Blog
Friday, December 27, 2024 - 14:21
When Turton lays out the details of how vocabulary for f/f sex was deliberately omitted, obscured, and removed from dictionaries -- especially in comparison to how vocabulary for m/m sex was handled -- it becomes clear how badly queer historians have stumbled in relying on dictionary entries as evidence that "they didn't even have a word for it." One of the things I'm working on for my Sapphic Sourcebook is a collection of these vocabulary items, along with the dates, sources, and contexts, to help provide authors with a counter to the "common wisdom."
Major category:
LHMP View comments (0)
Full citation:
Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1
Publication summary:
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Chapter 3 – Silencing Sex
This chapter opens discussing how dictionaries explicitly presented themselves as censoring inappropriate language when aimed at an audience that included women. This sort of comment shows up as early as the later 18th century. Even the nature of what was being censored is censored, with explanations that it is aimed at “inelegant” words, rather than objectionable or obscene ones.
One can trace the fate of censored vocabulary when dictionary authors incorporated existing source material but filtered out specific topics and words that are identifiable by their absence in the resulting output. This can be seen especially when Latin-English dictionary contents that included words for f/f sex such as “fricatrix” or “tribas” are incorporated. E.g., a Latin supplement to a late 16th century dictionary includes “fricatrix” glossed vaguely as “she that useth unlawful venery” and more explicitly “tribas” as “such filthy women as abused their bodies one with another against kind.” The source material was incorporated into various 17th century works with similarly informative glosses. But later dictionaries derived from this material begin to omit these terms.
Tribade and fricatrix had already naturalized in French and English by the early 17th century, along with the calque “rubster” and the variant “confricatrix.” But when citation contexts are given for these terms, they emphasize distance in time (classical references) or space (e.g., Turkish examples). The attempt to distance sapphic terms from the English usage of the era of the publications is contradicted by use of the same words in poetry and theater from the early 17th century on.
As dictionaries became aimed at a more general readership in the 18th century, the significance of the f/f acts referred to is undermined, using phrases like “in imitation of intercourse,” or the words are excluded entirely.
There is a comparison of the f/f vocabulary recorded in Anne Lister’s diaries with the vocabulary admitted into dictionaries of her era. Similarly, the writings of diarist Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi are noted as a source for the use of explicitly sapphic terms (in a documentary context) in the late 18th century.
One more general cause of the exclusion of sexual language during the later 18th century and after was a shift in libel laws that discouraged publication of more explicit language, especially when applied to specific individuals. Libel laws could also be used against the publication of “obscene” books, even when the language was not describing specific individuals. Thus, for nearly a century from the mid 18th to the mid 19th centuries, the inclusion of entries for same-sex topics fell to almost nothing. One dictionary of 1775 runs counter to this trend, with a large number of entries for sex-related topics, including same-sex ones. [Note: Turton doesn’t point out that this dictionary contains only m/m terms, based on my review of the listings in the appendix.] Despite this relative wealth of word entries, their definitions obscure the nature of the acts they reference.
Around the 1870s, there is a return to inclusion of m/m-related words in general dictionaries, but no similar return of f/f entries. When words such as “fricatrice” do make an appearance in general dictionaries, their glosses erase the same-sex aspect and simply define them as indicating a sexually loose woman.
During the period of absence, such words continued to be included in specialized medical dictionaries, and this was an era when same-sex attraction began to be medicalized.
Medical dictionaries were much more interested in tribades and fricatrices than any general reference works had been.
Discourse of the 18th century reflected the general dictionaries’ aversion to specifics, claiming that there was no vocabulary available for female same-sex acts, and using circumlocutions such as “liking her own sex in a criminal way.” [Note: Keep in mind that “criminal” in this case is being used by analogy to illegal m/f and m/m sex acts, while there is no indication that law courts considered f/f sex to be criminal. See Derry 2020 on this topic.]
Some of this lack of same-sex terminology in general dictionaries was made up for in a new genre: glossaries of cant and slang terms, which became popular in the 18-19th centuries as transgressive entertainment aimed at a male readership. While cant terms for m/m sex and its participants were frequent and imaginative in these books, vocabulary for f/f relations is virtually absent from them. Even at a time when “female husbands” were a stock topic of popular media, language for them is not included in cant/slang dictionaries, except to the extent that one might read it into words attributing masculinity to specific women. But mannishness is not directly associated with f/f sexuality in the definitions. The closest that slang dictionaries come to directly addressing f/f sex may be in entries referring to boarding schools and dildoes that hint at f/f possibilities.
This doesn’t mean that slang terms for lesbianism were absent from the historic record entirely. The later 18th century is when we have clear attestation of terms such as sapphic, sapphist, tommy, and (game of) flats in clearly sexual senses. (These are collected in some modern slang dictionaries, but were not included in slang dictionaries at that time.)
This deliberate omission can be seen, for example, in the revision notes for one 18th century slang dictionary that references “game at flats,” but then omits the phrase in the actual published version of the revised dictionary.
[Note: there is a discussion of a variety of slang terms for various sexual practices where the dictionary entries do not adequately indicate what the acts were – which makes me think of some of Anne Lister’s terminology, such as “grubbling” – suggesting that there may well have been a rich slang vocabulary for f/f sex that is entirely lost to us.]
In the 19th century, slang that originally had been presented as belonging to criminals and the lower classes shifted to being framed as associated with fashionable elite men. In this context, terms for f/f sexuality are not only not embraced, but those tangential references previously found (such as dildo) are flagged as obsolete, or even as entirely spurious. Even when included, we are told that the words refer to non-existent things.
Only finally in 1890 did a slang dictionary finally admit such terms as “cunnilingist,” “fuck-finger,” and “lesbian.”
Place:
Event / person:
Thursday, December 26, 2024 - 11:01
This chapter picks up a theme we've seen regularly across time and geography, where everyone attributes the origins of same-sex sexuality to "foreigners" and as something that only happened long ago (or at least, has only recently arrived in the speaker's home territory).
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1
Publication summary:
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Chapter 2 – Estranging English
This chapter begins exploring the assertion that languages bear an essential relationship to the nature of their speakers, and that deviations of the language from this essential quality can be attributed to foreign influences. This idea appears in the introduction to a 1676 dictionary. The naturalization of words is paralleled to the naturalization of citizens and must be a strongly policed. Ethnic stereotypes are ascribed to languages along with the people who speak them. English, of course, is assumed to be neutral, moderate, and free from excess.
This establishes the principle that dictionaries have a moral mission to exclude words that represent concepts that should be excluded from English culture. Or at least such uninvited word usage should be presented with appropriate judgment noted. (Chapter 3 will specifically explore how the strategy was applied to language for f/f relations.)
This chapter looks at how dictionaries excluded or marginalized language for transgressive sexuality either specifically situating them as foreign (via etymology) or as displaced in time and space (via citation choice). The high status of classical literature posed a problem that might be handled more subtly.
Entries for “sodomy” invoke both strategies, emphasizing the foreign origin of the word, and its reference to biblical eras (taking the later equation of Sodom with m/m sex as a given). Similarly, etymologies of “bugger” that traced it to Bulgaria, even if simply via analogy of the punishment by burning , applied both to heretics (via a specific heresy attributed to Bulgaria) and sodomites.
It was common for dictionaries to ascribe the origins of both the word and the practice to specific foreign origins. A 1670 law dictionary assigns those origins to Italy, and specifically to Lombardy. [Note: Although the book doesn’t mention this, there may be additional relevant stereotypes associated with Lombardy, long associated with Italian banking practices. But it may be simply that Lombardy was the most familiar region of Italy when viewed from distant England.] Not only were claims made that foreigners brought the word/practice to England, but that visiting foreign climes could result in Englishman picking up both.
Terms related to “pederasty” underwent similar treatment, with the added complication of the esteem in which classical civilizations were held. Definitions of pederasty conflated it with sodomy (specifically with “boys” as a target) but the inherent contradictions in this equivalence resulted in ambiguity, due to the positive connotations of pederasty in classical texts. Further, pederasty was often defined as desire for boys, not specifically referring to a sex act. As usual, definitions that assume a male agent (without specifying one) created space for understanding the word in ways not intended. The scope of meaning for “boys” or “children” used in these definitions did not necessarily align with the “beardless adolescent” of classical reference.
The chapter explores a variety of other terms for a male receptive partner, with their supposed origins. Most are of clearly non-English origin and fit with the pattern of distancing. One exception, in some definitions, is “leman”—a word that is found for a non-marital sexual partner regardless of gender. Some dictionaries connected it with French “le mignon” (which would imply a grammatically male partner) while other propose an English source meaning “lie-man, one who lies with a man,” including female partners.
The author suggests that a m/m definition was prevalent in the early 17th century, but gave way to a more general sense by the 18th century, at which point new etymologies were suggested, either French (l’aimant(e)) or Germanic (leof-man). As a proposed Germanic origin takes center stage, definitions that focus on m/m senses have disappeared.
[Note: I think the book has failed in not noting the earlier usage of the word in a generic sense, and its Old English origins incorporating the non-gendered sense of “man=person” with the meaning “loved one”. As it stands, the text implies a same-sex meaning was original and only later supplanted. But I may be misunderstanding the book’s intent, as it may be trying to say that in the 17th century (when dictionaries were beginning to be a thing) the same-sex sense was prevalent, rather than suggesting that it was the original meaning.]
There is a discussion of how there is an abundance of terms for a receptive male (same-sex) partner in contrast to fewer for the insertive partner, who is in many ways, assumed as the default. [Note: compare with Latin vocabulary where the insertive partner is simply a default “man” while there are specific terms for different types of receptive partner.] The projection of a “passive” role onto the receptive partner is parallel by grammatically passive constructions. The receptive partner “is fucked, is hired, is abused, is kept, is loved.” The exception being “semantically passive” constructions where he “suffers [an act]” which is a wording also found for female partners in m/f sex.
The lexicographers’ emphasis on foreign origins for words about non-normative sex extended to the quotations selected to illustrate them, which situate the subjects of the quotes distantly in time and space, rather than using equally-available passages referring to persons and events in England.
As a classical education could not help but touch on mythological examples of m/m love, the treatment of these situations and characters in dictionaries intended for scholars is instructive. At the same time that dictionaries are defining “ganymede” (as a noun) as a receptive male sexual partner, they describe Ganymede (the mythic character) simply as being “beloved” by Jupiter. This creates a circular logical failure when the same books define “love” in heterosexual terms. Though, again, this requires the lexicographers to exclude usage in which “love” and more explicit sexual terms are clearly used in same-sex contexts.
The treatment of Sappho and other classical women is included in this chapter, although f/f language in general is treated in the next chapter. Classical dictionaries discussing the Calisto myth focus on how Jupiter tricked her into sex, but omit that the disguise relied on an assumption of f/f desire (involving Diana). The latter motif comes to be admitted in 18th century references.
Treatments of the Iphis myth up through the 19th century give her no agency, despite Ovid’s text clearly depicting her as a desiring agent.
Sappho—in general early modern discourse—is handled in three ways: as a poet, in the Phaon story, and as a lover of women. Literary references of the time clearly acknowledge the last, but dictionary entries largely do not, with a few exceptions in woks aimed at an elite male audience, rather than a general one. “Aimed at” does some heavy lifting, as even dictionaries that explicitly describe their readership in male terms may have women in their subscriber lists.
In contrast, dictionaries that present themselves as aimed at a female readership omit reference to Sappho’s same-sex loves.
By the mid 19th century, dictionary references to Sappho might include rejections of the claims about f/f love (to “redeem” her reputation), while a few began acknowledging it. And, of course, any acknowledgement of Sappho’s same-sex reputation could take comfort in the knowledge that she was long ago and far away.
Place:
Event / person:
Tuesday, December 24, 2024 - 10:03
In reading about the history of how dictionary publishers deliberately obscured or silenced discussions of sex -- especially of non-normative sex -- I can't help but think of the current (and periodic) panics over controlling the access of children to information about sex and gender. The attitude prevalent in the early modern period that simply knowing about certain sex acts could "infect" someone with an urge to commit them is still an underlayer to current concerns. "If school libraries include books that recognize the existence of non-approved genders and sexualities, that's tantamount to seducing kids to be something other than straight and cis!"
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1
Publication summary:
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Chapter 1 – Legislating Acts
This chapter looks at how words are defined and cited, and the semantic frameworks they’re associated with, using “sodomy” and “buggery” as the working examples. [Note: my summary is going to give undue attention to discussions relevant to women.]
17 century definitions of “buggery” in legal dictionaries include both homosexual acts and bestiality. They often reference earlier penalties (burning), though that was no longer in force. Two factors contribute to obscuring the specific nature of the acts so named. The descriptions are often in Latin (despite the books being overtly intended for non-scholarly readers), and the sexual nature of the acts is usually not explicitly mentioned. That you get entries like:
“One describeth this offence to be carnalis copula contra naturam & haec vel per confusionem specierum, sc. A man or a woman with a brute beast, vel sexuum, sc. A man with a man, a woman with a woman.” (1652) The question of whether sodomy could be committed between women was actually a point of contention.
These legal texts might have more explicit descriptions of the act elsewhere (e.g., that it requires “penetration and the emission of seed”) while being vague in the glossary. This deliberate vagueness has been a general feature of discourse around homosexuality, with authors often referring to it as an act “not to be named” or “not suitable to be discussed.”
When examined in parallel with other sexual terms, such as “copulation” or “fucking”, there is a general pattern of focusing on men as those who “commit sex”, but also a silent assumption that sex occurs between a male-female couple. So “sodomy” is presented as something a man does to a man where the nature of the act is separately defined as something a man does to a woman. These patterns complicate the interpretation of buggery/sodomy, both in terms of the nature of the act and the scope of its participants. We’ll get back to that.
A 1596 glossary typifies this vagueness, defining buggery, as “conjunction with one of the same kind” or in a later revision adding “or of men with beasts”. This is a relatively judgment-free definition, especially in comparison with the later editions’ definition of “sodomy” as “when one man lieth filthily with another man.”
The cultural association of “sodomy” with biblical references, and "buggery" with the 1533 Buggery Act raises the question of whether word choice depended on the genre of the text. An analysis of the association of these words (in their dictionary entries) with terms associated with religion (e.g., “sin”), or law (e.g., “crime”) also considering association with nature (e.g., “unnatural”) finds a definite association of “sodomy” with religious contexts, but a unclear preference in context for “buggery.”
In general, judgmental language when defining sexual terms works to clearly distinguish approved acts (m/f procreative sex within marriage) from unapproved acts (everything else). At the same time, by identifying and listing unapproved acts, a dictionary recognizes their existence and possibility. Except when specifically addressing acts defined as same-sex, definitions of sexual offenses (such as fornication, incest, polygamy, prostitution), explicitly presented the act as m/f.
