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No point in spacing these out when I'm on a roll. I've had half a dozen articles sitting on my iPad all read-and-highlighted waiting for me to write them up. I have one more of those to post, then 4 articles on theater to read and post. I'm about a third of the way through making notes from one of the two(?) books on women in theater that I have scheduled. Then I think I'll be ready to tackle the "women on stage" tropes podcast. I think it'll be a lot of fun. Who knows why I'm feeling energized to work on these blogs. I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 289 - Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 13: Mothers, Sisters, Daughter – Pseudo-familial Relationships - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/06/15 - listen here)

Introduction and the Elephant in the Room

Today we’re looking at romantic relationships between women that use the symbolism and language of familial relationships, either sisterhood or mother-daughter bonds. I debated about whether to put this topic in the tropes series, because it doesn’t strongly correspond to an established trope in male-female historic romance. But it does fall in the general category of “trope” in the sense of a structured framework for character relationships that affects the shape of possible stories and outcomes. It also gives me a context to talk about the dynamics of age-gap relationships as a trope.

But the elephant in the room for this topic is the question of incest imagery. If two women are framing their relationship as being a type of fictive sisterhood, how does that relate to the idea of biological sisters engaging in a romantic or even sexual relationship? If two women use the language of mothers and daughters for their partnership, is that problematic? And is it problematic within the historical context of a story, versus for modern authors and readers?

I feel the need to address this because I get a sense that some reading communities are going through a period of being highly sensitive to anything that could possibly read as incestuous, and yet the symbolic use of familial relationships—especially sisterhood—to talk about romantic partners is a strongly established historic practice.

So, to make clear, this podcast is not talking about romantic relationships between actual immediate biological kin, whether sisters or parent and child. What we’re talking about is the use of language and imagery of those relationships to construct models for social structures that had no concrete, authorized social reality.

Within this context, it’s important to keep two general practices in mind. The first is the broad use of familial language to talk about non-biological bonds. Members of a religious community or a social organization such as a craft guild might refer to each other as sisters or brothers, with those in positions of authority using the title of mother or father. Non-biological relationships created through marriage could confer both the label and social expectations of siblinghood or parental status.

Secondly, this type of language has regularly been in use between married male-female couples. Married couples might call each other “brother” and “sister” either within the context of community practice where these terms emphasized membership in a specific social group, or as a more individual practice to indicate a sense of closeness. Similarly, married couples might refer to each other using parental titles. Sometimes this is to emphasize the pre-eminence of parenthood as the purpose of marriage, for example, that a woman’s role as mother was viewed as being more important in the family than her role as wife. Sometimes it reflected a sense of power differential within a heterosexual marriage where a woman framed her husband as carrying the role of both spouse and parent with respect to her.

I’m not saying that such usage might not—in some cases—reflect problematic roles within heterosexual marriages, but the point is that women who used familial language and models to interact with same-sex partnerships were not doing so as a unique function of same-sex relations. Rather they were drawing on practices that existed more generally in society. So before we recoil from the specter of incest if a female couple talks about being sisters or if one partner assigns the role of “mother” to the other partner, consider if we would have a similar reaction if a married woman addressed her husband as “Daddy” which, in fact, is a practice I’ve encountered in my own extended family.

This is, perhaps, an overly long introduction, but given reactions I’ve encountered to the use of sisterhood language in my own writing, I wanted to put it openly on the table.

Why Use Familial Models?

Why use familial models for relationships at all? The simplest answer is that when human beings want to understand a new concept, they look for things it can be compared to—models that can be used to understand how to interact with it. If society does not present you with existing paradigms for a type of relationship, you look for paradigms that can be adapted for the purpose. Rarely have historic societies offered structures specific to same-sex romantic partnerships. So when two women looked for inspiration for how to behave toward each other and how to structure their lives together, they would usually look around to find concepts that felt similar in some way.

Marriage was one obvious existing model to borrow. Friendship was another obvious model. But if women felt that the closeness, familiarity, and mutual support of a kinship group came closest to what they were experiencing, then biology-based relationships between two women—specifically sisterhood and mother-daughter bonds—were another obvious option and could give them a way to anchor their partnership in familiar and socially-approved structures.

Even setting aside the question of romantic relationships, kinship networks have historically been essential for a successful and happy life, and those from the birth family could be supplemented (or even replaced) by fictive ones. Marriage itself could be made unnecessary with sufficiently supportive networks. Thus familial models for same-sex romantic relationships existed within a potential network of fictive kinship that served non-romantic purposes.

