly Fox to help women flee abusive partners and catch their husbands affairs.
To make matters worse, she’s currently being sued by a client’s husband for snapping pictures of him with his secretary and ruining his marriage. When she comes across another woman being abused, Cora Bellinger, she decides to help her and falls in love, making her fiancé a sworn enemy while trying to process her feelings.
But it isn’t until the dancers at her club begin going missing—and then murdered—that Penny realizes a serial killer is on the loose. If she wants to save her club and stop more women from being killed, she’ll have to put her private eye skills to good use—before it’s too late.
We haven’t had as many cross-time stories lately, but Give My Love to Berlin by Katherine Bryant from Walrus Publishing follows a popular structure that jumps between the past and present, following memories and family secrets.
In 1927, the beautiful city of Berlin is the gay capitol of the world. Ruth, a performer at one of the nightclubs in the city, and her girlfriend, Tillie, are living their lives and enjoying the freedom of the Weimer Republic. They are surrounded by a chosen family that includes drag performers, transgender women, and the prominent physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Ruth, Tillie, and their best friends, James and Ernesto spend much of their time at the Institute for Sexual Science, the hub of the queer community in the twenties and early thirties. As the ’20s come to a close, Tillie watches her father, a prominent lawyer, as he becomes more entrenched with the Nazi Party. Working in his law office as his secretary, she meets prominent figures in the Nazi Party, including Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and becomes increasingly concerned as time passes that there is much more at stake than just her relationship with Ruth, who is also Jewish. Tillie becomes privy to the planning of rallies, the plans the Nazi party is making in order to ensure Nazi victories in major elections, and how the Nazis are taking over Germany one neighborhood at a time. The novel jumps between the twenties and thirties and the early nineties and a young woman named Thea. Thea is dealing with the onset of her grandmother’s dementia, and discovers secrets hidden away that her grandmother never intended for her to uncover. Alternating between Tillie’s perspective during the ’20s and ’30s as the Weimar Republic slowly gives way to a dictatorship and Thea’s perspective in the ’90s as the secrets of her grandmother’s history come to light, Give My Love to Berlin follows the lives of two gay couples—Tillie and Ruth, and their best friends, James and Ernesto—trying to navigate falling in love, thriving in their community, and coming to terms with the danger they are in just by being who they are.
Actual medieval epics had a fascination with stories in which a woman in disguise earns fame as a knight and attracts the romantic interest of a fair lady. To the Fairest by M. Walker takes up this motif, although it turns the “convenient twin brother” trope on its head.
In medieval Europe, Elena Montfort has always dreamed of competing in the knights' tournament—an arena forever closed to women. When her twin brother falls gravely ill before an important competition that could save their financially struggling family, Elena makes a daring decision: she will don his armor, assume his identity, and enter the lists as "Sir Elric."
What begins as a desperate gamble transforms when Elena presents a rose to the beautiful Lady Isolde, setting in motion a romance neither woman anticipated. As Elena continues her masquerade through increasingly prestigious tournaments, she must navigate court intrigue, jealous rivals, and her growing feelings for Lady Isolde, who believes herself in love with a man who doesn't exist.
Will Elena's deception be discovered? Can love flourish when built on necessary lies? And when forced to choose between duty to family and the desires of her own heart, what will this unlikely knight sacrifice?
Another standard structure in the cross-time group is the “romance of the archives” in which research into a historic document uncovers a sapphic romance. Time After Time by Mikki Daughtry from G.P. Putnam's Sons combines this with the supernatural version in which past lives may be intertwined.
Libby has always been inexplicably drawn to the old Victorian house on Mulberry Lane. So much so that when she sees a For Sale sign go up in the front yard, Libby uses all the money her grandmother left her to pay for college to buy the house instead, determined to fix it up herself—even though she knows her parents will be furious.
Tish, a brash, broke fellow student, doesn’t need much to get by. She can fix almost anything, so she makes do by building sets for the theater department and working odd jobs at the nearby salvage yard. Tish passes by the house one day and is mysteriously compelled to knock on the door. Libby offers her a room in exchange for her help with repairing the old house, and as they begin to work together, the two young women quickly find themselves growing closer.