The buggery act of 1535 defined buggery as “a detestable and abominable voice…committed with mankind or beast.” The lack of specifics regarding the agent of this act, and the use of “mankind” (rather than, for example, “man”) left room for dispute over whether women were in scope. If “mankind” can refer to human beings of any gender or if the specified agent can be of any gender, then m/f sex is technically included in “buggery”. This is workable if the “vice” in question is something that can be done to a woman, as in a disputed 18th century case where the term was applied to anal rape of a woman. But that requires an additional layer of definition of the act that is often absent or taken for granted.
One position held that “mankind” should be understood as “humanity” not “male persons”. The question of whether the omitted agent could be female was addressed directly in the context of bestiality (“by womankind with brute beast”) and addressed in some expanded definitions of sodomy as “a carnal copulation against nature, two wit, of man or woman in the same sex, or of either of them with beasts.” Others argued a distinction that sodomy excluded bestiality, while buggery included it. By the mid 17th century, legal definitions of buggery settled on including bestiality (by a man or woman) and both m/m and f/f sex. But exceptions occur that do not include f/f ( by omission rather than explicitly). The inclusion of f/f sex is largely restricted to legal dictionaries, rather than general purpose ones. The most limited definition of buggery mentions only m/m sex and omits bestiality. [Note: Despite these published definitions, England was absent of actual prosecutions of f/f “buggery”.]
As a rule, definitions of “sodomy” are more restricted. Bestiality is not included, and when the gender of the participants is mentioned, only men are specified. This is attributed to the model of the biblical story where male-assigned participants are involved. [Note: one might dispute the gender of angels, but they were treated as male by the human participants.]
In some cases, sodomy and buggery were presented as synonyms, but more often, sodomy was considered a subset of buggery.
The chapter moves on to considering the specific nature of the acts involved. While some learned sources make reference (in Latin) to anal penetration, none of the surveyed dictionaries explained the physical act. Instead, vague reference is made to the “unnatural” aspect combined with lust, wantonness, conjunction, copulation. But when those terms are defined, it is always specifically in reference to m/f sex. “The active generation between male and female” etc. Such terms are either too underspecified for clarity (“to join together”) or too over-specified to include same-sex acts.
We return now to the observation that dictionary definitions of sexual terms assume a male agent. Definitions of sex acts typically involve an unspecified agent (understood as a man) doing something to a woman. These formal definitions, however, do not reflect the more expansive use of the words in everyday language, where it is seen that women can fuck and men can be fucked. These uses turn up in legal records of witness testimony, but are not reflected when formal legal dictionaries are drawn up. (This points up only one of the flaws in using dictionaries as a guide to real-world language.)
In the context of this androcentricity there is a brief discussion of Anne Lister’s annotations on a 1735 Latin-English dictionary that placed herself as agent in a sexual context. Some dictionaries were specifically aimed at a female audience. The book speculates whether a woman reading a definition of a sexual verb as “to carnally know a woman” might have been inspired to place herself in the role of agent – as we know Anne Lister did, given that she describes becoming aroused at such a text.
From the mid 18th century on, dictionary compilers dealt with their anxiety around this possibility by increasingly censoring and obscuring sexual language in order to avoid giving people (especially women) ideas. This self-censorship not only appears in legal commentaries and glossaries, but in court records themselves, where accused acts of sodomy/buggery are concealed under phrases like “an unnatural crime” or using severely abbreviated forms of the word such as initials or first and last letter, joined by a dash.
Such words were also disappearing from ordinary dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson’s (1755). Before that date, more than half of the studied dictionaries included “buggery,” while after, only 15.6% do. Entries for “sodomy” also declined somewhat, though appearing in well over half the texts both before and after. (This will be explored further in chapter 3.) Those entries that did appear from around 1750 to 1850 remove any explicit sexual reference and simply use phrases like “an unnatural crime.”
Place:
Sunday, December 22, 2024 - 10:51
If someone told you there was a sustained conspiracy to suppress lesbian history, would you believe it? Or would you consider the idea a bit paranoid? When you look at the history of how words for f/f sexuality were handled across the long history of dictionaries of the English language, it's hard to find a more accurate word than "conspiracy" to describe the systematic obscuring, suppression, and censorship involved.
Having read a lot of primary sources, I always found claims about the supposed recency of vocabulary for lesbianism to be dubious, but the first acknowledgement I found that the OED--supposedly the official record of usage and history--could not be relied on for this topic was in an online article that I blogged as LHMP #245. So when I saw announcement of Turton's book, I got very excited to see a longer exploration of this topic. And as a bonus, the book includes an extensive appendix of all the dictionary entries that do exist. (Which I will file away for future reference for my own chronology of terminology.) It took a while to get around to blogging this book, despite my intense interest, because other publications were prioritized to support podcast topics. But here we are at last.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1
Publication summary:
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Introduction
How many times have you seen a claim along the lines of “people didn’t even have a word for lesbianism until the late 19th century” with a reference to the dated citations in the Oxford English Dictionary? This book shows why that impression is totally wrong-headed, due to deliberate and selective editing and suppression of words for female same-sex sexuality in the long history of dictionaries of English.
The book begins with an anecdote about the OED updating its entry for “marriage” when the (British) marriage equality act was passed, and how this was framed in the press as participating in a “change of definition”. This is followed by an anecdote from a slander case in 1942, which argued that “lesbian” could not be slanderous, as it was (incorrectly) asserted that the word didn’t exist in English when the relevant law was passed--an argument based on citations in the OED entry for “lesbian”, which was not included in the first edition published in 1908.
Does the OED reflect or prescribe usage? Or something else? Despite the lack of the sexual sense of “lesbian” in the first edition of the OED, the word was definitely in use in that sense. The relationship between language and its dictionaries is complex and falls somewhere in the middle ground between documentation and prescription. Dictionaries are not neutral entities, especially in contested fields, such as sexuality. This book will explore that relationship and its history in English.
The author uses the example of “queer” in a sexual sense to trace how words entered the dictionary and from what sources. The earliest current citations are one from 1894 in a letter by the Marquess of Queensbury, then after a gap of 20 years, two newspaper examples in California. But the 1894 example is ambiguous in meaning and only clearly intended as negative, while the 1914 examples are clearly in the context of homosexuality. The origin of new senses can be hard to pin down due to polysemous senses, and shifts in application.
There is a discussion of what falls under the author’s use of “dictionary” as opposed to other types of reference works, then a similar discussion of the scope of sexuality as discussed in this work. This is followed by a review of previous literature and a history of dictionaries as a publishing genre.
A review of queer historiography challenges the supposed clear dividing line at the “invention of homosexuality” in the late 19th century. Definitions in dictionaries, in addition to negotiating the balance between descriptive and prescriptive, also reflect societal judgments and norms (and tend to be inherently socially conservative). Thus, when the 1914 OED defines “tribade” as “a woman who practices unnatural vice with other women” it is not providing a value-neutral reflection of the word (or even an objective description of usage), but is telling the reader how to think about the subject. It is also obfuscating the specifics of meaning, contributing to silencing the topic. It is likely that many readers of the definition would have been unclear on the specifics of the denotation, while understanding the judgment. “Lexicographers favored disapproval over detail.”
An absence in the dictionary can reflect nonexistent words, or ignorance of their records, or a deliberate withholding of knowledge.
The remainder of this introductory chapter lays out the plan of the book’s methodology and structure. The first four chapters look at specific “cultural discourses” in an overlapping chronology.
1. Conceptual frameworks, in which sexuality was discussed and interpreted, focusing on the words “buggery” and “sodomy.”
2. Sexuality as driver of national imagery.
3. Dictionary as gatekeeper, by defining or excluding words and meanings.
4. The treatment of transgressive sexuality by medical texts, especially for female, same-sex topics.
This takes the chronology up to 1884 when the fascicles of the OED began to be published.
5. Looks at the OED specifically, including the 1933 supplement.
This is followed by a discussion of current lexicographic concerns and approaches.
Place:
Sunday, December 15, 2024 - 16:31
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 303 - Interview with Margaret Vandenburg - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/15 - listen here)
When I set up an interview with Margaret Vandenburg about her novel Craze, I was planning on the sort of short book-release-related interview that I normally include in the On the Shelf episodes. About ten minutes into recording, I realized that we were both having far too much fun to cut the discussion short and decided to make the interview its own episode.
Margaret Vandenburg’s life parallels that of the protagonist of Craze in loose terms. Raised in a western state, she spent time abroad, then settled in New York City. She had an academic career at Barnard College specializing in modernism, postmodernism, and gender studies. Her fiction has covered a range of topics and settings, but today we’ll be focusing on her most recent novel, about an art journalist who returns from time spent in the salons of 1920s Paris to land in the middle of queer New York during the Roaring Twenties.
In the next hour we have a wide- talk about books, the cycles of history, and the meaning of queerness.
[A transcript will be added at some future date.]
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Too many things to list individually
- Books and people mentioned
- Magnus Hirschfeld
- Virginia Woolf - A Room of One’s Own
- Margaret Vandenburg - An American in Paris
- Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
- Virginia Woolf - Orlando
- Chappell Roan
- Oscar Wilde
- Emma Donoghue – The Pull of the Stars
- Gertrude Stein
- Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality
- Golden Crown Literary Society
- Olivia Waite - Feminine Pursuits series
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 Margaret Vandenburg Online
Major category:
LHMPSaturday, December 7, 2024 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 302 - On the Shelf for December 2024 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2024/12/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2024.
There are so many exciting things finishing up this year and looking forward to next year! We just aired the last fiction episode for 2024, “A Very Long Malaise” by L.J. Lee. If you enjoyed it, definitely check out the guest blog that L.J. sent us, exploring the details and context of a female romantic couple in medieval Korea.
And, of course, next month we’ll be open for submissions for the 2025 fiction series. Submissions month is always a time of anticipation and terror for me. Anticipating what treasures authors will send in, and terror that I won’t receive anything. And yet, you’ve never yet failed me. This year’s stories challenged me in new ways, especially in terms of finding narrators who were right for the specific cultural settings. But I’ve discovered that the social media site Bluesky is an amazing place for making creative connections with people. When I put out the call for a narrator for “A Very Long Malaise” I quickly identified several promising prospects—and the call kept getting passed around well after I’d chosen someone. I’ve found a Bluesky feed for voice talent and next year that’s where I’ll go first when I need to find a specialty narrator. There’s a very vibrant sapphic fiction community on Bluesky and I just created my very first “here are people to follow” list for authors of sapphic and lesbian historical fiction, which is getting a lot of interest. So if you want to flee the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter and worry that you’ll never find the same community dynamics that it had in its good old days, you definitely might want to check out Bluesky.
Publications on the Blog
The blog has been seeing more action recently than it has in the last few months, thanks to my push to read material in preparation for the January essay on lesbians and the law. I finished writing up Caroline Derry’s Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, which traces the history of how English law kept flirting with the idea of bringing the law to bear on lesbianism, but settled for trying to avoid acknowledging that such a thing existed.
Another article by Caroline Derry, “The ‘legal’ in socio-legal history” took a deep dive into the famous Pirie & Woods vs. Cumming Gordon defamation case and shows how the popular image of the case as being about debating the existence of lesbianism misses a lot of interesting and nuanced details of the legal procedures.
One of the more fascinating medieval court cases is the early 15th century trial of two French women, Jehanne and Laurence, related to their sexual relationship. In Emily Hutchison and Sara McDougall’s article “Pardonable Sodomy: Uncovering Laurence’s Sin and Recovering the Range of the Possible” Laurence’s appeal for pardon is analyzed in the context of royal pardons in general and specifically those involving sexual offenses.
Jonas Roelens looks at a period of unusually pointed interest in prosecuting lesbian-adjacent acts in “Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands (1400-1550).”
And finally, the guest blog by L.J. Lee, “Sossang and Danji: 15th century Korean maidservants in love” touches on the contexts in which same-sex relationships in Korean history might be treated as legal offenses.
Every time I get some good momentum on reading for the blog, I promise myself to keep it up more regularly. I don’t know how well I’ll manage this time, but I’ve already made notes on the first three chapters of Stephen Turton’s Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600-1930, which is a study on how language around queer sexuality has been handled in English dictionaries, and especially how dictionaries can conspire to suppress knowledge of sexual topics even while claiming to promote knowledge.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
No new non-fiction books were acquired this month, so we’ll move directly on to the new and recent fiction releases. I’ve started to track in my database how I hear about new books, whether through social media, via Netgalley, through other listing aggregation sites and publishers’ websites, via direct communication by authors and publishers, or by running keyword searches on Amazon. I’m only keeping track of where I first hear about a book and not how many different places I run across it. Using multiple sources can really help when the cover copy for a book doesn’t clearly indicate that it has sapphic content, or is unclear on whether the book is a historical. This month, about a third of the titles came to my attention through social media—seeing an author post about their forthcoming book and talking about it—and the other two-thirds were found in Amazon searches. I keep hoping to reduce the percentage of Amazon finds because I know that my keyword searches miss a fair number of books. This month, I stumbled across a new crowdsourced site created by @lavendersbook for 2025 sapphic fiction releases, tagged by genre, representation, and tropes. Like all such resources, it’s only as complete as the information fed into it. In the historic field, it had half a dozen 2025 books I hadn’t heard of yet (or which I hadn’t known were sapphic), and I contributed another half dozen that I’d found but that it didn’t include yet. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out.
I came up with a couple of October titles that I’d missed the first time around.
The Lady and the Maid by Paul Jackson presents a Victorian enemies-to-lovers adventure, with a non-explicit love story.
Lady Charlotte Worthington and Eliza, a housemaid, harbour an instantaneous dislike for one another. Yet fate deals them the same unjust hand, forcing them to flee Worthington Manor together. On the road, their initial animosity gradually dissipates and suppressed feelings drift to the surface, but Charlotte puts a cap on the simmering emotions. Finding unlikely travelling companions, they arrive in Birmingham where their idyllic life crumbles as hardship and desperation force them down a dark path. Can their newfound love survive the brutal realities of the city, or will their shared journey end in despair?
The Potent Solution by Ashley Nova from Spectrum Books is a historic fantasy set in England’s Georgian era. I think I missed this originally because the cover copy gives no clue to sapphic content.
Charlotte Price is a mess; perpetually tardy, chronically unfocused, and indecisive to a fault.
She'd hoped that apprenticing for London's only master alchemist and private detective would help solve her problems, but her first investigation will test her limits in ways she never imagined. On the trail of a dangerous magical drug, Charlotte's mentor vanishes without a trace, Lost, overwhelmed, and inexperienced, she must use everything she's learned, and improvise the things she hasn't, as she takes on magically empowered assassins, gate-crashes a society ball, and uncovers a conspiracy that goes right to the heart of government.
