The Lesbian Revolution

Lesbian Feminism in the UK 1970-1990

Sheila Jeffreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138096561
• eBook ISBN: 9781351600569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Lesbian Revolution argues that lesbian feminists were a vital force in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). They did not just play a fundamental role in the important changes wrought by second wave feminism, but created a powerful revolution in lesbian theory, culture and practice. Yet this lesbian revolution is undocumented.

The book shows that lesbian feminists were founders of feminist institutions such as resources for women survivors of men's violence, including refuges and rape crisis centres, and that they were central to campaigns against this violence. They created a feminist squatting movement, theatre groups, bands, art and poetry and conducted campaigns for lesbian rights. They also created a profound and challenging analysis of sexuality which has disappeared from the historical record. They analysed heterosexuality as a political institution, arguing that lesbianism was a political choice for feminists and, indeed, a form of resistance in itself. Using interviews with prominent lesbian feminists from the time of the WLM, and informed by the author's personal experience, this book aims to challenge the way the work and ideas of lesbian feminists have been eclipsed and to document the lesbian revolution.

The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of women's history, the history of feminism, the politics of sexuality, women's studies, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as to the lay reader interested in the WLM and feminism more generally.

1

The origins of lesbian feminism

The revolution that was lesbian feminism transformed the meaning and practice of lesbianism. Lesbianism went from being a largely underground and stigmatised form of sexual deviance to a form of resistance by proud and out lesbians who were intent upon changing the world. Lesbian feminists put the spotlight upon heterosexuality, the institution that founds and organises the subordination of women, as a problem. They were the solution. In this chapter, I will examine the way that lesbianism was understood and lived before the Women’s Liberation Movement and the changes that lesbian feminism wrought. I will explain the ways in which lesbian feminism developed in relation to the WLM. Differences of class, education and race affected the way that lesbian feminism developed, as did political differences around the way that lesbianism and feminism related to each other, between socialist feminists and radical feminists in particular. I will explain why lesbians separated off from mixed struggles that included gay men, and why they found it necessary, in many situations, to organise separately from heterosexual feminists.

Lesbianism before the flood

Lesbian feminism developed as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Before the WLM, feminist historians point out, it is likely that the majority of women knew little of women’s ability to express sexual love for each other (Faderman, 1985; Jeffreys, 1997 [1985]). There was no concept of the lesbian – i.e. a woman who chooses to love women – in popular culture. If women did come to love each other, and indeed to express this sexually, there was no lesbian ‘identity’ to which they could attach themselves. They are likely to have considered their love to be an eccentric and individual phenomenon. Lesbian historians argue that we should be careful about the way in which we name women who loved other women in the nineteenth century (Faderman, 1981: Jeffreys, 1989). Some women did behave towards each other in ways that we would be likely to call ‘lesbian’ today and lived with women partners all their lives. Some even left a record (and this is extremely rare) of their sexual encounters with other women (Whitbread, 1988). Most women were unable to choose to live with and love other women because they did not have independent means. They were forced to marry, or to live under the protection of a male relative who would support them.

But women did find ways to love each other. Lillian Faderman and other feminist historians have traced a history of what they call ‘women’s romantic friendships’, in which middle-class women would engage in long-term relationships with best friends which could last a lifetime, and could include sleeping in the same bed and forms of passionate physical affection, though there is usually no record to suggest how far this went (Rosenberg, 1975; Faderman, 1981). Such friendships seem to have been common and unremarkable. The women were not stigmatised, and they were not seen as sexual deviants or social outcasts. These women would likely not have called themselves lesbians or any other word which would indicate same-sex sexual relationships. They may not have known that women could relate to each other except in terms of friendships, which were often conducted alongside their marriages to men.

