The novel Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) maybe the earliest American literary depiction of a passionate romantic relationship between women. Criticism of the work has tended to reflect the attitudes toward women’s same-sex relationships prevalent in the critic’s own era, rather than considering it within its own context.
USA
Includes Colonial America in what would become the USA. May also be used generally for North America if sources were not specific. See also separate tag Native America for discussions of indigenous North American cultures.
LHMP entry
Given the prominence of the word “lesbianism” in the title of this article, I found it less interesting than I hoped. Margaret Fuller was a prominent American writer and feminist in the first half of the 19th century. The theme of this article is how her writings and opinions around various romantic connections she had with women illustrate the tensions around the dividing line between acceptable and praiseworthy Romantic Friendship and the types of relationships between women that were felt to go beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
As with several other articles I’ve blogged in this run of American-themed publications, this one covers material that I’ve already discussed in more detail in a previous entry. (Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “"The Cry of Sodom": Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in <em>The William and Mary Quarterly</em>, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286)
I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)
Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
While this article is (necessarily) focused primarily on m/m history, it does have useful details of the early legal history of female same-sex relations in America. I’ll be focusing on those details and so this summary won’t cover the article as a whole. The general approach is to compare the “official” (church and state) position on same-sex erotics with the evidence for how specific individuals were viewed within their communities, including some startlingly lax responses to men notorious for their sexual interest in other men.
[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
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