Yet Charlotte's biggest challenge is her own errant attention span, which threatens to stop the investigation in its tracks. To find her mentor and prevent disaster, she must overcome her fear of failure, trust her instincts, and learn that she has everything she needs to thrive.
I have four November books that didn’t make last month’s show.
The Long Winter of Miðgarðr by Edale Lane is part of her mythic Tales from Norvegr series.
Three disparate women; one common goal: survive.
Jorunn holds fast to duty and honor. The stalwart shieldmaiden is admired for her skill and courage in a harsh landscape beset by dangers and enemies. Would she sacrifice it all for the love of a beautiful, mysterious woman?
Madlen, a revered holy sister of the Eldríss Hringr, bears a sacred mission to guard Miðgarðr from Surtr and the monstrous fire giants of Muspelheim on an island dominated by a volcanic passage between the realms. While inexplicably drawn to Jorunn, her obligation to the sisters and their tasks must remain her priority.
This next book is a classic “romance of the archives” story, with the modern framing story of academic historians holding the stage as much as the historic love story they stumble across. The book is: Female Sharpshooter in the Civil War by Kenneth Alder and I’m going to condense the very long cover copy quite a bit.
A present-day lesbian couple inherits a group of letters written by two young lesbian lovers during the Civil War Era. Rachel (Ray) serves as a sharpshooter in the Union army, disguised as a man and exchanges letters with her lover Mary, who is trying to survive in an abusive home.
The heart of the story is two small groups of letters. Those from Rachel’s parents describe the political and economic factors that led to the Civil War. The remaining bulk of the letter collection is between Mary and Rachel, reflecting the turmoil of war and the confusion of civilian life
Victory, Virus, Votes: 1917-1920 (Deborah and Miriam's Boston Marriage #4) by Ellen M. Levy from Halo Publishing International is the latest installment in a series following a Jewish lesbian couple across the early 20th century. The earlier books in the series seem to have been published quite some time ago and only recently reissued, but this one appears to be new.
The end of World War I sees an upheaval in American society—the Great Migration of Black Americans, the devastation of the Spanish Flu, and women’s struggle for the vote. Victory, Virus, and Votes: 1917–1920 brings history to life through the lens of two young Jewish lovers fighting to find their place in a turbulent world. The continuing saga of Deborah Levine and Miriam Cohen explores key historical occurrences such as the suffragists’ Night of Terror, the Great Molasses Flood, and the Women’s Land Army.
Beyond the Boundaries of Time by Hazel Bennett is yet another “romance of the archives” intertwining the stories of a contemporary couple and the historic figures whose correspondence they are exploring.
Set against the backdrop of World War II and present-day, the narrative follows Isa Fletcher, an English nurse, and Sofia Delgado, a Spanish poet, whose deep bond flourishes in a time of turmoil. As they navigate the challenges of war, their letters become a lifeline, each word filled with hope and longing.
In the present, Valeria Torres, an environmental artist, and Emma Landry, a writer and historian, stumble upon the letters written by Isa to Sofia. Drawn into the echoes of the past, they embark on a journey to uncover the truth behind Isa and Sofia’s love, reflecting on their own relationship along the way. Their exploration leads them to a small Spanish church where Isa left her final letter, a testament to her enduring love that transcends time.
As Valeria and Emma delve deeper into the intertwined stories, they confront their own fears and insecurities. Inspired by the unwavering love of the wartime lovers, they realize they have the power to rewrite their own narrative, choosing a path that celebrates connection and courage.
I have five December books, but I expect more will turn up in the course of the month.
The Case of the Missing Maid (Harriet Morrow Investigates #1) by Rob Osler from Kensington appears to be the start of a new historic detective series.
Chicago, 1898. Rough-around-the-edges Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. Just twenty-one with a younger brother to support, she seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires her as its first woman operative. The move sparks controversy—with skeptical male colleagues, a high-strung office secretary, and her boss, Mr. Theodore Prescott, all waiting for her to unravel under the pressure.
Only an hour into the job, Harriet has an assignment: Discover the whereabouts of a missing maid from one of the most extravagant mansions on Prairie Avenue. Owner Pearl Bartlett has a reputation for sending operatives on wild goose chases around her grand estate, but Harriet believes the stunningly beautiful Agnes Wozniak has indeed vanished under mysterious circumstances—possibly a victim of kidnapping, possibly a victim of something worse.
With Mr. Prescott pushing a hard deadline, Harriet’s burgeoning career depends on working through a labyrinth of eccentric characters and murky motives in a race to discover who made Agnes disappear. When her search leads to Chicago’s Polish community and a new friendship in Agnes’s charming older sister, Barbara, clues scattered across the city slowly reveal just how much depends on Harriet’s inexperienced investigation for answers . . . and the deep danger that awaits once she learns the truth.
A different sort of cross-time story is told in Speak EZ by Elle E. Ire from Bywater Books. In addition to the contemporary characters and the long-hidden mystery they investigate, we have a ghost dog—and not only the dog.
On New Year’s Eve, in 1923, someone walked into Michelle “Mickey” McFadden’s queer speakeasy hidden beneath the Big City Little Theater and shot her and her dog, EZ, dead. Or . . . sort of, mostly, kind of dead, maybe? Because instead of crossing over, they become trapped within the bar’s cinderblock walls. And though EZ eventually manages to wriggle his way free, Mickey remains, her spirit frozen in time.
In 2022, employees of the Big City Little Theater begin encountering a stray dog sneaking in and around the premises. When Ciara, the theater’s bookkeeper, saves the dog from being hit by a truck, she begins to suspect there’s something odd about the mysterious canine and makes it her mission to catch him and either return him to his owners or keep him as her own.
That is until Ciara and her friends happen upon the sealed-up speakeasy in the theater’s subbasement —and find the dog inside. But how did he get in there when the door was locked? And why are there bullet holes in the otherwise beautifully preserved bar? Their discovery launches them on the investigation of a lifetime, complete with an ancient murder to solve, strange occurrences to explain, and a missing person to find.
When Mickey’s spirit, which has been trapped in the mysterious in-between for the past hundred years, begins to find her way out, she and Ciara finally come face-to-face. And it’s more than the speakeasy’s old wiring that makes sparks fly. Ciara’s falling hard for Mickey and Mickey for her. Can they solve the murder and figure out how EZ returned to the world of the living before the clock strikes midnight on the next New Year’s Eve?
Because if they don’t, they’re pretty certain Mickey’s time will finally be up—this time for good.
Ghostly characters also feature in Clara, Darling by Chace Verity, which raises interesting questions about what constitutes “ever after” in “happily ever after.”
It was Sadie Reynolds’s dream to leave her small town behind and drink in the exciting life that New York City offered with her best friend at her side. Now it’s 1932, Sadie’s rich and has a career in radio, and she’s miserable. She’s married to a cheating comedian, the wealthy elite of Fifth Avenue think she’s a gold digger, and Clara Prescott has been dead for nine years.
As Christmas draws near, Sadie prepares for another year of pretending to be someone she’s not. Her plans get interrupted, however, when Clara returns as a ghost.
Since Clara was brave enough to come back, Sadie realizes she can also be brave enough to do what she needs in order to start truly living again—this time, with Clara.
Encrypted Hearts (A Women in War Historical Romance #3) by E.V. Bancroft from Butterworth Books features the famous World War II codebreakers.
Cam Langley, a sharp-witted codebreaker at Bletchley Park, dresses like a man and makes no secret of who she is. Gloria Edwards, eager to escape her domineering father, joins the war effort and is quickly drawn into Cam's orbit.
Cam feels an immediate attraction, while Gloria is caught off guard, having only ever been with men. As they work closely together, their connection deepens, but a spy within Bletchley threatens to destroy everything.
Can they survive the chaos of war, or will secrets tear them apart?
Unbroken by Kim Pritekel from Sapphire Books Publishing has a very cinematic description.
In 1945, thirty-three-year-old Jessie Lowrey is summoned back to Greyson Manor. The huge mansion served as the backdrop of her childhood, as her father worked on the extensive grounds and her mother served as personal maid to Mrs. McGovern, the estate’s matriarch, who is now dying of cancer and wants to make amends.
The visit stirs nostalgia in Jessie, a journey of memory taking her back in time to 1918, when her family first arrives at the estate to work in service to the family. As the two are close in age, Jessie is assigned to be essentially a living toy for the McGovern daughter, Heaven. The girls quickly grow inseparable, exploring everything from the expansive grounds, to the endless corridors and rooms, which still echo with girlish giggles…to each other.
When heartache strikes, along with the stock market crash of 1929, the two young women are torn apart by deeply buried secrets, which Jessie will have to face and unbury, piece by piece, to find her way home.
Will Heaven be waiting for her?
What Am I Reading?
So what have I been reading in the last month?
It wasn’t quite all audiobooks this month, but it was mostly audiobooks. I listened to Emma R. Alban’s queer historic romance You’re the Problem, It’s You which is a direct follow-on sequel to Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend, but this time with the focal couple being male. It has the same positives and negatives as the first book. The characters are interesting, the plot—though somewhat predictable—carries through. But as with the first book, the characters think, act, and feel like modern teenagers and the historic setting is overall weakly built.
Nghi Vo has another addition to her Singing Hills cycle of novellas with Brides of High Hill. This time the tale of story-collector Chih picks up gothic horror elements that grow slowly as all the initial premises unravel.
I loved Rose Sutherland’s A Sweet Sting of Salt, set in a fishing village. The characters aren’t aware of what genre they’re living in, so it takes the entire book for the protagonist to learn the secret that the reader finds obvious: that the woman she loves is a selkie. There are some tense moments of peril, and I’ll note a content warning for animal death, but the romantic couple has a happy ending. The writing is gorgeous and the details of the setting feel solid and true.
I did manage one story in print—the short story “Harvest Season” by Annick Trent, part of her 18th century “Old Bridge Inn” cycle. This is a lovely sweet romance overlaid on some light adventure around weaver labor activists. Great writing and a solid historic grounding to the characters. It’s a quick read—I finished it in a single sitting while riding the train to San Francisco to meet some friends.
I have high hopes of returning to more print reading once I’m not staring at a screen all day for work. Only 150 days to retirement!
Show Notes
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
- Call for submissions for the 2024 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Derry, Caroline. 2020. Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-030-35299-8
- Hutchison, Emily & Sara McDougall. 2022. “Pardonable Sodomy: Uncovering Laurence’s Sin and Recovering the Range of the Possible” in Medieval People, vol. 37, pp. 115-146.
- Derry, Caroline. 2022. “The ‘legal’ in socio-legal history: Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon” in Journal of Law and Society 49:778-799.
- Roelens, Jonas. 2015. “Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands (1400-1550)” in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review vol. 130 no. 3.
- Lee, L.J. 2024. “Sossang and Danji: 15th century Korean maidservants in love” published as part of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project at alpennia.com.
- A new resource for forthcoming sapphic/lesbian fiction
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- The Lady and the Maid by Paul Jackson
- The Potent Solution by Ashley Nova
- The Long Winter of Mi?gar?r (Tales from Norvegr) by Edale Lane
- Female Sharpshooter in the Civil War by Kenneth Alder
- Victory, Virus, Votes: 1917-1920 (Deborah and Miriam's Boston Marriage #4) by Ellen M. Levy
- Beyond the Boundaries of Time by Hazel Bennett
- The Case of the Missing Maid (Harriet Morrow Investigates #1) by Rob Osler
- Speak EZ by Elle E. Ire
- Clara, Darling by Chace Verity
- Encrypted Hearts (A Women in War Historical Romance #3) by E.V. Bancroft
- Unbroken by Kim Pritekel
- What I’ve been consuming
- You're the Problem, It's You by Emma R. Alban
- Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
- A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland
- Harvest Season by Annick Trent
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:
LHMPSaturday, November 30, 2024 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 01 – A Very Long Malaise by L.J. Lee - transcript
(Originally aired 2024/11/30 - listen here)
This episode concludes the 2024 fiction series with a story set in late 18th century Korea, among the attendants of the court. The author, L.J. Lee has contributed a guest blog giving some of the historic background that inspired the story, which you can find on the website. L.J. Lee is a translator living in Korea, and writes stories that center queer and marginalized people in Asian history. This is her first fiction publication, but she also has a book review published in Exchanges, a journal of literary translation. She has a Mastodon account at @ljwrites@writeout.ink and blogs about history, translation, and more at ljwrites.blog. See the links in the show notes.
Our narrator this time is Bailey Wolfe. Bailey is a Korean American voice actress based in Minneapolis, who relishes playing characters with playful confidence–and big stompy death robots–but also enjoys adventures in commercials, branding, narration, and direction. She notes, “Not every voice actor you meet has experience in medicine, vaccine development, and biomedical engineering, but maybe you just haven’t realized you need one that does.” Bailey notes that when not doing voice acting, you can find her outside on a river somewhere. Unless it’s cold. Then she’s on the ice. You can find her online at https://bbwolfevox.com/. As usual, see the show notes for a link.
I’d like to give credit to the Bluesky network of voice actors for helping me locate vocal talent that matches the voices and character backgrounds in our stories. My experience in connecting with Bailey indicates that this part of my job is going to be much easier in the future! And remember that we’ll be opening for submissions for the 2025 fiction series in January.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
A Very Long Malaise
by L.J. Lee
The smooth body of the cup suddenly too heavy in my nerveless fingers, I bring it down on its saucer before I can drop it. The warmth of the sparrowtongue tea sloshes over my hand, but I don’t spare it a glance.
Instead I hunker down, my words a frightened squeak. “You would have me spy for you again?”
“Lower your voice!” Aji, Attendant Han that is, looks over at the closed door of her chamber, as though to seek shadows blotting the paper panes. A spy would be wary of spies, wouldn’t she?
“Of course it’s nothing like that.” Turning back to me, she takes a square of folded cotton to wipe my hand. My fingers are colder when she draws away to wipe spilled droplets from the table. “The Minister simply wishes to learn more about the events that shook the palace at the time, out of concern for His Highness’s well-being.”
“By digging into the circumstances of—” I clamp my voice down and lean closer to her, catching a whiff of cool apricot, “—of the death of His Highness’s father? That was decades ago. How does it help anyone to bring it back up?”
“Let me be the judge of that.” She pats my hand, the half-moons of her eyes narrowing to the crescent moons of a smile. I pull my hand away, still feeling her lightly-scented touch on the skin. A sudden surge to my feet makes my bad back twinge.
“I’ve heard enough. Thanks. For the tea and snacks.”
Dull-witted wench that I was to come running when she invited me for cakes and tea. I don’t know what I expected from her, from us when us is a long-closed dusty book. The rasp and tap of wood as I slide the door shut feels like finality.