Those women who were able to choose for women because they were financially independent of men did have some models of women-loving women to whom they could compare themselves, and therefore create something which could now be seen as related to a lesbian identity. The wealthy, independent landowner Ann Lister, for instance, who conducted a number of sexual relationships with women in Yorkshire, where she lived, uses the example of Sappho when talking of her relations with women in her diaries from the 1820s (Whitbread, 1988). There is nothing in her diaries to suggest that she knew other women who identified with Sappho, however, or that she was part of a community rather than an isolated individual. Other women in the early nineteenth century, such as the teachers at a Scottish girls’ school who were the protagonists in Faderman’s book Scotch Verdict, may not have had a model to relate to, but seem to have managed to carry on relationships nonetheless (Faderman, 1985).

In this period there were likely to have been differences between the ways in which middle- and upper-class women who loved women thought about themselves and practised their love and the ways in which working-class women did. The difficulty for historians is that, although there is some record kept by educated middle-class women in diaries and letters of their love for women, working-class women did not keep such records, and the shape of such relations as they had with other women is not clear. Middle- and upper-class women were more likely to be literate and to live independent lives and practise their lesbianism more freely. They were able to write down information that enables us to have some insight into their lives.

Lesbian historians suggest that a golden age of romantic friendships for middle-class women was brought to an end by the work of the sexologists or scientists of sex in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth (Faderman, 1981). The sexologists created hostile stereotypes of what Henry Havelock Ellis called ‘female inverts’, which led to the stigmatisation of lesbian relationships as deviant (see Jeffreys, 1997 [1985]). Ellis based his insights on his own wife, Edith Lees Ellis, who was a lesbian. Lesbian feminist historians have argued that the sexologists were engaged in an ideological backlash against the powerful feminist movement of that period, which made women’s friendships that had once seemed harmless into a threat to male dominance. Women started to enter occupations, such as teaching and typing, which enabled some independence. Women with an income were in a position to reject men and choose each other as life companions. Ellis’s work circulated amongst a certain class of women, and by the 1920s lesbians such as Vita Sackville-West, who was married to a homosexual, and the novelist Radclyffe Hall possessed extensive libraries of his work and other sexology texts. The sexological version of the lesbian was of a woman who was masculine because she possessed the soul of a man in the body of a woman. Homosexuality was explained by sexual inversion – i.e. the ‘germs’ of one sex finding their way mysteriously into the body of the other. This appealed to some lesbians in the period before the First World War and the period between the wars, because it provided an explanation for their inclinations and a way to defend themselves. If lesbianism was the work of god-given biology, then lesbians should be tolerated rather than condemned. Radclyffe Hall, whose 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness is a plea for tolerance, has her heroine Stephen say: ‘God’s cruel, he let us get flawed in the making’ (Hall, 1982 [1928]: 207).

In the 1920s manly dress was adopted by certain fashionable women of the middle classes in the UK, with the effect that those lesbians who wore breeches were less likely to stand out and attract opprobrium (Doan, 2001). In the case of working-class women in the UK, the adoption of masculine attire was less a fashionable affectation and more a matter of survival and necessity (Oram, 2007). These lesbians had to be taken for men if they wanted to get remunerative employment, and in such a guise they were able to live with other women without remark. The lesbian historian Alison Oram found examples of such practice until the 1950s (Oram, 2007). She explains that, when those taken to be men were revealed to be women, there was no public outcry against them as lesbians; rather, they were seen as curiosities. There was no category of ‘the lesbian’ in popular culture into which observers might place them. Rebecca Jennings explains that a lesbian subculture in which lesbians could socialise and create community did not exist before the 1920s. Men had had a gay subculture and particular clubs and bars long before this time, but there were cultural norms against women drinking, women had less money and there were restrictions on women’s freedom of movement in public spaces (Jennings, 2007). In the 1920s a lesbian culture was developing around particular pubs and clubs that were usually mixed. This began to change, and the Gateways Club in London, which had started out as a Bohemian venue in the 1930s, catered almost entirely to lesbians by the 1950s (Gardiner, 2003). It was less class-specific than the venues of the 1920s, in which upper-class lesbians had been able to socialise. Nonetheless, until the late 1960s most lesbians would have had recourse only to mixed gay clubs, and the lesbian culture available therein would likely have been one of butch/femme role-playing.