Such fictive kinship might be entirely informal, or it might have its own solemnizing rituals, or there might be formal structures in place to give the relationships legal weight. The available options will depend on the specific culture. This survey will be anecdotal, rather than trying for a comprehensive understanding of the options.

The Sister Model

The sisterhood model is supported by two pathways: the expectation that natal sisters will have a close emotional bond and will provide social and economic support to each other, perhaps including sharing a household, and the use of sisterhood as a model for close non-romantic relationships that share similar features. There are plentiful examples of women using the term “sister” to mark either the expectation or reality of a long-lasting interpersonal bond, to say nothing of the use of “sister” in religious contexts or charitable organizations to mark membership in a community. (I haven’t touched much on the intersection of love between women in convents with the use of sisterhood language because the two aspects would be difficult to untangle.)

The concept of sisterhood represented a close supportive bond between equals in age and status. Sororal relationships were expected to include a component of physical affection, as well as emotional closeness. In general society, sisterhood models might be enhanced by paralleling other attributes of natal families: naming children after the friend, co-residence, sharing beds while visiting, and integrating other members of the natal family into the relationship.

Somewhat more rarely, we can find examples of sister-language that carry an implicit understanding of romantic desire, as in a medieval Welsh love poem where the female poet sends a love-messenger to the woman who was “like a sister to me” but whom marriage has now put out of her reach.

An unusually clear 19th century example of the way fictive sisterhood could embrace a clearly romantic and erotic relationship comes from the letters of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, who called each other sisters (though wishing they could use the language of husband and wife) and sometimes used the same surname, all while being accepted by their families as having a formal connection and behaving as natal family members would.

Formalizing Sisterhood

Fictive sisterhood could be formalized, in some cases. The simplest method would be for two women to swear some sort of informal oath to consider each other as sisters. We see this in Susanna Highmore Duncombe’s 18th century poem “To Aspasia” where she describes “In youthful innocence, a school-day friend first gained my sister-vows.

More formal understandings might be marked by traditional ceremonies. John Boswell, in his work on same-sex ceremonies, tentatively identifies some “sworn sisterhood” rituals in the early Christian period, alongside the better-attested sworn brotherhood rituals for men. He also cites a 17th century account from the Balkans of two young women formalizing a sisterhood ritual in church.

There are descriptions from the early modern period of Iranian rituals for women to make formal vows of sisterhood, involving elaborate “courtship” preliminaries and community participation.

One theme that shows up in 18th and 19th century records is of women formalizing fictive sisterhood through marriage—that is, one woman marrying the other’s brother, or perhaps both marrying a pair of brothers. Not, perhaps the ideal approach for sapphic history, but a solidly historic approach. A familiar example might be poet Emily Dickinson’s beloved, Susan Gilbert, marrying Emily’s brother, enabling their continuing close relationship.

Rejecting the Sister Model

And yet, women sometimes recognized that the sister model had its flaws when a lasting, exclusive relationship was the goal. In Sidney’s New Arcadia, the heroine Philoclea ponders how she might spend her life in a romantic relationship with the supposed amazon Zelmane. She considers sisterhood, but rejects it, as a sister might be parted by marriage.

The 18th century poet Pauline de Simiane complains to her female beloved that she doesn’t want to be kissed “like a sister,” recognizing a gulf between publicly-acceptable forms of affection and the more erotic version she desires.

The Mother/Daughter Model

Intimate friendships that involved a significant age difference might use the language and symbolism of a mother-daughter relationship, though parental imagery could also be used with smaller age differences, based on differences in experience or personality instead. Compared to sisterhood models that emphasized equality and reciprocity, a parental model could imply that the expected contributions to the relationship would not be symmetric, involving support and mentorship from the older partner, and devotion and loyalty from the younger. One might see a parental model being used in cases where the two women met when one was not yet independent or needed care-taking, but it might also be attractive in cases where it provided a “safety net” against the relationship becoming uncomfortably intense or exclusive. Occasionally, the use of mother-daughter language could reflect or encourage a view of the relationship as a transient, life-stage experience. And I have to say that some of the examples I found of parental relationship models can get somewhat messy.

Famed bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu took on a younger relative as a protégé, after being widowed, who functioned as something halfway between an adopted daughter and a supportive spouse. While there aren’t any clear indications that Montagu had romantic inclinations, she did seem to intend the young woman to serve as her “wife” for household purposes. The relationship—whatever its nature—foundered on Montagu’s refusal to formalize it by naming her protégé as her heir. The young woman subsequently considered marriage to offer a more secure future and left her.