###
Stepping into the hall, I am swallowed up by the whisper and hum of the palace. Eyes down, make myself small. White-sheathed feet fall on wooden boards with no more sound than snow on snow.
Is that— it is, it’s her!
Attendants split like a wave of indigo and green to either side of the hall, making way for a Senior Lady of the Inner Sanctum. We bow to her as she sweeps by in rich dark skirts, though we know enough to steal unobtrusive glances that miss nothing. The black cap high on her head, held up by the gilded frog pin of her rank, seems to look down from the pinnacle of power. Other Senior Ladies greet her on her way, yet Senior Lady Bak of the Inner Sanctum, though in her thirties and young for her rank, merely acknowledges them with short nods as she moves on with her Attendants in tow.
Senior Lady Bak, huh. A kinswoman of this Minister Aji spoke of and the newest of the Senior Ladies of the Inner Sanctum who serve His Highness and the royal family up close. And, they say, a shoo-in for Chief Senior Lady should the Minister’s star continue to rise as it does.
Is that Aji’s angle here? To get in Lady Bak and her family’s good graces? That she’d think to use me to that end, just because I have the ear of a few old ladies—
“What are you standing there for, Honored Sister?” A younger Attendant elbows me as she passes. “You’ll be late for shift!”
I nod and hurry after her. Of course. Don’t even think about getting involved in spying or the affairs of higher-ups. I know the consequences all too well for sticking my neck out.
Run that rat mouth, burn that rat mouth! The words are in my ears as we bustle into the embroidery hall. A memory of blinding torchlight thrusting into my face overlaps the neat worktable overspread with embroidery pieces. I try to blink the image away; that was a lifetime ago, nothing for a fully-fledged Attendant to fuss about.
The lapse costs me dearly when I prick a finger and smear blood on the white hollyhock needlework, earning me a lecture from the dour Senior Lady on duty and five days of workroom clean-up.
###
That is why I am late, late, late by the time I’m free to hurry to the gate to meet my visitor.
She hovers outside the visitors’ house, huddled around a package in her arms and eyes darting to and fro as if she expects to be arrested or berated any minute. I flinch at the patched and worn top she wears. I can’t help it; even the servants who clean and carry water dress better in here.
“Mother, it has been too long.” My bow is hurried and stiff, in part because my back aches from the frantic pickup and wiping down of the workroom, in part because I don’t want to be seen with her in the open. Noblewoman she may not be, but we—they—get by with Father’s herbalist business, especially with the cocoon-boiled silk and finely-woven hemp I send them out of my wages. Why would she go around looking like this? I wish it were a different visitor I were meeting, though it’s too soon for her to come around and I shouldn’t think this way. “I apologize for my tardiness. Please, come inside.”
“No, it seems I’ve caught you on a busy day. It’s my fault, when you’re working so hard all the time for the King. Here, I brought you a little dried pollack.” She thrusts the cloth-wrapped package at me with its faint fishy aroma. “It’s not much, but you can share with your friends and…maybe your superiors, so they’ll look kindly on you?”
Oh, Mother. Of course she has no concept of the kinds of gifts the Senior Ladies get from Ministers and Great Houses seeking their favor. Not even the common Attendants here would look twice at the grade of pollack she could buy at the lower markets of the capital.
Still, I give a tight-throated nod. “Thank you, Mother.”
She turns away after a few more words, with the look of one who has unfinished business.
Let her go, I tell myself. Let her go, don’t ask why she came, don’t give her that opening. Let her waste her time coming all this way to visit the eldest she never comes to see unless she wants something. It’s the least she can do, isn’t it, after wasting my whole life by throwing me in here, never to have a mate or a house of my own. Don’t ask her—
It’s the sad sag of her shoulders, like a pillar bowed under the weight of a roof, that defeats me.
“Was there anything else, Mother?”
###
It was about money. Of course it was.
Your youngest sister is—was—to wed in the spring.
Was, that is, until Father fell ill and the family slid into debt.
A wedding! Apparently it’s something women still have, in the world outside these walls. You face your groom across a laden table in the yard of your girlhood home and you each bow down to the ground, the weight of your layered skirts and wide-sleeved garment dragging at you so your kinswomen have to help you up after every bow. In the morning you are carried in a litter to a place where you belong, a home to call your own. I watched those ceremonies myself as a child before I came here, raising myself on tippy-toe to see over the heads of the crowd while the smells of the wedding feast filled the charged air.
I suppose I had a wedding of sorts myself, midway into my twenties. The memory swims up as I walk past ponds and gardens toward the boisterous calls of an arrow-throwing game. I was nervous and stiff-necked when I bowed before a table of food and drinks, not wanting the rented flower-cap to fall off my head and roll in the dirt. There was no groom filling my sight as he would fill my life from that moment on, only deep obeisance across waves of walls and tiled roofs toward His Highness’s house of high office, the only man in my life and our theoretical husband. Thank the Lady of the Moon the prospect remains a theory for almost all of us, and I am certainly no exception. Life here is precarious enough as a faceless face, never mind a royal concubine.
Your sister swears she’ll put off the wedding and take care of your father until he’s well, but… Mother’s words disappeared into the tie of her top as she pressed it to her mouth, but I didn’t need to hear more. What parent, what elder sister, would want a young girl in the family to squander her best marriageable years? Having one unwed daughter in the family is more than enough.
Walking into the sunlit yard where I was told Attendant Han would be, I watch as Aji herself takes her turn. She flits up to a log on the ground marking the distance, stretching out an arm as though to show off the line of her jade-colored sleeve. Her entire body thrusts after the throw of a red-plumed arrow, narrowed to one single aim and purpose. She seems ready to tilt over in its wake and oh, won’t she fall on her face for once, flat on the ground with the rest of us that she treads on so blithely on her flight to the stars?
She does not fall, and the arrow cuts a neat arc into the waiting jar. Aji cheers and laughs with the other Attendants she no doubt has in her hands, as she had me. Look how fake she is, bowing to the Senior Ladies and eunuchs, and how they fall for it. Even Senior Lady Bak, watching surrounded by Attendants and servants, gives her a small, graceful nod.
I slink around the back of the crowd to Aji when she is away for a moment from her adoring crowd. “A word, Attendant Han?”
“Souri!” Her face creases in mirth as though we were still the best of mates. “Did you see my throw? Why don’t you join in?”
“No, thank you. I only need a moment.” I draw her aside, looking around for any listeners. “Your offer from yesterday. Does it still stand?”
Her face smooths over into a pane of ice. “So you’re in.”
“If you can make it worth my while.” I don’t have the luxury of being picky, Not with Mother so frayed and patched, bowed by the weight of the world. I bow with her to share her load.
Aji pats my shoulder as though I’m some intimate or lackey of hers. I clench my hand in my skirt before I can scratch that condescension off her face. “Oh, don’t worry on that account. It’ll be just like old times!”
Will you abandon me, just like old times? The words push up to my chin, but instead I say:
“Thank you, Attendant Han. I will speak to you again with what I learn.”
“Is it to be Attendant Han all the time now? People would think us strangers.”
“Oh, I wish we were.” The words are a grumble behind my lips but she hears them, for her face flicks and falters like a pennant that has lost its wind. Why does that make me ache, as though I were the one who wronged her? I nod a bow and stalk away before she can respond, my back stiff again and making the movement awkward.
Burn that rat mouth!
###
“Is it winter again? When you’re my age, you know, the cold sets in the bones.”
The old Senior Lady Roh coughs and stirs, trying to lie comfortably in the swathe of her bedding. Her bones feel fragile as a bird’s when I help her writhe to lie on her side yet she is also heavy, borne down by her own helplessness.
“It’s still autumn, but they’re keeping the floors warm. You should be fine.” Indeed, it is so warm and close here my armpits pool with sweat and I wish I could take my top off.
“Oh, fires won’t help this kind of chill.” Senior Lady Roh cackles, wrinkles cracking her face in all directions. “Now, when my Danhyang and I would lie together until dawn doing very little sleeping, that was some real heat! Have you a special friend, too, young lady? You should, you know. Not much else in here for the boredom.”
My head jerks around to steal a look at the door, not all of the sweating from the temperature now. Of course, no stern-faced and stone-fisted Inspector-Attendants burst in to haul this sick and wandering woman away, to have the dread letters 違法交朋 위법교붕 “friendly intimacy in violation of the laws” carved on her bony chest. No one cares what she did or what she might rave about. She lives the future that awaits all of us, cast out to unvisited back rooms and gathering dust like forgotten bits and ends.
“No.” My answer is soft as I push away a stray thought of pleasant afternoons in the visitor’s house with a pretty widow. “I don’t have anyone like that.”
What I once had with Aji, my laughing sharp girl, was dashed to pieces years ago when I fell running from the guards and she ran on, the dark wave of her skirt as one with the blue winter night. We would both have been caught, were her words when she visited me where I lay recovering from my punishment. I can’t let a charge of spying stain my record.
I shifted under the sheets to turn my back on her, though my wounds burned and stabbed. When she reached out trying to help I struck her hands away, though I almost cried at the pain that shot along my spine. That was the end of our illegal friendship.
Yet her ambition marches on and I rattle along to it, like a doll of grass in a child’s hands. Taking a breath, I start digging for the kind of memories only a woman whose mind is half gone would share, and only with someone familiar to her. Someone who seems harmless, like me.
My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. I think of my sister promising to put off marriage for our parents’ sake, and that pushes the words through. “How long have you known Danhyang? You must have weathered some dangerous times, given the years you lived through.”
Senior Lady Roh’s clouded eyes widen and I glimpse the woman she must have been decades ago: young, strong, and deeply afraid. “Oh, there was so much, some fearful times indeed! Who could ever forget Year Nine of the Ox when there was such trouble, death everywhere…”
###
“She really said that? She heard the Minister telling the eunuchs that the Crown Prince must die?”
I look down to my lap at Aji’s question, a lump in my throat. Senior Lady Roh’s tale came away like thread from a cocoon once she was properly warmed up. And here I am, dragging the whole dripping mess to Aji, running my rat mouth for a bit of coin and cloth.
“Well.” She lets out a huff of breath and stands. “Thank you, Sou— Attendant Kim. I will extend my full thanks, obviously. I believe you will be well-satisfied.”
Questions spill from my mouth the moment I raise my head to face her. “What do you plan to do with this information? Will you really take it to the Minister, telling him there is evidence implicating him in the death of His Highness’s father? You know it will make the Minister afraid for his safety. Even a rat will bite when cornered, and he is no rat but a fox.”
She heads to the door with barely a rustle of her skirts. “That is really none of your concern, is it?”
My voice stops her before she can open the door to leave. “Wait. This job turned out more dangerous than I thought. Our lives on the line if the Minister finds out who knows what, and I want one more thing.”
“I told you, you will be well-rewarded. I advise you not to let greed get the better of—”
“Not for me. Senior Lady Roh talked about Danhyang, her intimate friend. She’s retired to the Palace Village, hasn’t she?” Retired, meaning sent there to die. It is unclean for any but a royal to die within the palace walls and bring that shade to His Highness’s own home. Palace Village is our final stop once we are too old and sick to be of use. “Senior Lady Roh misses her fiercely. They are both old and ill, let them meet before it’s too late.”
Aji shakes her head. “You haven’t changed at all, have you.”
“We dragged a frail old woman into this terrible affair, using her trust in me. Isn’t this the least we owe her, to see her friend once more in life? If you have ever known what it is to love someone—” I do not say, if you ever loved me, “—couldn’t you do that much for her?”
She fidgets with the end of her sleeve and I feel her need to throw me some kind of bone, the instinct of the ambitious and popular. I push on.
“You know people. Senior Ladies, the elder eunuchs, Ministers even. I know your plans always reached toward the ranks of the Inner Sanctum, to serve by the Queen’s side.” In the end, maybe that was what frayed and snapped the fabric of our connection—she wanted to fly higher and higher still, while I was content with my feet planted in the earth.
The plump triangle of a mouth whose taste is a faded memory works for a moment. “Well, I’m not there just yet. But I’ll see what I can do.”
###
“Oh, it’s something of a jape played on the first-year girls,” I tell the pretty widow who has come around at last on one of her supply visits. Maybe my laugh will make me seem confident and unshaken, everything I am not. “On the last night of our first year in the palace they stood us in a row in the yard, masked with wheat cakes in our mouths, and the junior eunuchs thrust torches in our faces, shouting ‛Run that rat mouth, burn that rat mouth!’ It’s a warning to keep quiet about the goings-on in the palace. That’s why I said it in reply to your question, as a joke. Not a very funny one, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, no, no. It’s funny, now that I know.” Mulgoldaek the widow touches her smooth pale fingers to her lips as she titters, as though to hide the gap between her front teeth though she really shouldn’t. We have been meeting for nearly a year now over embroidery threads and sweetmeats and I don’t think I’ve seen her look this sadly at me, the corners of her eyes drooping even while she lifts her cheeks in a smile.
I don’t like that. I am not someone to be pitied, and the widow is prettiest when she laughs. “I mean, we were never in any danger! I found it amusing myself the next year, watching the first-year girls wailing and carrying on.”
“But you didn’t know that at the time, did you? Everything was new and you didn’t know what to expect.”
“No…I suppose not.”
Neither of us makes a show of laughing any longer. Her eyes are clear as though looking down a well at noon, and in turn seem to look into mine right to the bottom. I look away, not wanting to think what she might find there. “Thank you for the sweets. The old ladies in the back rooms like the street tastes from their girlhood best.”
“That is kind of you, to visit them.”
Kind? Maybe I should tell her it started out as punishment, when I was ordered to wait on them after I was caught eavesdropping, though barely recovered enough from my flogging. Over time seeing them became something to do, since I also lost Aji and any thoughts of advancing through the ranks. “I suppose it became habit. I can talk to them like I can’t to others in the palace.”
And that ‘habit’ became Senior Lady Roh’s peril, because Aji found out what old history she might yet wring out of the discarded old woman. Because I didn’t have the strength to tell her no.
“Please don’t be hard on yourself, Attendant Kim. Giving comfort to the lonely is no small thing in a cold world.” Mulgoldaek’s hand closes over mine, warm and soft with a scent of the winter cypress oil she uses in her hair. The pounding of my heart feels like the footfalls of something both unfamiliar and old.
###
“Senior Lady, ma’am?” I am already sweating as I walk into her sickroom. “I got that pumpkin taffy you wanted, and a few other things besides—”
Who’s that kneeling next to the old lady’s bedding with a tray? I know who brings the Senior Lady her herbal infusions, a servant with a slight limp. This is a completely different woman, one who moves in servants’ roughspun with the incongruous grace of a predator. Less gently than I like, she shakes the old woman who blinks and stirs as she wakes from her nap.