Soon after moving in, Libby discovers a journal written by a young woman, Elizabeth, who lived in the house a century earlier and was deeply in love with her personal maid, Patricia. As Elizabeth’s journal entries delve deeper into her secret affair with Patricia—a love that was forbidden and dangerous in their time—Libby can’t help but notice uncanny similarities between that young couple and Tish and herself.
Have she and Tish lived this life before? And is this their chance to get it right?
Paranormal themes underly A Spell for Change by Nicole Jarvis from Titan Books.
Kate Mayer has always been troubled by visions of the future. No matter what she does, her disturbing premonitions come to pass—often with terrible consequences. But Kate has a secret: swirling, romantic dreams of a strange boy, and a chance meeting in the woods.
Oliver Chadwick Jr. returned from the Great War disabled, disillusioned, and able to see the dead. Haunted by the death of his best friend, Oliver realizes that his ability to communicate with spirits may offer the chance of closure he desperately seeks.
Nora Jo Barker’s mother and grandmother were witches, but she has never nurtured her own power. Always an outsider, she has made a place for herself as the town's schoolteacher, clinging to the independence the job affords her. When her unorthodox ideas lead to her dismissal, salvation comes in the form of a witch from the mountains, who offers her a magical apprenticeship. Yet as she begins to fall for another woman in town, her loyalties pull her in disparate directions.
Rumors of a dark force stalking the town only push Kate, Oliver, and Nora Jo onwards in their quest to determine their own destinies. But there are powers in the world stronger and stranger than their own, and not all magic is used for good...
Other Books of Interest
I put one title in the “other books of interest” category due to it teetering on the edge between historic fantasy and pure fantasy. For some reason, authors seem to find it impossible to write about ancient Greece without treating myths and gods as real. It’s not the only setting that seems to exist only in the mythic imagination as far as fiction is concerned. This one is: The Olive and the Spear by J.A. Rainbow.
In the midst of the Greco-Persian War, where the clash of swords and the cries of warriors fill the air, an unexpected love story unfolds. Athena, the revered Goddess of War and Wisdom, watches over the battlefield with a keen eye. Her divine duties are interrupted when she encounters Andromeda, a fierce and valiant Spartan warrior whose courage and strength are unmatched.
As Andromeda fights to protect her homeland, she captures not only the admiration of her fellow soldiers but also the heart of the goddess herself. Drawn together by their shared valour and unyielding spirits, Athena and Andromeda forge a bond that transcends the mortal and divine realms.
But in a world where duty and honour reign supreme, their love faces insurmountable challenges. As battles rage on and enemies close in, Athena must navigate her divine responsibilities while protecting Andromeda from both human and celestial threats. Together, they must find a way to preserve their love amidst the chaos of war.
What Am I Reading?
And what am I reading? Not much, I’m afraid, and nothing new. I did a re-listen to Kate Heartfield’s The Chatelaine in preparation for discussing it on someone else’s podcast. But mostly I’ve been too distracted by retirement preparations to settle down with books.
Author Guest
As previously mentioned, today we have an interview with Lindz McLeod about her new release The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet.
[interview transcript will be available at a later date]
Show Notes
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
- Retirement
- Financing the podcast
- Expanded analysis projects
- A new policy affecting the new book listings
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod
- Midnight Letters by Rowan Wilder
- The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
- Murder at the Cabaret by Dana Gricken
- Give My Love to Berlin by Katherine Bryant
- To the Fairest by M. Walker
- Time After time by Mikki Daughtry
- A Spell for Change by Nicole Jarvis
- Other Titles of Interest
- What I’ve been consuming
- The Chatelaine by Kate Heartfield
- This month we interview Lindz McLeod and talk about:
- The appeal of adapting Jane Austen’s fiction
- Communicating with the language of flowers
- Other Austen characters who might have interesting stories
- The wide variety of Lindz’s work
- The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod
- The Miseducation of Caroline Bingley by Lindz McLeod (forthcoming)
- An Honour and a Priviledge by Lindz McLeod (forthcoming)
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)
Links to Lindz McLeod Online
- Website: https://lindzmcleod.co.uk/
- Twitter: @lindzmcleod
- Instagram: @lindzmcleod.bsky.social
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