One familiar example of a clearly romantic couple who used a parental model for their relationship was poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote together under the pen name Michael Field. Katharine was Edith’s aunt and—along with her mother (Edith’s grandmother) helped to raise Edith and her sister when their mother became an invalid. There was a 16-year age difference between the women. But after Edith began attending college, their relationship shifted to one of partnership, though it must have inescapably retained some hierarchical aspects.

The use of a parental model for relationships could sometimes partake of religious overtones, with the mother figure framing her love as spiritual, even when it included erotic encounters.

Composer Ethel Smyth had a series of romantic affairs and crushes on older women in whom she looked for something of the unconditional supportive and understanding love she does not appear to have received from her own mother. In some cases she found partners who supported the role-playing she sought, while in other cases the targets of her affection seemed to have accepted a motherly role as a means of holding off the possibility of an erotic relationship.

Actress Charlotte Cushman had a fairly extensive series of female lovers, often overlapping significantly as she juggled competing relationships. For the most part, her partners were of similar age and experience, but when she encouraged and indulged a crush from Emma Crow, the daughter of a business associate, she was 24 years older than the 18-year-old Emma, whom she addressed in letters sometimes as her “little lover” and sometimes as her “daughter”. Cushman was always a sucker for devoted admiration but Emma’s romantic pursuit of her pushed the more cautious Cushman into something of a managing parental role. In her bid to have her cake and eat it too, Cushman suggested that their cohabitation might be safely camouflaged by having Emma marry Cushman’s nephew, in a new variation of the “marry her brother to become her sister” ploy.

Mother/Daughter versus Age-Gap

I haven’t made direct comparisons of sisterhood and mother-daughter relationship models to parallel dynamics for male-female relationships, though such comparisons could certainly be worth exploring. As I mentioned at the beginning, these don’t necessarily fall in the usual category of “romance tropes,” although they can have connections to friends-to-lovers, among other tropes. But I thought I’d finish up with a consideration of a closely-related trope that we hear a lot about in lesbian romance circles: the age-gap romance.

By identifying age-gap relationships as a “trope” there is a certain implication that the unmarked default is for a female couple to be closely similar in age. This is another facet of the contrast between similarity and difference models in romantic attraction, but focusing on maturity and experience rather than gender polarity. Certainly not all age-gap relationships partake of a parental model, or even of a mentor-student model which is another possible framing. But there will be echoes of some of the dynamics: not simply a generational difference in age, but differences in life experience, perhaps in perceived social power dynamics, all of which will likely need to be addressed in some fashion within the relationship.

But when we compare the situation to male-female pairings within the context of historic romance, we can see that there isn’t really a corresponding trope because the defaults are opposite. The default for historic mixed-gender couples is an assumption that there will be an age gap: that the man will be older—sometimes even significantly older—and more experienced, without that being notable as a particular type of scenario. So it’s an apples and oranges situation: age-gap isn’t a trope that carries over from the more general world of romance fiction, but rather one that emerges within same-sex romance literature specifically because it creates an unexpected dynamic with respect to the assumed default.

Conclusions

So if your romantic couple are reaching for concepts and structures into which they can fit their emerging relationship, one possibility they might consider is to view themselves as becoming family, not in the shape of a marriage, but in the shape of slipping into existing familial roles that presume the sort of closeness, affection, and mutual support that they desire.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Relationships using the imagery of sisters and mother/daughter
• Age-gap relationships
• References
  • Babayan, Kathryn. “’In Spirit We Ate Each Other’s Sorrow’ Female Companionship in Seventeenth-Century Safavi Iran” in Babayan, Kathryn and Afsaneh Najmabadi (eds.). 2008. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03204-0
  • Boswell, John. 1994. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. Villard Books, New York. ISBN 0-679-43228-0
  • Hansen, Karen V. 1995. "No Kisses is Like Youres" in Gender and History vol 7, no 2: 153-182.
  • Lasser, Carol. 1988. "'Let Us Be Sisters Forever': The Sororal Model of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship" in Signs vol. 14, no. 1 158-181.
  • Levin, Richard A. 1997. “What? How? Female-Female Desire in Sidney’s New Arcadia” in Criticism 39:4 : 463-49.
  • Matter, E. Ann. 1989. “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, eds. Judith Plaskow & Carol P. Christ. Harper & Row, San Francisco.
  • Merrill, Lisa. 2000. When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ISBN 978-0-472-08749-5
  • Morgan, Mihangel. 2016. “From Huw Arwystli to Siôn Eirian: Representative Examples of Cadi/Queer Life from Medieval to Twentieth-century Welsh Literature” in Queer Wales: The History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales. Huw Osborne (ed). University of Wales Press, Cardiff. ISBN 978-1-7831-6863-7
  • Rizzo, Betty. 1994. Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3218-5
  • Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1975. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America” in Signs vol. 1, no. 1 1-29.
  • Vanita, Ruth. 1996. Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-10551-7
  • Vicinus, Martha. 2004. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-85564-3
  • Wiethaus, Ulrike. 1993. “In Search of Medieval Women’s Friendships: Hildegard of Bingen’s Letters to her Female Contemporaries” in Wiethaus, Ulrike (ed) Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse. ISBN 0-8156-2560-X