“Is the usual servant on break?” I sink down on Senior Lady Roh’s other side, laying aside the packet of sweets. “And where might you be from, did one of the Departments of Healing send you?”
The unfamiliar woman murmurs vague assent and takes up the bowl to make the invalid drink, but if she is a servant with the healers she is either new, or bad at her job. The medicine laps at the edge of the bowl in her right hand while her left fumbles getting the Senior Lady to sit up. Is it just me, or does the medicine smell different than usual? It may be almost two decades since I was an herbalist’s brat running in and out of the shop and helping to steep the mixes, but some early impressions last a lifetime.
Whatever, I might as well do something. It’s not as though I have a record or reputation to lose.
“Here, let me help.” I ‘helpfully’ put my hands to the bowl—and then my fingers stretch a little too far, tipping it off balance. The whole thing goes flying, its contents splaying over the floor in a burst of brown whose scent clings oddly to the inside of my nostrils. I’ll be spending some time cleaning the floor up if I was wrong here.
The serving woman stares down at the mess, not even angry, but tensing up as she coils to spring. I flinch back when she looks up with a glare, but it’s not me she’s looking at. It’s the old Senior Lady.
A claw flashes, no, that’s steel, a knife! I should get away from here, scream for help, stay very still so this tiger passes me by in the night.
The old woman wanted to see her Danhyang one last time. She’s alone here and forgotten, just like me, just like—
My arms are around Senior Lady Roh as I fall with her away from the gleaming arc of the knife. It skids like a hot-cold lash across my back, leaving wet fire in its wake.
So this was Aji’s game, to rat this sick old lady out to the Minister so he can carve out the danger at its root. The friend I once knew soars upward on hungry dreams, higher and higher to the stars while I plunge to earth flailing and shrieking.
I crawl away from the assassin and her knife, dragging the flopping old lady with me, but a muscle in my back yanks like a string on a doll and tumbles me flat. The pain pierces through to the tips of my toes, leaving me gasping and unable even to scream.
Senior Lady Roh, weeping, tries to push me off her. “Run, you stupid young thing. Save yourself!”
A crack from the doors and a scuffle—hands are pulling the wide-eyed and blubbering Senior Lady from my clutching arms. No no, please spare her, she didn’t do anything wrong!
“Souri! Attendant Kim! It’s all right. The royal guards are here.”
My mouth opens to speak and then just hangs open as Aji cradles me, the red stain of my blood vivid on her sleeve while she shouts over a shoulder that I need a healer. Behind her eunuchs and guards drag away the assassin, who fights every inch and is gagged around her bloody mouth to keep her from biting her tongue and killing herself before she can face the Royal Interrogators.
“It’s all right.” Tears shine in Aji’s eyes, as though she cares. “You did so well. You can rest now.”
Obedient even now, my head falls on her shoulder while my mind falls away, the mayhem of the room darkening before my eyes.
###
“So we were bait the whole time, to make the Minister overreach and be caught red-handed in the palace.”
“If you must put it that way.” Aji lowers her gaze with a small pout. “I do apologize for not being speedier.”
“Oh, spare me. You came in exactly when you needed to, so nothing could be plausibly denied and you could take the credit. Senior Lady Roh’s and my lives were acceptable wagers.”
Aji raises a coy eyebrow and says nothing.
“I suppose congratulations are in order. Everyone says you’re next in line to enter service in the Inner Sanctum, with one of their number to be sent packing.” It’s still hard to believe Senior Lady Bak smuggled the assassin in, but I’m not one to speak about holding firm against bad influence.
“Oh, you know.” My bad influence plays with the hem of a sleeve. “It would be an honor if I were given the nod, but I would never presume to be worthy of it.”
“Well, in case you are chosen, I have one final boon to ask. I think I’ve earned that much, don’t you?” The wound in my back throbs under the bandages, a mix of old aches and new.
###
The wind blows differently here in Palace Village, running free unchecked by high stone walls. Little about it is palatial, just a cluster of modest tiled-roof houses under a hill. It is named not for its size or importance, but for the former palace attendants who live here: Women like Senior Lady Roh and her Danhyang, who I left dozing hand-in-hand and face-to-face as they love to do through the languor of the lengthening afternoons.
I never saw two people weep the way they did when they laid eyes on each other on Senior Lady Roh’s arrival, each taking the other’s papery cheeks between veined hands. That first shock of reunion since settled down to the softness of routine, and the healer who comes around to see the sick marvels at how much better the Senior Ladies are doing since.
I just want you to be well, Mother told me when I sent her away with coin, silk, cotton, hemp, fish, and rice for a wedding I will never see with enough left over to ease my parents’ hardship—so much in goods that a cart was hired to carry it all—telling her it might be the last help I can give the family for a while.
Am I well here, as she wanted? Spring winds brush my forehead as I walk to the edge of the village on dirt paths. It unsettles me to feel the seasons again, as though the palace walls had the power to block the passage of time itself.
My back twitches without rancor as I step over mud puddles from recent rains. It’s more the old wound than the new. The knife-wound is so well healed, after all, that I took up embroidery again for something to do. These bits might also supplement the small stipend we get from the palace, if I can find a way to sell them.
How strange, to be thinking of a future here. Yet seasons turned with no summons from the palace, long after I have been able to work again. Did Aji manage to convince the bureaucracy, as I asked, that I was close to death and unfit to return to service? She does have reason to want me gone and forgotten with all I know, so this may well be a meeting of the minds between us. I hope it is.
At the end of my meandering walk, there outside the guesthouse waits the merchant I was told might be interested in my needlework. Wait…do I know her? My eyes follow the peeking hems of underpants and petticoat below the jaunty lift of her skirt, the curve of breasts under green-trimmed collar and the sloping line of shoulders draped with an outer frock. At the sight of me her mouth falls wide in such joy, she forgets to cover the gap between her front teeth.
“I was informed by a maid of Senior Lady Han of the Inner Sanctum, that I might buy some good embroidery here?” The widow Mulgoldaek lowers her gaze, her cheeks glowing like the apricot buds dotting the trees around us.
“She always was a nosy one.” The spring warmth fills me, too, rising to the tips of my ears. “Come inside, the air’s chill and we have tea.”
Show Notes
This quarter’s fiction episode presents “A Very Long Malaise” by L.J. Lee, narrated by Bailey Wolfe.
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 L.J. Lee Online
- Website: ljwrites.blog
- Mastodon: @ljwrites@writeout.ink
Links to Bailey Wolfe Online
- Website: bbwolfevox.com
Major category:
LHMPFriday, November 29, 2024 - 10:05
I’m formatting this guest blog as an LHMP entry so that it can be picked up by search tags.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Lee, L.J. 2024. “Sossang and Danji: 15th century Korean maidservants in love” published as part of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project at alpennia.com. See also: https://ljwrites.blog/
As an accompaniment to tomorrow’s podcast, featuring L.J. Lee’s story “A Very Long Malaise,” set in late 18th century Korea, the author shared some of the background research she is doing on evidence for queer people in Asian history, and in this case, specifically in Korea. While the following material is set several centuries earlier than the story, it contributed inspiration and context for the dynamics and hazards of female same-sex relationships within the royal palace.
You can follow more of L.J.’s work on her blog at: https://ljwrites.blog/
--Heather Rose Jones
# # #
Sossang and Danji: 15th century Korean maidservants in love—a guest-blog by L.J. Lee
Copyright (c) 2024 by L.J. Lee, all rights reserved. Contact the author for permissions.
Content warning: Sexual violence and stalking, enslavement, corporeal punishment, sexism, violent lesbophobia, classism
Introduction
Sossang and Danji were two enslaved maidservants in the Korean royal palace who were in a romantic and sexual relationship with each other, as recorded in the Annals of Sejong the fourth King of Joseon (ruled 1418–1450). I discussed this record in a large overview post on records of homosexuality in premodern Korea. When I say "earlier post" or "post on premodern homosexuality," that is the post I am referring to. This post is an expansion of the relevant section with historical and societal background, a translation of relevant passages from the Annals, and my own commentary.
Comments and attention on this incident have mainly focused on a third woman, the Crown Princess Consort from the family Bong, who broke Sossang up with Danji and raped Sossang. To me, though, the main point of interest in this record is that it depicts a sexual and romantic relationship between enslaved women, one violently disrupted by a jealous princess. These unique circumstances and the official investigation into them resulted in the only surviving account of named, real-life premodern Korean women in a consensual homosexual relationship, to my knowledge.
Sossang and Danji were far from unique as premodern Korean women who loved each other, of course. It is indisputable that many such relationships existed, as the record translated here itself demonstrates, along with others discussed in the earlier post. These relationships existed both in the royal palace where some of these women were caught and punished for their illicit relationships, and also in the wider society where they could not be nearly as effectively watched or penalized. These two particular women simply had the bad luck to be preyed on by a member of the royal family and forced into official attention and the record, in contrast to numerous other women in homosexual relationships who lived and died in what was likely a much safer obscurity.
This makes the record of these two women representative as well as individual: In addition to discussing the relationship of two specific women, it also talks about them in the larger context of similarly-situated women loving each other. It is through a hostile and violent viewpoint, to be sure, but the information we may glean from it is still valuable.
Social and historical context
The following are notes on the enormous subjects of human enslavement, societal order, and social attitudes toward homosexuality in the relevant era. I touch on them here to give context to the passages presented in the next section. If you have no background on premodern Korean society and are interested in learning, you may want to look through this section. If you would rather dive into the historical material first, feel free to jump to the Translation section and refer back for any confusing details. I will try again in the Commentary section to synthesize and contextualize the historical record.
- Slavery in the Goryeo and Joseon eras
You may find it helpful to understand that Sossang and Danji were enslaved domestic servants, and what that meant in the society they lived in. By slavery I mean the institution of classes of persons who were socially viewed as the "property" of other persons or institutions, were subject to being bought and sold, and were sharply restricted in their movements, selection of livelihood, ownership of property, and family life.
These enslaved people's status was hereditary, with some Korean societies instituting rules where a person with at least one enslaved parent was also enslaved. By the post-medieval Joseon era of Korea, the majority of enslaved persons were those who had inherited their status, meaning they were enslaved from birth. Causes for new supplies of enslaved persons other than heritage included imprisonment in war, unpaid debt, and punishment for serious offenses such as murder or treason including collective punishment of entire family lines and households.
A formal term for enslaved persons was nobi (奴婢), with no (奴) meaning enslaved men and bi (婢) enslaved women. Another included cheonmin (賤民) or cheonin (賤人) meaning the lowest classes/lowest people, focusing on their social status. Some cheonmin, such as traveling performers, meat workers in the Joseon era, or shamans were not formally enslaved. All enslaved classes were cheonmin, however. A casual term is jong (종), a derogatory word for a servant, many of whom were enslaved persons.
There were broadly two types of nobi in the Goryeo and Joseon (medieval and post-medieval) eras of Korean history, gongnobi (公奴婢) enslaved by public bodies and sanobi (私奴婢) enslaved by private families. Gongnobi were pressed into service for government and public institutions including central government departments, waystations, palace households, regional prefectures, and Confucian schools. The large numbers of Buddhist temple-bound nobi during the Goryeo era were transferred to public enslavement and became gongnobi when the temples were reduced in size and possessions.
Sanobi were generally classed into live-in and out-dwelling nobi. The former were made to live in the households of their enslavers to provide domestic or farm labor, while out-dwelling nobi kept their own households and were compelled to pay their enslavers in products or money. Out-dwelling nobi, who were the majority of sanobi in the early Joseon era, were similar to free commoners in everyday life and status including the ability to own property and grow their wealth, with the difference that their status could change at the order of their enslavers. A few such out-dwelling nobi did become famously wealthy, but of course the vast majority of nobi were impoverished from systemic exploitation.
Nobi were subject to enormous social and legal inequities. Their enslavers had the legal power to punish and control them, so long as the enslavers' actions fell short of wilful murder or excessive cruelty. (Even this minimal restriction was routinely violated, of course.) Nobi were punished more heavily than free people for any crimes against their enslavers: The punishment for a nobi battering their enslaver was death by beheading, for instance. Nobi were also not allowed to report their enslavers' crimes unless it was treason.
The control of enslavers over nobi extended into personal and family life as well. Since nobi status was hereditary and such heritage was the main means for the continuation of the nobi classes, the reproductive and family lives of nobi touched directly on the wealth of their enslavers. If nobi enslaved by the same entity married each other and had children, it posed no problems for the enslaver and was a welcome addition to their wealth. However, if two nobi with different enslavers had children, the enslaver of the father was perceived to have suffered a loss because the children would be claimed by their mother's enslaver, to the gain of the mother's enslaver and not the father's. In such cases, enslaved fathers have been on record as being punished or forced to compensate their enslavers. The inheritance and sale of enslaved people by their enslavers also disrupted the family lives of the enslaved, as families could be split up in such processes.
The status of children born between free and enslaved persons went back and forth for much of Joseon history in a struggle between the central government and enslaving families. The government pushed to give these children their freedom so they would owe labor and taxation to the state, while the enslaving classes pushed for children of free-enslaved unions to be enslaved to them so they could continue to extract labor and payment down the generations. In 1731 the conflict was settled in favor of free status for children of these mixed unions.
The ensuing decades would see the decline of enslavement as an institution as more and more enslaved people had free children, escaped, bought out, or forged papers to free themselves. The formal institution of slavery was abolished in 1894 along with the class system itself. The remaining practices of enslavement in private life gradually disappeared with modernization.
Source: Nobi entry in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture
- Dynastic legitimacy and Confucian order in Joseon
Another crucial background of this incident is the vast political change that still reverberated through the kingdom. The record takes place in in CE 1436, Year 18 of Sejong the fourth king of Joseon, only 44 years after the kingdom was founded in 1392. [1] Sejong's grandfather Yi Seong-gye was a late Goryeo-era general and politician who seized power in the tumult from the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, chaos in Goryeo from geopolitical turmoil and internal conflicts, and mounting challenges to governance including the inadequacy of state revenue and failing central control. The section of the earlier premodern homosexuality post on King Gongmin discusses his failed attempts to reform and stabilize the troubled kingdom. After dethroning and executing Gongmin's three successors, Yi Seong-gye finally took the throne for himself and founded the new kingdom of Joseon. He would be known as Taejo the founding king of Joseon.
Having wrested power from the Goryeo dynasty, Yi Seong-gye/Taejo and his line had to prove that they were not mere usurpers but worthy of ruling as kings. The new dynasty sought to establish such legitimacy in part by instilling a strict Confucian order, placing the King at the apex of secular order and fathers at the tops of their own households. The new Yi royal family could pose themselves as the enforcers of stability and order after the turmoil of the Goryeo years, and as upholders of patriarchal rule and morality in contrast to the libertine excesses of Goryeo. This direction also aligned the royal family with the Confucian bureaucrat class who were a major source of support during the late Goryeo years and beyond.