A working-class lesbian from Newcastle describes the clubs in which lesbians socialised and found partners in the 1960s, just before the advent of gay liberation and the WLM, as the ‘dives’ (Farnham, 1990: 50). It was not a positive environment, because ‘[t]‌here was no women-only things. It wasn’t that you weren’t out as a lesbian it was just that the pubs were all you had, and they were grotty, overcharged and mixed.’ The pub she used, she says, ‘was a dive, where all sorts of people went, you had gays and petty criminals and prostitutes, so you mixed shoulders with everybody. This was the middle sixties.’ The predominant way in which lesbians interacted was through butch and femme roles: ‘I was into the three-piece suits and the butch thing. […] And no way could I ever see myself as a femme. God, no. It was the high heels… You felt you were either one or the other’ (ibid.). Even well into the 1970s, in places where there were no ‘discos’ (alternative venues run by lesbians where women danced to music selected by lesbian disc jockeys and often run as benefits for women’s organisations), the alternatives for a social life were dire. My interviewee Al Garthwaite describes the situation thus: ‘You had to go into these, the Gateways, holes in the ground with lesbians in them, or places that were frankly low life’ (Al Garthwaite, interview 2013).

The 1960s: a change of climate

In the 1960s there was a change in the climate which affected the way that lesbianism was thought about by lesbians themselves and in popular culture. A move towards a more collective identity replaced the idea of individual deviance. The more liberal sexual climate encouraged wider public discussion of the issue of homosexuality and enabled the setting up of homosexual rights groups. A campaign to repeal the legislation that criminalised male homosexual activity began after the Wolfenden report was published in 1957 (Home Office, 1957). The report was commissioned as a result of a wave of police persecution, arrests and imprisonment of gay men in the early 1950s. It recommended that a private/public distinction should be applied to male homosexuality, such that homosexuality in private should not be within the concerns of the law. In response, the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) was set up to campaign for law reform, which led to repeal in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Greater public awareness and toleration made homosexuality a respectable topic for media discussion, as in the two television documentaries by Bryan Magee in 1964 and 1965, the second of which was on lesbians (Jennings, 2007: 100).

Lesbian sex was not criminalised in the same way, but lesbians were involved in the HLRS to support gay men. The first stage in what Rebecca Jennings calls ‘the negotiation of collective lesbian identities’ was the publication of a specifically lesbian magazine, Arena Three, whose editor, Esme Langley, remained in post until its demise in 1971 (Jennings, 2007: 130). Out of this an organisation, the Minorities Research Group (MRG), was set up by Langley, Cynthia Read, Julie Switsur and Diana Chapman, to publish the magazine and to ‘conduct and to collaborate in research into the homosexual condition, especially as it concerns women; and to disseminate information and items of interest’ to a variety of actors (ibid.: 138). There was an example to emulate, in the shape of the first specifically lesbian organisation set up in the US a decade earlier, the Daughters of Bilitis (ibid.). The MRG agenda was egalitarian rather than feminist, meaning that it focussed on promoting the idea that male and female homosexuals were really just like anyone else and should be supported in integrating seamlessly into malestream society and culture.

In an interview, Diana Chapman explains how men reacted when Arena Three was set up. She says that the organising group had not realised that, for men, lesbianism was a source of sexual excitement: ‘We hadn’t realised that there was this interest in lesbianism as pornography and that we found quite shocking. We’d have men knocking at the door or ringing up’ (Hall Carpenter Archives, 1989). Men’s desire to sexually access lesbians probably results from the fact that lesbians are women who specifically reject men’s advances and provide the exciting challenge of violating boundaries. This problem bedevilled lesbian organising from this time onwards. Its counterpart today is the pretence by male heterosexual cross-dressers that they are ‘lesbians’ and the demand that lesbians submit to penetration by these men to avoid accusations of ‘transphobia’ (see Jeffreys, 2014). Chapman explains that the lesbians who produced Arena Three wanted it to be ‘a proper, decent magazine and that there should be no overt sex, nothing that could be remotely described as titillating’. The times were so conservative that ‘we wouldn’t send it out to any married woman who didn’t have her husband’s approval because I think we had one or two letters from raving husbands more or less threatening to sue us for alienation of affection’ (Hall Carpenter Archives, 1989: 53).