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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

Links to Heather Online

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

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 288 - On the Shelf for June 2024 - Transcript

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

Welcome to On the Shelf for June 2024

News of the Field

New podcast-of-interest alert! I had a lovely time this month talking to Claudia Cox and Yasmin Vince, the hosts of a new podcast with a feminist take on period dramas. Here’s the podcast description: “Each episode, we break down how women are presented in a different historical film or TV show. A historian tells us how that period drama has changed our understanding of real women from that time period. Were corsets really as grim as TV tells us? Have the makers of Bridgerton ever opened a history book? Have the makers of Gladiator ever spoken to a girl? We shall discuss all this and more, while fangirling over Keira Knightley at any given opportunity.” They invited me to talk with them about the movie “The Favourite”—which long-time listeners may recall I discussed on this show, with guests Trystan Bass and Farah Mendlesohn. The new podcast is titled “Period” which makes for fun wordplay. I’ve provided a link in the show notes and I encourage you to check it out. The episode I’ll be in will come out sometime in the next month, I think, but I don’t have a link yet.

Another item you folks might want to check out is a limited periodical series titled “Lesbiantiquity,” which is publishing all the known classical Greek and Latin texts relevant to female homoeroticism, in both original and translation. The series is covering one author or work per issue, coming out weekly. The issues are available to read online for free, but you can also subscribe to support the project and receive notification of new issues. See the link in the show notes.

For the first time since the start of Covid, I went back in-person to the annual medieval congress in Kalamazoo. There was a wealth of papers on queer history, including a significant number on the Romance of Silence, a surprisingly modern-feeling gender-bending chivalric romance. Next year at the congress a group is presenting a stage version of the romance, so I expect there will be more papers on the topic as well.

Publications on the Blog

Still no new blogs covering books or articles – honestly, I don’t know where the time goes or how I ever managed to keep up before. And in the mean time, the new items to cover just keep piling up!

Book Shopping!

Speaking of which, the medieval congress has always been a hazardous book-buying experience for me, and this year was no different. Only three items were relevant enough to the Project that I’ve listed them in the show notes. I picked up another in Ian Mortimer’s “Time Traveler’s Guide” series, this one covering Elizabethan England. Books of this sort can be useful in grounding you in a period, before you move on to more specific research. I picked up a bilingual edition of Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women, part of a genre of philosophical writings pushing back against the misogyny that was endemic in the European middle ages. And I received a book I’d ordered previously for my “women on stage” topic – a collection of papers titled Women Players in England, 1500-1660, edited by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, which offers a good counter to the misapprehension that there were no female actors until the Restoration.

But in addition to those, I picked up several books on textile and clothing history, magical texts in Tudor England, medieval Welsh poetry , and the depiction in medieval art of King Balthazar (one of the three wise men) as a Black man. Oh, and also some fun Latin reading matter: an “easy reader” edition of a text on bird omens, a collection of tomb inscriptions giving glimpses into everyday lives, and a phrase book of “conversational Latin” illustrating everyday scenarios. Just in case you ever wondered what an amateur historian thinks of as “light reading.”

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

But until someone writes a lesbian romance in ancient Latin, what we’re really here for is the new releases.

I found one more April book. Uncharted Waters (The Savages of Falcote) by Ally Hastings from Attwater Books, which is part of a connected family romance series, but I think the only book with a sapphic romance.

1816. A young widow, a marquess’s sister, and the year without a summer.

Sarah Fitzrobert has lost much. Her husband, her youthful optimism, and, she sometimes fears, her liking for other people. When she was first out in society she couldn’t wait to be a wife, and the months of her engagement had seemed endless. Now, only four years later, she is a widow with nothing to look forward to except tagging along on her siblings’ social engagements, the future as wide and flat as a calm sea.