Confucianism was not only a political ideology but a program of social control over private and political life alike.
In this ideal, when applied to families, children owed filial piety and obedience to patriarchs at the heads of families, and women played roles within their households as obedient wives, daughters, and mothers. The degree and forms of such control differed greatly across social class, wealth, region, and many other factors, but the ideal existed of an order ruled by benevolent patriarchs at every level of society with all others giving their obedience and support. This entailed strict controls on women in particular, with expectations of modesty and chastity, obedience to patriarchal social order including submitting to polygamy without jealousy (while wives' own sexuality was heavily restricted), and personal virtues of work ethic and gentle temperament essential to the maintenance and reproduction of this social order.
This neo-Confucian order is the context for understanding major points of the record in the next section, including Sejong as both king and patriarch making decisions about his son the Crown Prince's marriage with little visible input from the Crown Prince himself, and the expectations that were placed on princesses and domestic servants alike for decorum and chastity. The issues involved more than personal distaste or even marital unfaithfulness, but implicated the stability of the royal family and the kingdom itself in the political-familial-cosmic order they took place in.
Sources: HistoryNet article on the founding of Joseon; Hyun June Ahn, "King Sejong's Female Gender Awareness and Punishment of Homosexuals – Focusing on Crown Princess Bong's Case," Master's thesis in literature for the Department of History, The Graduate School, Pukyong National University, 2021 (안현준, 세종의 여성 성(性)인식과 동성애의 처벌 – 세자빈 봉씨 사건을 중심으로. 2021년 8월 부경대학교 대학원 사학과 문학석사학위논문)
- Homosexuality in Goryeo and Joseon
This incident also seems to reflect changing attitudes toward homosexuality in a time of social transition between the Goryeo and Joseon eras. One indication of Goryeo-era attitudes is that at least three kings from early and late Goryeo are on record as having been in sexual relationships with men. The records attach no moral judgment to these relationships so long as they were conducted properly, for instance so long as the king kept up his duty to uphold dynastic continuity.
Two kings of Goryeo were recorded as having homosexual relationships without being morally condemned for it: King Mokjong in the 10th century had no children with his women consorts (a Queen Consort and a concubine) and had at least one male lover, but it seems this was largely unproblematic because he adopted his young cousin to be his heir. King Chungseon in the 13th century had Korean and Mongol consorts and concubines he had many children with, and at least one male lover. He was not morally judged either for what we would today call a bisexual personal life.
In contrast, Chungseon's grandson King Gongmin in the 14th century was heavily condemned for sexual activities with his male bodyguards because he was apparently a recipient of penetration and caused the young men to do “wanton deeds unto him as to a woman.” He also had a different male lover for whom the records used the conventional refined and non-judgmental language for such relationships. The partner himself was criticized for his abuses of power, but this was a common charge across premodern Korean and Chinese records for kings' male lovers and female consorts alike.
Failure to carry on the dynasty was another major reason a king who had homosexual relations might face disapproval. Gongmin's sexuality may be ambiguous in modern terms as he is famous for his emotional attachment to his queen who died having his child, but the historical record also states that sexual intimacy with even her was infrequent and nearly nonexistent with other women. The History of Goryeo blames this proclivity for Gongmin's lack of an heir and the subsequent uncertainty surrounding his successors' legitimacy. [2]
In summary, what mattered in judging the homosexual relationships of Goryeo kings was not the gender of a king's sexual partner but rather the way the king conducted himself. For instance, was the sexual activity proper for a king's status? And did he uphold his duties, especially the paramount one of ensuring the dynasty continued through his heirs?
There are other indications of generally positive or neutral stances toward homosexuality in the Goryeo era. A case in point is a poem by the famous writer Yi Gyubo about his friend the Buddhist monk Gonggong's romantic relationship with a young man. I am not aware of any Goryeo-era or earlier Korean records, or even literary works about or allusions to female homosexual relationships. However, as noted in the terminology section of the earlier post, the origin of the widely-used term daeshik was in female homosexuality and knowledge of the practice was widespread. Yi Gyubo's poem uses the term to celebrate love between men.
Joseon's official royal records depart from the generally accepting attitude toward homosexuality in Goryeo-era records. The Annals of the kings of Joseon are to the best of my knowledge entirely devoid of any direct record of homosexual activity by kings, and the rape of Sossang by the Crown Princess Consort Bong appears to be the only record of homosexual activity by a member of the royal family, taking place in the very early years of dynastic history at that.
One explanation for this change is that the Yi dynasty really was made of entirely different stuff from the preceding Wang dynasty and were an entirely heterosexual family line that never had any homosexual or gender non-conforming leanings for half a millennium. The other is that, as part of the dynasty's self-image as enforcers and upholders of patriarchal family order, such records were increasingly suppressed where the royal family was concerned. Having no solid factual basis for either conclusion, I will leave the matter up for readers to decide.
Nevertheless, records of homosexuality persist throughout the Joseon period in other sectors of Korean society. Unambiguous references to homosexual activity by high-ranking lords and ladies are last seen in the 15th century, but strongly suggestive to unambiguous accounts of both female and male homosexuality among working and monastic classes appear into the 19th century. For more details, refer to the latter parts of the earlier premodern homosexuality post.
It should also be noted that homosexuality was not singled out for particular condemnation compared to what was viewed as illicit heterosexual activity. As also noted in the earlier post, illicit heterosexual activity by palace attendants could carry even heavier penalties than homosexual ones, and there is no evidence of official penalties for homosexual activities outside the context of the palace as opposed to, say, male-female adultery. The national project, as discussed in the earlier section on Confucian order, was to uphold patriarchal familial and political order, and both heterosexual and homosexual activities could be a threat. In general moral rules and criminal law had much more to say about illicit heterosexual activities than homosexual ones, and other than general disapproval and penalties under some very specific circumstances (such as palace life, adultery, and false accusations), there is no evidence of official organized crackdowns on homosexuality in of itself.
Translation of excerpts from the record
[Translator's notes and summaries in square brackets.]
Book 75 of the Annals of Sejong; second article of the 26th day of Month 10, Sejong Year 1, Year of Yellow Rat <CE 1436, Ming zhèngtǒng 正统 Year 1>
上御思政殿, 召都承旨辛引孫、同副承旨權採, 令就御榻前, 屛左右曰:
The King went out to Sajeong-jeon [the hall where state matters were discussed] where he summoned Doseungji [official of the department that sent out royal decrees] Shin Inson and Dongbuseungji [a lower official of the same department] Gwon Chae to call them before the royal seat, then sent out the other officials and said:
比年以來, 事多不諧, 心實無聊, 近又有一異事, 言之亦可羞恥。
"Since this year I have no peace because so many matters have gone amiss. Another matter has arisen lately that is shameful even to speak of.
我祖宗以來, 家法克正, 比及予身, 亦賴中宮之助。
"Order in the home has been set to utmost uprightness ever since the advent of this dynasty and court, and in matters of my own person I have been greatly aided by my Queen Consort.
中宮極柔嘉, 無妬忌之意, 太宗每稱有樛木逮下之德, 以故家道雍穆, 以至于今。
"The Queen Consort is exceedingly gentle in character and all her words and deeds are exemplary without a shadow of possessive jealousy. King Taejong [Sejong's father, the third King of Joseon] regularly heaped praise on her virtue as being like the supple branches of a tree reaching downward. Thus was the state of affairs until the present time."
[Here follows an account of Sejong's son the Crown Prince's marital history. The Crown Prince, who would go on to become the next king Munjong, was first married at the age of 14 to beget heirs early, but the first Crown Princess Consort from House Kim lost her position for a scandal involving the use of magical curses out of jealousy. Her successor as Crown Princess Consort was a young lady from House Bong, but her marital relationship with the Crown Prince was also lacking and they had no children. Sejong and his Queen Consort did their best to teach their daughter-in-law in the ways of the home and a royal wife, but "as even parents may not fully instruct their children in matters of the bedroom," the situation improved little except in appearance. Three royal concubines were therefore selected from good families for the Crown Prince, which angered his Princess Consort who was of a jealous temperament. She was especially threatened and even wept out loud when one of her husband's concubines, a lady from House Gwon, fell pregnant. Her parents-in-law the King and Queen remonstrated the Crown Princess Consort against such unseemly jealousy in a wife and Princess Consort, to no avail.]
[Then there follows an account of Crown Princess Consort Bong's other improprieties, including allowing an elderly servant woman to make her parents garments out of the Crown Prince's undergarments; falsely claiming to be pregnant and then to have miscarried; watching outsiders through cracks in the attendants' outhouse walls; having her maidservants sing songs about loving men; personally making items such as knee protectors and pouches for palace eunuchs, leaving her no time to make items for the Crown Prince's birthday and giving him old birthday offerings as though they were new; sending excess items and food to her mother's house without telling the Crown Prince; and giving gifts in thanks for her father's funerary rites, also without telling the Crown Prince.]
若此不穩之事頗多, 予皆以婦人不識大體, 故置之。
"There were many such improprieties that I let pass, thinking that she simply did not know the great courtesies of a wife.
近聞奉氏愛一宮婢召雙者, 常不離左右, 宮人或相言: "嬪與召雙常同寢處。"
"Recently I have heard that Lady Bong loved Sossang, a bi [enslaved woman] of the palace and would not let her leave her side, and the palace attendants would whisper to each other, 'The Princess Consort always beds and abides with Sossang.'
一日, 召雙灑掃宮內, 世子忽問: "汝信與嬪同寢乎?" 召雙愕然對曰: "然。"
"One day Sossang was cleaning in the palace when the Crown Prince suddenly asked her, 'Is it true you sleep with the Princess Consort?' To which Sossang replied in her fright: 'It is, Your Grace.'
其後頗聞奉氏酷愛召雙, 暫離左右, 則恨恚曰: "我雖甚愛汝, 汝則不甚愛我。"
"Afterward it was heard many a time that Lady Bong in her love for Sossang would be resentful and angry if the girl left her side for a moment, and would say, 'I love you to distraction, yet you love me but little.'
召雙亦常謂人曰: "嬪之愛我, 頗異於常, 我甚惶恐。"
"Sossang herself would always be telling those around her, 'The Crown Princess Consort's love for me is quite out of the ordinary and it frightens me.'
召雙又與權承徽私婢端之相好, 或與同寢, 奉氏以私婢石加伊, 常隨其後, 使不得與端之同遊。
"Sossang was also intimate with Royal Concubine Gwon's [the Crown Prince's concubine's] sabi [privately enslaved woman] Danji and the two would sleep together. Lady Bong would have her sabi Seokga'i always shadow Sossang, frustrating her attempts to spend time with Danji.
先是, 奉氏晨興, 常使侍婢斂衾枕, 自與召雙寢處以後, 不復使侍婢而自斂之, 又潛使其婢澣濯其衾。
"Previously Lady Bong would have her attending maidservant [I will use this term from here on for enslaved women in this particular context of domestic servitude] take away her pillows and bedding at dawn when she rose, but since sleeping and sharing her bedding with Sossang she never again gave the task to her attending maidservant but would gather the items herself, and have her maidservant wash the bedding in secret.
此事頗喧於宮中, 故予與中宮召召雙而問其狀, 召雙言: "去歲冬至, 嬪夜召我入內, 他婢皆在戶外, 要我同宿, 我辭之, 嬪强之, 不得已半脫衣入屛裏, 嬪盡奪餘衣, 强使入臥相戲, 有如男子交合狀。"
[CAUTION: THIS PARAGRAPH IS A VICTIM'S FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF RAPE BY COERCION]
"With these matters causing a stir in the palace, the Queen Consort and I summoned Sossang to ask her the truth of it. She said: 'This past winter solstice the Princess Consort called me inside while all the other maidservants waited outside the door. She demanded I sleep with her, which I demurred. She forced the matter, however, and unable to say no, I took off half my clothes to enter behind the screen. The Princess Consort took away the rest of my clothes, made me enter and lie down, and we pleasured each other in form similar to lying with a man.'
予常聞侍女從婢等私相交好, 與同寢處, 甚惡之, 宮中嚴立禁令, 有犯者, 司察之女卽啓, 決杖七十, 猶不能禁止, 則或加杖一百, 然後其風稍息。
"Often did I hear that female attendants, maidservants and others would engage in such private unsanctioned intimacy, sleeping and abiding with each other. Loathing such custom I set up strict prohibitions in the palace, and those found in violation by the report of the watching women were put to seventy strikes; if this was insufficient to deter them they would be put to 100 more, after which the custom somewhat abated.
予之惡有此風, 殆天誘其衷而然也。豈圖世子之嬪, 亦慕此風, 蕩泆如此?
"Surely my hatred of this custom was Heaven moving my heart. How could I have ever thought that the Crown Prince's own Consort would follow such custom to this wantonness?
乃召嬪而問之, 答曰: "召雙與端之, 常時愛好, 不獨夜同寢宿, 晝亦交頸砥舌, 此乃彼之所爲, 我則初無同宿之事。"
"I summoned the Princess Consort to ask her about this matter, to which she answered: 'Sossang and Danji were constant in their loving intimacy and would not only lie together at night, but also embrace neck-to-neck and suck on each others' tongues in the day. These were things they did together, that is all, and from the first there was never a time when I lay together.'
然諸證甚明, 豈能終諱? 且彼人交頸砥舌之事, 亦豈嬪之所宜知乎? 常見其事而歆羨, 則其勢必效而爲之, 益無疑矣。
"Yet with the evidence so clear, how could the truth be hidden to the end? And how could the Princess Consort have known that those two sucked tongue neck-to-neck? Doubtless that in always watching and envying such conduct, the weight of events would balance toward emulation and action.
其餘使侍婢唱歌及窺壁隙等事, 悉皆自服, 然餘事皆輕, 若非召雙之事, 則雖置之可也, 及聞召雙之事, 然後予意斷然欲廢。
"Other matters, such as causing maidservants to sing and looking out through wall cracks, she has confessed to in their entirety. The others are all relatively minor in nature, and if it were not for the matter of Sossang I could leave things be. However, having heard about the matter of Sossang, I am resolved to remove [the Princess Consort] from her position.
夫冢婦之職, 所係匪輕, 有此失德, 其何以承宗祀而母儀於一國乎?
"The office of the eldest legitimate son's wife is no light thing. With her having thus lapsed in her virtue, how could she uphold the house and set an example as the mother of the nation?"