The MRG was determined to present a respectable image, and some members were dismayed that there were women attending meetings in masculine attire. An issue of the MRG magazine Arena Three from its first year contains what the writer called a ‘complaint’ in a section entitled ‘MRG News’, about the way that some lesbians who attended meetings chose to dress:

We must regretfully voice a complaint. A good many members who have attended the first two M.R.G. meetings have been somewhat piqued by the exhibitionist tendency of one or two others, and want to know if it is really absolutely necessary to turn up to these meetings dressed in what is popularly known as ‘full drag’. As the majority of women homosexuals are not ‘transvestites’…we shall be glad if at future meetings there will be no further cause for wounded sensibilities.

(Arena Three, 1964, 1 (6): 14)

A contributor called K.H. comments: ‘Would anyone take the H.L.R.S. seriously if all the male homosexual members turned out in full female finery?’ Chapman comments that, when the social group Kenric was set up out of the MRG, ‘we had a very bitter debate on whether women should come dressed as men’, but says that this role-playing was not de rigueur because ‘there were always people like me and Esme who just dressed in slacks and shirt’ (Hall Carpenter Archives, 1989: 55). The MRG and Arena Three were important in providing the first public voice for lesbians, and providing a support network. The magazine became steadily more feminist in orientation until its demise in 1971 under the influence of the burgeoning WLM.

Lesbian feminism and the WLM

Lesbian feminism was a development from the Women’s Liberation Movement, which began in the UK in 1969/70. Lesbian feminism transformed the idea and practice of lesbianism from being simply a sexual practice to a revolutionary way of living, as the US lesbian feminist philosopher Janice Raymond explains: ‘Lesbian feminists have…expanded the range and reality of what has been perceived as a sexual category – lesbian sexuality – far beyond the physical body to a social and political reality’ (Raymond, 1986: 14). Women’s liberation got under way sooner in the US. Susan Brownmiller recounts, in her autobiographical account of its early years, that women’s groups were being formed in the late 1960s, mainly by women activists who had been involved in the civil rights movement and on the Left (Brownmiller, 2000). By the early 1970s many feminist publications had already been started up, including the foundational feminist magazine MS in 1971. The American example helped to spark the beginning of women’s liberation in the UK, which got under way a couple of years later than in the US.

As in the US, the women who began the WLM in the UK came from the Left. Sheila Rowbotham says that it was an awareness of a women’s movement beginning in the US and Germany reaching the UK in 1968 and an uprising of working-class women that sparked the WLM in Britain (Rowbotham, 1972). The first women’s rights group was formed in Hull in the spring of 1968, around a campaign by fisherman’s wives to demand improved safety after the loss of two trawlers on which their husbands worked. This stimulated what Rowbotham calls ‘left middle class women’ to form an equal rights group. Gradually women on the Left started to talk about their ‘specific o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Biographies of interviewees
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Lesbian feminism: hidden from history
• 1 The origins of lesbian feminism
• 2 Lesbian culture
• 3 Separatism
• 4 The lesbian perspective
• 5 Political lesbianism and heterosexuality
• 6 Sadomasochism: The challenge to the politics of sexual equality
• 7 The gender backlash: Butch/femme role-playing
• 8 Identity politics and the destruction of lesbian feminism: ‘The CIA couldn’t have done it better’ (Rahila of Southall Black Sisters, 1986)
• 9 Grief: The demise of lesbian feminism
• Postscript: The erasure of lesbians
• Bibliography
• Index