Lady Mariana Sinclair, née Savage, has everything she ever hoped for. Enough money to dazzle society with her dressmaker’s daring creations, frequent visits to her family home, and an agreeable husband to whom she is only married in name. So why does she still feel as if there is something missing?

Staying at Falcote during a sunless summer, Sarah and Mariana hesitantly start to talk about their hopes and disappointments, and ask the questions they cannot ask anyone else. But they are not the only ones who are curious, and when one of the other guests sees something she shouldn’t have, the precious safety of Falcote is threatened…

I also found one more May release that I’d missed, a western:

Three Times Elspeth Harris Rode to Town by Becky Black from JMS Books.

There had never been as much excitement in the town of Ghostbrook as there was the day Elspeth Harris faced trial for shooting a man. But it’s a clear case of self-defense, and she’s soon free to attend a wedding, where she meets Rose O’Sullivan, the town’s only seamstress, and engages her to make some unusual alterations.

Rose knows Elspeth has a secret she is protecting, one Rose has only seen hints of. As a lover of dime novels and tales of adventure, Rose’s imagination runs wild. Could Elspeth be a government agent? An undercover lady Pinkerton?

When they meet again at another wedding and share confidences about their lives and the difficulties of being a woman alone in the world, Rose grows ever more intrigued by the mysterious Elspeth. What secrets lie behind her beautiful, but aloof exterior?

Rose will finally learn those secrets when the third wedding of the summer comes around and with it, a bold proposal.

The rest of the books will be June releases.

Lee Swanson finishes up his medieval series “No Man is her Master” with the fourth volume: She Serves the Realm from Merchant's Largesse Books.

At the conclusion of the third novel, Her Dangerous Journey Home, Christina Kohl learns of the death of Sir Edgar Baldewyne, the boorish and abusive husband of her beloved Lady Cecily. At last free to marry, Christina and Cecily lack only the permission of the king to fulfill their heart's fondest desire. This seems only a modest hurdle, as they both enjoy his favor. But in the turbulent times of Edward II's reign, he is much more concerned with making use of Christina's considerable talents than in bringing happiness to her life.

In She Serves the Realm, Christina is torn from her merchant trade and the woman she loves to become an officer of the king. She is placed in ever-growing danger as civil war seems all but inevitable; the Lords Ordainers demanding the banishment of the Earl of Cornwall, King Edward just as adamant to retain Gaveston by his side. Complicating matters further is the always present peril of her disguise being discovered, revealing her not to be Sir Frederick Kohl, but in actuality a woman.

With her mentor and friend Herr Ziesolf no longer by her side, Christina finds herself devoid of her staunchest ally. But she is not left to fight alone; the irreverent Reiniken, erstwhile Jost, and noble Sir Giles join her on her adventures, as well as others both old and new to the readers of the series.

Many of the popular sapphic pirate stories we’ve seen lately fall more in the realm of fantasy, a la “Pirates of the Carribean”, but Briony Cameron’s The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye, from Atria Books, is inspired by a relatively historic figure.

This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa.

Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.

Jess Everlee has a historic romance series out from Carina Adores, with the series title “Lucky Lovers of London.” Volume 3 focuses on a sapphic couple in A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence.

London, 1885

A lesbian in a lavender marriage, Jo Smith cuts a dashing figure in pin-striped trousers, working in her bookshop and keeping impolite company. But her hard-earned stability is about to be upended thanks to her husband’s pregnant paramour, who needs medical attention that no reputable doctor will provide.

Enter Dr. Emily Clarke, a tantalizing bluestocking working at a quaint village hospital outside the city. Emily has reservations about getting mixed up in Jo’s scandalous arrangement, but her flustered, heart-racing response to Jo has her agreeing to help despite herself.

There’s a world of difference between Jo’s community of underground clubs and sapphic societies and Emily’s respectable suburbs. Perhaps it’s a gap that even fervent desire can’t bridge.

But for those bold enough to take the risk, who knows what delicious adventures might be in store…

Short fiction is hard to summarize without giving away the entire plot, so the description of Her Runaway Bride by Brooke Winters is also short and sweet.

When Lady Rachel fled from her home the night before her wedding, she never expected to find happiness in the arms of another woman. In disguise as a maid, Rachel has never been happier. When her identity is discovered, her new life and love are threatened. Anne has always struggled with trust and when she finds out that her lover isn't who she says she is, her heart is broken and her trust shattered. Rachel is determined to win Anne back.