[Sejong then goes into the intricacies of the situation and the gravity of removing a Princess Consort to raise another, especially when he had already removed one Crown Princess Consort. He discusses precedent from Chinese antiquity both for and against the decision, and how a second removal of a Crown Princess Consort would shock and unsettle the country. He consulted on the matter with high officials who were unanimous that Crown Princess Consort Bong must be expelled.]
斷以大義, 不得不然, 卿等詳知首末, 作敎旨草以進。 昔金氏之廢, 予方年少氣銳, 謂廢立重事, 不可曖昧, 故詳載其事於敎書, 今則不必然也。
"For the greater good I assuredly cannot do otherwise. You, sirs, are apprised of the matter from its very beginning; you will draft the decree and submit it. Back when I removed Lady Kim [the former Crown Princess Consort before Lady Bong] I was young in age and sharp of temperament, and had the matter accounted in detail in the decree because I deemed removing [a Princess Consort] and raising [another] to be a manner of great gravity where nothing may rightly be left ambiguous. That will not be necessary, however, in the present case.
奉氏與宮婢同宿之事極醜, 不可載於敎旨, 姑以性妬無子, 又唱歌等四五事數之, 與三大臣同議, 速製敎旨以進。
"Lady Bong's conduct in lying with a maidservant of the palace is ugly in the extreme and cannot be stated in official decree. Therefore, first count among her crimes four or five matters including her jealous nature and childlessness, and the singing. Then discuss the matter with the three high officials [Hwang Hui, No Han, and Shin Gae that he had previously consulted with] and swiftly draft the decree for submission."
引孫與採宣上旨于黃喜、盧閈、申槪, 同草敎旨以進, 卽令入直同知中樞金孟誠爲行香使, 以廢嬪告于宗廟, 廢黜奉氏爲庶人, 還于私第。
[The two officials] Inson and Chae [here referred to by their given names] passed on the King's will to Hwang Hui, No Han, and Shin Gae, after which they drafted the decree together for submission. Dongjijungchu [an official of a department in charge of carrying out royal orders and enforcing palace security] Kim Maeng was immediately on duty to take on the charge of incense-bearer and announced before the royal ancestral shrine that the Princess Consort would be removed. Lady Bong was expelled to commoner status and sent back to her family home.
[The contents of the royal decree follow, citing her improper conduct such as jealousy, lack of heirs, the love songs, and handling of palace property, without any mention of adultery with a maidservant.]
Source: Article in the Annals of Sejong on the disgrace of the Princess [https://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kda_11810026_002]
Commentary
This incident appears to have been a perfect storm of the pressures and mores of the age. Sejong betrays his, and his house's, self-consciousness as the king of a still-new dynasty ("ever since the advent of this dynasty and court…"), and is eager to make his own house an exemplar of domestic propriety and harmony, something he credits in part to the assistance of his virtuous chief consort the Queen. The ideological and political need to establish the still-new dynasty as the chief protector of family virtue and order resulted in a zeal to clean house, especially by controlling the conduct of women as a centerpiece of patriarchal order.
Leadership by example from the virtuous wife of the patriarch was particularly important to establish such familial order. To this end, the impeccable conduct of Sejong's Queen Consort is contrasted to Crown Princess Consort Bong's wanton and improper ways, with the Queen held up as the ideal the Crown Princess Consort must live up to as the future Queen Consort herself.
It is telling that Crown Princess Consort Bong was her husband's second Crown Princess Consort to be expelled from court, and the third for the new dynasty. As discussed by Sejong, there was a Crown Princess Consort Kim before her who was removed for jealousy and the use of magic, which were violations of wifely virtues such as acceptance of a husband's other partners and spiritual purity dictated by Confucianism. Going back two reigns to Sejong's grandfather Taejo the first King of Joseon, and only in the second year of his reign and of the dynasty in fact, Taejo's daughter-in-law the Crown Princess Consort Yu was also removed from her position and sent back home. Though Taejo refused to share the reason for the expulsion with his officials much to their consternation, [3] the beheading of a eunuch named Kim Manri at the same time led to the speculation that some improper conduct had taken place.
These expulsion incidents so early in the dynasty seem to be a sign of a clash between old and new norms. It seems unlikely that three different young women of very prominent families chosen by an intensive selection process were wholly unaware and unprepared for the demands of being a Princess Consort, and it is more plausible that they fell afoul of new norms that they did not expect. The records of the previous Goryeo dynasty are rife with accounts of royal women taking lovers and having children out of wedlock. It may be that highborn women used to greater sexual and personal freedoms failed to meet more restrictive social norms that had not entirely settled in yet in the first decades of the Joseon dynasty.
Greater control and repression took effect for women at the bottom of the palace hierarchy as well as those at the top. Sejong's account of love among female palace attendants and maidservants (enslaved female domestic servants) is an incontrovertible record of women workers loving other women. His fervency in violently attempting stamp out what he found a loathsome custom was another aspect of his efforts to mold his household, the highest in the land, into the exemplary Confucian ideal of feminine modesty and propriety.
As live-in domestic servants, Sossang and Danji also led some of the most restricted and closely-watched lives among enslaved classes of people. The record shows that Sossang was enslaved by a public institution while Danji was a privately enslaved live-in domestic worker who was in the palace as part of a royal concubine's household. In practice they would both have been live-in enslaved persons pressed into domestic servitude, since palace households doubled as both public institutions and family homes. This meant they had no households of their own and were continuously on duty. Even aside from the control their enslavers had over their family and reproduction as enslaved women, simply forming unions and having children in the first place may have been unacceptable given the exploitative labor demands placed on them.
Under these circumstances, working-class women in the palace loving other women would have been a plausible avenue of sexuality and intimacy for those inclined to engage in it. The Goryeo dynasty's institution of slavery and labor exploitation was at least as rapacious as Joseon's, but the comparatively lenient attitudes toward homosexuality and women's sexuality may have provided some cover. These private intimacies may have developed into a custom that the next dynasty would come to decry and try to suppress with violence.
"Try" is the operative word, of course, when it comes to suppressing women's love. As discussed in the earlier homosexuality post, records and contemporary commentary state or strongly suggest that the more elite ranks of female palace attendants persisted in sexual relationships with women as well as men. While the sex lives of enslaved women workers in the palace fade from the later official records, it seems likely that homosexual affairs continued to feature in some of their lives as well. It is impossible to tell whether sexual affairs between enslaved women workers in the palace even abated in Sejong's own time or were simply hidden better, despite the credit he gave himself for phasing out this custom with violent crackdowns.
These efforts to suppress women's homosexuality were limited in scope as well as effectiveness. This is without discounting how violent, repressive, and destructive these penalties were to the women who were caught up in them, of course. Sejong himself only spoke of setting up strict prohibitions in the palace, not the entirety of Joseon where there is no evidence of a general ban on male or female homosexuality though plenty of societal disapproval.
The official criminal codes of the time are silent on consensual homosexuality, though there is no doubt that the general and increasing restrictions placed on women's lives and sexuality would have sharply limited their sexual activities with women as well as with men. It is likely that there were also many incidents of private violence and discrimination that were never committed to the written record. In the case of rape, there were codes that punished the rape of a man by a man, but not of a woman by a woman such as Crown Princess Consort Bong was described as perpetuating on Sossang.
Criminal codes against rape would not have protected Sossang in any case. As an enslaved woman she was not legally protected from her enslavers' violence against her whatever their gender, and she would not have been able to report them through official channels. Nor would a nobleman, far less a male member of the royal household, have faced any consequences for assaulting her. Princess Consort Bong was removed from her position not for rape but for having an adulterous affair, much as Princess Consort Yu apparently was four decades earlier for her affair with a eunuch.
Furthermore, as previously discussed, homosexuality was a form of improper sex but not the only form. Though homosexual activities by women was officially repressed in certain limited contexts, they were not singled out for homosexuality in of itself but rather for the crime of illicit sex, whether with men or with women. Depending on the time period, a palace attendant having sex with a man other than the king was punishable by beheading for both parties, in contrast to the 70 blows on a first offense as mentioned by Sejong for homosexual activity. Kim Manri, the eunuch who appears to have been accused of adultery with Crown Princess Consort Yu in the first expulsion of a Princess Consort of Joseon, was similarly beheaded.
The record makes no mention of Sossang's and her lover Danji's fates, but we can speculate. It seems unlikely that they were given an official death sentence, especially since there were so many indications that Sossang was not a willing participant in the Princess's adultery. They could still have been punished for their relationship with each other, however, and may have been run out to fend for themselves or transferred to far harsher conditions. Even more grimly, it would not have been difficult to permanently silence two extremely vulnerable and marginalized women for the sake of preventing further embarrassment to the royal family.
A final point is the clarification that there was certainly homophobia in Joseon, and the specifics of criminal codes do nothing to take away from bigotry. It is itself sexist and homophobic, after all, to view homosexuality especially between women, and rape of a woman by a woman, as "lesser" activities that do not "count." There are also passages from scholarly texts in the late Joseon era showing clear disdain and disapproval of male homosexuality and possibly of female homosexuality, as discussed in the earlier post. The contention is not that there was no homophobia in Joseon, but rather that homosexuality was considered no more of a threat to the prevailing neo-Confucian order than illicit forms of heterosexuality. As with the social forms of homosexuality itself, the specifics of homophobia also differ by society and context.
Source: Han hee sook, "The significance of the expulsion of the Crown princess under the reign of Taejo and Sejong of the Joseon dynasty - Focusing on Hyenbin Ue, Whubin Kim, and Sunbing Bong -", Journal of Korean Personal History No. 14 (2010) 217-248 (한희숙, 조선 태조·세종대 세자빈 폐출 사건의 의미 - 현빈 유씨, 휘빈 김씨, 순빈 봉씨를 중심으로 -, 한국인물사연구 제14호 217-248).
Conclusion
We know about Sossang and Danji because their lives were turned upside-down by events outside their control. Their relationship was recorded under their true names and known to this day only because a princess stalked and raped Sossang, and the state bureaucracy headed by the princess's father-in-law deemed this a matter worthy of investigation—not as rape, but as sexual indiscretion unbecoming of a wife's virtue. Sejong's comments provide a window into the broader custom of working women in the palace, attendants and enslaved domestic servants, entering into romantic and sexual relationships with each other.
A part of Sossang and Danji's story comes through with moving truth and immediacy even through this hostile lens of interpersonal and institutional violence: These two enslaved women shared a relationship that aroused the envy of a princess who felt entitled to strip away the comfort shared by women in servitude who had so little else. At the same time, the broader community of working women who loved women aroused the king's moralistic ire in a violent backlash.
Sejong's attempts to eradicate women's love in the palace were a failure, however. Later records and commentary attest that this custom he so hated persisted in the very heart of Joseon's moralistic patriarchal order, the palace where his ancestral spirit was enshrined after his death. The king claimed Heaven had moved his heart to loathe the custom of women loving women. Perhaps these women were moved by a less lofty and more abiding power to be so constant in their loving intimacy with each other.
Notes
[1] This was also seven years before the promulgation of Hangul in 1443, for those who remember what Sejong is most famous for. At this point the research and work for the invention of Hangul, centered around the state research institute Jibhyeon-jeon (集賢殿, "Hall of Gathered Wisdom"), would have been fully established and ongoing.
[2] For more details and cautions in reading these records, see the section on King Gongmin from the earlier homosexuality post.
[3] Taejo's expulsion of Crown Princess Consort Yu without any explanation was a cause of political strife and purges, and multiple officials were exiled for speaking out. Perhaps Sejong wanted to avoid similar political fallout when he shared details with the country in Princess Consort Kim's case and at least with his closest officials in Princess Consort Bong's. It may also be a sign of a more mature bureaucratic and political system, with an assertive bureaucratic class demanding transparency and a king who had been trained from a young age as a royal prince, unlike his grandfather Taejo who was a soldier born in Mongol-controlled borderlands.
Time period:
Place:
Event / person:
Wednesday, November 27, 2024 - 09:54
This is the last article I had flagged to finish before writing the "Lesbians and the Law" episode for the podcast, though of course there are many more publications relevant to the topic that I haven't yet read. One of the eternal truths of this project is that I can never wait to know "everything" before writing on a topic. That's going to be a real pain point when I work on my sourcebook--there will always be "one more thing" I want to research. (I'm already coming to terms with the fact that the scope will largely be restricted to Europe, with only some contextual ventures outside to the New World and the Islamic world.) As it is, I expect the "law" podcast to be fairly long. So I'd better move on to writing it!
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Roelens, Jonas. 2015. “Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands (1400-1550)” in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review vol. 130 no. 3.
It is generally agreed on by historians that evidence for prosecutions of women for “sodomy” (however defined) are both rare (in absolute terms and compared to those for men) and often more lightly punished. Roelens explores a context that runs counter to this pattern: the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th century.
Roelens has identified 13 trials, involving 25 women, from court records in Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain, and Malines in which women were tried for “crimes against nature” or “sodomy.” The article begins with a review of how the term “sodomy” in this era and the context for why it typically was not applied to women. Definitions typically centered around inappropriate penetrative sex, and often were worded in ways that assumed it was necessarily performed by a man. Law codes that addressed sodomy rarely included references to women, and sex between women was generally absent as a topic for secular law. Citing Murray 1996 and others, the following exceptions are noted: Orléans (France) in 1270, Treviso (Italy) in 1574, Portugal in 1499, Bamberg (Holy Roman Empire) in 1507. The Constitution Criminalis Carolina established by Emperor Charles V in 1532 called for the death penalty for sex between women but appears to have had little influence on local law codes. England’s “Buggery Act” of 1533 makes no reference to women.
Even in places where laws addressing sex between women existed, in theory, records of prosecutions were extremely rare. There were none in early modern Seville, none in 15th c Venice, none in two centuries of sodomy prosecutions in Florence, none in 15-16th c England and the Northern Netherlands. Elsewhere, records of prosecutions that might be due to f/f sex include France 1405, Rottweil 1444, Speyer 1477, Basque country 1503, Freiburg 1547, Geneva 1568, Portugal 1570, Valencia 1597, Gutenstein 1514, Spain 1409 & 1502, France 1533 & 1535, Grenzach 1537, and Italy 1580. (Looking beyond the period covered by the present article, there are a handful of Spanish cases in the 17th century of which only one was punished.) Outcomes ranged from acquittal to exile to execution. There is no indication of any systematic campaign of prosecution, though it must be taken into account that the “crime” is often referred to obliquely and may lie concealed behind ambiguous language. [Note: It was a common theme to refer to sodomy as an “unspeakable crime” with authorities treating that label literally by refusing to describe it explicitly.]
The preceding is the context in which the set of cases from the Southern Low Countries in the 15-16th centuries stands out. Women represented over 8% of the sodomy accusations there, and were punished with a severity parallel to male defendants. The cases are identified clearly, using terms like “buggery,” “unnatural sin,” “sin against nature,” and “sodomy.” The specific acts covered by this term can be identified from the records.
Some specific examples include:
- Two women who confessed to “a certain great kind of the unnatural sin of sodomy with several young girls” evidently acting together
- A woman and her daughter accused of committing sodomy with a servant girl
Punishments varied, and to some extent appear to have taken into account the agency of the accused. Corporal punishment (whipping) and/or exile were for participants seen as less culpable, either due to age, ignorance, or lacking power to refuse. Those viewed as having agency and intention received harsher penalties including execution. Out of the 25 individuals in the study, 60% were executed (usually by burning, similarly for male sodomites), 28% received either corporal punishment or banishment or both, and 12% were released with no penalty. This degree of severity was a new development in the 15th century, as seen by comparison with a 14th century case in Ghent where the women were allowed to pay a fine instead.
Most of these trials involved multiple defendants, and it’s possible that the trials of individuals involved solo acts under the sodomy umbrella, which could include masturbation and bestiality. (Sex with non-Christians could also be classified as sodomy because, as one 16th c legal scholar opined, Turks, Saracens, and Jews were the equivalent of animals, therefore sex with them was equivalent to bestiality.) Other types of transgressive sexual behavior were also treated more severely in the Southern Low Countries than elsewhere, including cross-dressing, which was not directly connected with sex between women. [Note: the one cited case of a woman committing “buggery” while dressed as a man doesn’t clearly indicate that her partner was female. See for example Bennett & McSheffrey 2014 where female cross-dressing is associated with sexual offenses involving male partners.] In contrast, women who committed (or were subject to) sodomy within marriage were not similarly prosecuted, lending support to the idea that the primary concern was behavior that contradicted traditional expectations of female behavior. (Married women who committed sodomy with female partners were treated the same as unmarried ones.)
Roelens concludes by exploring possible explanations for this localized preoccupation with female sodomy and its harsh penalties, particularly given that there was no actual legal basis for the prosecutions. Roelens posits that the unusual freedom, agency, and social power possessed by women in this era in the Southern Netherlands resulted in increased female visibility and scrutiny. As women’s freedoms and power decreased in the 17th century, prosecutions for female sodomy greatly declined (or rather, shifted to the Northern Netherlands, where the shipping economy that removed men for long periods of time resulted in greater female agency and power.) [Note: I’m not entirely convinced that this correlation indicates causation, but there is a general pattern across history of backlash against female empowerment.]
For reference, here is a catalog of the women and offenses mentioned in the article:
- Maertyne van Keyschote, daughter of Adriaen (Bruges) committed sodomy with several young girls (Grietkin van Bomele & Grietkin van Assenede) with her accomplice Jeanne vanden Steene—the two perpetrators were flogged and exiled while their younger partners were only flogged
- Marie de Valmerbeke and her daughter Belle Wasbiers (Ghent) accused by their servant Margarete Scoucx under torture of the “crime against nature”. Marie and Belle were burnt and Margarete was exiled.
- Amele sMoors and her sister (Ghent) in 1375 paid a fine to escape prosecution for “that filthy work”.
- Jozyne Quetieborne commited “the sin of sodomy” while in prison in Bruges for an unrelated crime. No partner is mentioned, so this may have been masturbation. Sentence not given.
- Kathelyne Dominicle (Brussels) was executed for committing buggery with her dog. (The dog was also executed.)
- Lysken Jans & Johanne Silversmeets (Brussels) whipped for sodomy having had “carnal conversation” with Turks.
- Jehanne Seraes (Ghent) confessed to committing buggery “while in the clothing of a man” and was executed. (No partner is mentioned so the partner’s gender is not known, but it would be unusual for a woman to be described that way if a man were involved.)
This is, of course, not the full catalog of 25 women described in the article.
Place:
Event / person:
Tuesday, November 26, 2024 - 14:49
This article fits in well with the question of what the actual legal issues are when lesbianism is part of the context of a legal case. When you dig into it, the central usefulness of Pirie & Woods vs Cumming Gordon is not what it says about whether two specific women had a lesbian relationship, but rather the amount of detail it provides about legal and social attitudes toward lesbianism at the time.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Derry, Caroline. 2022. “The ‘legal’ in socio-legal history: Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon” in Journal of Law and Society 49:778-799.
The defamation lawsuit brought by Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie against Lady Cumming Gordon in the early 19th century is often cited as concerning accusations of lesbianism against the two women. But This article looks at the details of the cause as illustrating points of Scottish legal procedure.
As basic background, Woods & Pirie set up a girls’ boarding school in 1809 just outside Edinburgh. Early enrollments were assisted by the support of Lady Cumming Gordon, who had enrolled her illegitimate half-Indian granddaughter, Jane Cumming, in the school, despite the initial reluctance of the headmistresses. Cumming Gordon’s support included enrolling several other (legitimate) granddaughters in the school as well as encouraging her friends to send their daughters there. Then, in late 1810, the majority of the students were pulled out of the school abruptly. The reason was traced to unspecified rumors that Cumming Gordon had spread among her social circle that the schoolmistresses were not to be trusted to oversee young ladies. In the face of this disaster, Woods & Pirie brought a defamation suit against her, in part to determine the specifics of the rumors. It came out in the trial that Jane, another student, and a servant at the school (who later changed her story) reported that Woods & Pirie had engaged in sexual activities (while sharing a bedroom – and in some cases a bed – with students). However the issue of any possible sexual activity was not the substance of the legal suit, except to the possible extent that the truth of the claims might be an adequate defense against the defamation charge.
The article opens with a review of studies and treatments of the case (including Lillian Hellman’s re-setting of it as The Children’s Hour). Academic studies have focused on elements such as the question of the women’s sexuality, the role of Jane Cumming’s Indian heritage and upbringing, issues of class and sexual knowledge, and the valorization of non-sexual “romantic friendship” among middle-class white women.
The present article touches on those elements while focusing on understanding the case through legal procedures and norms such as the rules of evidence (especially regarding who was allowed to testify), what types of assumptions the court was allowed to presume without evidence, and competing versions of what needed to be proven or disproven. All of these procedural frameworks helped the legal establishment in an underlying goal of suppressing the sexual elements of the case from public awareness, and even avoiding the need to establish any facts regarding sexual elements at all.
In the initial trial, Woods & Pirie lost their defamation suit by a single vote (four to three). The suit was reviewed in 1812 and their charge was upheld by the same narrow margin. Cumming Gordon appealed the case to the House of Lords. Several years later Cumming Gordon’s appeal was rejected and she had to pay damages.
Records of the case include a great deal of detail and testimony, but also omit many details due to the nature of legal procedure and the rules of evidence. Direct parties to the case could not testify (so Woods, Pirie, and Lady Cumming Gordon were out), nor could immediate family of direct parties testify (so Cumming Gordon’s legitimate granddaughters were out), but because Jane Cumming was illegitimate, she was determined to fall outside of “immediate family” and because the defamation suit didn’t name her as a defendant (because the nature of the accusations was not yet known) she wasn’t excluded on that basis. So Jane was the most direct witness to the substance of the events on which the defamation rested. But these distinctions were argued at great length and in the end, it was decided that Jane’s status within the family was irrelevant as the matter at hand was not the sort of private household concern where family members might be considered to be too closely involved for objectivity.
There is a constant thread throughout the case of assigning the knowledge and accusations of sex between women to marginalized people: working-class and non-white women. One initial framing of the case attributed the original accusation to the school servant, but once she denied having made the accusation, focus shifted to Jane Cumming. Jane’s position was highly ambiguous. She was not only illegitimate, but her half-Indian heritage associated her with stereotypes of “exotic sexuality.” The presiding judge placed into the record as a “matter of notoriety” (i.e., a statement that need not be proven) that female Indian servants had knowledge of sexual practices such as lesbianism, and that all-female spaces in upper class Indian households were hotbeds of sex between women due to their separation from men. Thus the underlying sexual knowledge that Jane Cumming exhibited could be displaced onto a hypothetical and unnamed Indian servant who had “corrupted” her with this knowledge. This side-stepped the uncomfortable need to damage the reputation of Lady Cumming Gordon’s granddaughter, who otherwise had the potential to become a “proper Scottish lady.” This “matter of notoriety” approach meant that this assertion was entered into the record as a matter of fact without any evidence or proof. Thus the existence of “knowledge of sex between women” could be established while distancing it completely from respectable Scottish society.
This case was happening at a time when colonial expansion in India (and other locations), in which Scots were over-represented, was being justified and bolstered by the image of white Britons as a civilizing and moral force. Thus the representation of India as a locus of sexual immorality not only served the purposes of the immediate lawsuit, but the lawsuit in turn supported the original premise.
One framing of the origins of the sexual rumor was that Jane Cumming and her fellow student had invented the story in retribution for school punishments and that, having created the story, their fervid imaginations then convince them that it was true.
Another element of legal procedure that was crucial to the outcome of the case was differing theories of what would constitute an adequate defense against the charge of defamation. In this context, the fact that the issue was defamation and not sexual acts was relevant. One of the judges that voted in favor of Cumming Gordon noted that he didn’t view the evidence as sufficient to prove the sex acts in question, but felt that it did justify Cumming Gordon’s actions. “Defamation” involved a defamatory statement (that injures the reputation of the person) that is made maliciously. Cumming Gordon definitely made defamatory statements that definitely injured Woods & Pirie’s reputation, but the judges were not in agreement with whether the truth of the accusation, or at least Cumming Gordon’s good-faith belief in its truth, could be an acceptable defense.
Were good motives (protecting the students) sufficient if there was insufficient diligence in confirming the truth of the allegations? Fairly early in the process, Cumming Gordon backed down from claiming that the accusations were literally true in their entirety, but her counsel asserted that any sort of impropriety was sufficient to justify her actions. The prosecution asserted that the accusations had been so extreme and damaging that passing them off as simple standing in for a general dissatisfaction with the schoolmistresses’ conduct was inadequate.
One version of this debate could be seen as a conflict between a student believing that her teachers had engaged in sex acts together, versus the teachers not only imagining such acts, but actually engaging in them. (The point about the teachers being able to imagine sex between women was a key underpinning to a lot of the anxiety in the judicial deliberations.)
If it was sufficient defense that Cumming Gordon was justified by any sort of impropriety, then there was no need to establish the facts regarding actual sex acts. If proof of the specific sex acts was necessary for defense, it was not enough to establish that sex between women was a possible phenomenon, but that these specific women (white, middle-class, British, Christian) could know about and engage in such acts—and engage in them in the specific circumstances involved (with pupils in the same room or even in the same bed). In the end, the stricter requirement prevailed and Cumming Gordon was required to prove her original claim that the women “came to one another’s beds in the pursuit of the gratification of unnatural lust.”
Given this requirement, there was a careful path to be threaded. As the presiding judge wrote, “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners, and that, again, on their habits of intercourse remaining as they have hitherto been—free from suspicion.” [Note: Do not read a sexual meaning into the word “intercourse” in this quote. It’s being used in a sense of “interactions”.] Some readings of this case suggest that the judges worked backward from a need to deny this possibility of the purported sex acts, but as Derry shows, the details of the deliberations show that it was far from certain that they would come to this conclusion.
With all these theoretical and procedural considerations, it was a review of the physical layout of the school premises that provided crucial arguments in the teachers’ favor. One witness claimed she had seen the teachers engaged in improper behavior while looking through a keyhole, but the room in question had two doors: one with no keyhole and one placed such that the alleged location of the act was not visible through the keyhole. Some acts that witnesses claimed to have “seen” occurred in darkness. Cumming Gordon’s version of the events required not only that the teachers had chosen to engage in sex while sharing a bed with a student (when they certainly had the ability to occupy a private room) but continued do engage in sex after being aware that their activities were known. Given these facts, a conclusion that these specific women had not committed the acts in question did not rely solely on a presumption that “respectable British women wouldn’t do that.”
The presiding judge also brought in discussion regarding the physiological possibility of the alleged acts, relying on popular myths about the nature of female orgasm and the image of women with enlarged clitorises engaging in penetrative sex. (Here he did raise the objection that foreign women might have that physiology, but British women definitely did not.) Derry reviews a chronology of theories about sex difference and female anatomy that situate these ideas within a shifting historical landscape.
In conclusion, Derry lays out the reasons why a simplistic view of the facts and arguments in the case flattens out the vast amount of nuance and negotiation involved, even before the actual evidence was brought into consideration. In particular, the case was not primarily concerned with establishing whether sex between women was possible, but rather whether it was necessary to prove that it had actually occurred in this particular case, and if so, whether it had been proven.
Time period:
Event / person:
Pages
Tags
2018 Fiction Series (5)
2019 Fiction Series (8)
2020 Fiction Series (6)
2021 Fiction Series (6)
2022 Fiction Series (7)
2023 Fiction Series (5)
2024 Fiction Series (5)
2025 Fiction Series (3)
admin (2)
A Little Princess (36)
All is Silence (1)
Alpennia (23)
audiobooks (2)
awards (7)
BayCon (3)
Bonus Fiction (2)
book intake (11)
Book Release Re-Boot (33)
Bookstore Event (1)
Cats (1)
Clothing (1)
conventions (35)
cookery (1)
cover (1)
Diana's Band (1)
FAQ (7)
Floodtide (48)
FOGcon (3)
Garden (2)
Gaylactic Spectrum (1)
Gifts Tell Truth (4)
giveaways (5)
guest-blog (9)
Gwylan (1)
Hoywverch (1)
Hyddwen (2)
Interview (6)
Kalamazoo (66)
Lace and Blade (3)
LaForge (27)
language (1)
Lesbian Book Bingo (10)
LHMP (848)
Mabinogi (1)
MAC2 (1)
Merchinogi (2)
Mistress of Shadows (1)
Mother of Souls (2)
Music (1)
names (1)
newsletter (3)
Numbers (1)
Patreon (2)
Philosophy (7)
podcast (358)
Podcastle (1)
Poetry (1)
promotion (86)
publication (1)
publishing (2)
QSF (3)
representation (1)
Research (3)
reviews (4)
Reviews: audio (7)
Reviews: Books (144)
Reviews: graphic novels (5)
Reviews: Live Performance (7)
reviews: movies (36)
reviews: non-fiction (6)
reviews: short fiction (2)
Sale (6)
Sirens (1)
stories (1)
Storybundle (16)
submissions (2)
teasers (52)
test (2)
The Language of Roses (2)
the language of roses (6)
Through the Hourglass (1)
transcript (8)
travel (8)
Updates (1)
Where My Heart Goes (2)
Work (1)
Worldcon (9)
Worldcon75 (13)
Worldcon 76 (1)
Worldcon 77 (12)
writing (53)
Year-End Summary (10)