So I confess that if I read the cover copy for Tides of Captivation: A sapphic pirate tale (Daughters Under the Black Flag #1), by Eden Hopewell, without that pointer in the sub-title, I wouldn’t have known this for a sapphic book. But I’ll take the author’s word for it.

A gilded cage. A rebellious heart. A journey that will rewrite her destiny.

Isabella Montgomery, stifled by the constraints of 18th-century Virginia society and the expectations placed upon her as a young woman of privilege, dreams of a life beyond the confines of her gilded cage. She yearns for adventure, knowledge, and the freedom to choose her own path.

When an arranged marriage to the arrogant and controlling Lord Frederick Ashworth threatens to seal her fate, Isabella takes a daring leap of faith. She escapes the suffocating world of balls and social obligations by stowing away on a ship bound for the open sea.

But the ship, the Lady Liberty, is not the escape she envisioned. The captain, Nathaniel Reynolds, is a man of mystery and intrigue, but also of harsh discipline and hidden motives. As Isabella navigates the challenges of life at sea, she faces dangers from storms, pirates, and the unpredictable nature of the captain himself.

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading? Somewhat surprisingly, it hasn’t been all audiobooks this month—just two out of three.

I rather enjoyed The Witch King by Martha Wells, which is a twisty fantasy about human-demon politics and adventures of the sort I love, where the worldbuilding is back-loaded and you figure out what’s going on along the way. There was one point at the very end where I felt this structure failed me, and a plot twist felt like it had come out of nowhere without enough set-up. But on the whole I enjoyed it.

I was just a tiny bit disappointed in Travelers Along the Way by Aminah Mae Safi, because I felt the advance copy had hinted at more sapphic content than it delivered. There is a background sapphic romance that is relevant to the plot, but given that I’d included it in the podcast listings on the basis of advance information, I did feel a bit misled. The story is a sort of Robin Hood re-imagining, set in the Holy Land during the crusades, with a slowly-accumulating band of misfits finding adventure and purpose while just trying to survive.

The last item I finished was in hard copy, which is why it took me almost 4 months to finish it. This is Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban. I had a lot of interesting thoughts about the structure and voice of this book—which I’m planning to put in an essay doing a compare-and-contrast with several other historic romances that got me thinking along similar lines. What it comes down to is: there are historic romances that actually feel like modern people dressed up in costume. And that doesn’t automatically mean that I won’t enjoy reading the book. In point of fact, I definitely enjoyed Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend. But only after I’d shifted gears and stopped reading it as a historical. At that point, the book has to stand or fall on the writing and characters. If a historic romance works for me as a historical, then it doesn’t have to work quite as hard on the prose and the characterization. It still has to work, but not as hard. But if it doesn’t work for me as a historical, then I find myself asking the question, “would I even be reading this book if I hadn’t been promised it was historical?” Anyway, Best Friend is allegedly set in Victorian England, and is something of a “Parent Trap” take-off in which two best friends (who develop romantic feelings for each other) are also trying to match up their widowed parents, which would completely solve the problem of being expected to get married to men.

If you’re interested in my overall thoughts on what I’ve found people are calling “wallpaper historicals,” it’ll probably go up on my Dreamwidth blog, because that’s where I’ve been putting my book reviews lately. It feels like a better separation between my personal opinions on books versus the boosterism I prefer to focus on in this venue. I’ve been working on getting caught up on posting about the last couple years of reading over there, so with the caveat that I may be more opinionated there, you can check out hrj on Dreamwidth.

Show Notes

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

In this episode we talk about:

• New podcast Period – feminist look at historical dramas
• Lesbiantiquity
• Book Shopping
  • Mortimer, Ian. 2012. The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England. Penguin Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-14-312563-1
  • Brown, Pamela Allen & Peter Parolin (eds). 2005. Women Players in England, 1500-1660. Ashgate, Burlington. ISBN 978-0-7546-6535-9
  • Colonna, Pompeo (intro Franco Minonzio, trans Margaret L. King). 2024. In Defense of Women: A Bilingual Edition. Iter Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-64959-113-5
• Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
  • Uncharted Waters (The Savages of Falcote) by Ally Hastings
  • Three Times Elspeth Harris Rode to Town by Becky Black
  • She Serves the Realm (No Man is her Master #4) by Lee Swanson
  • The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron
  • A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence (Lucky Lovers of London #3) by Jess Everlee
  • Her Runaway Bride (Hers: Victorian Lesbian Romance) by Brooke Winters
  • Tides of Captivation: A sapphic pirate tale (Daughters Under the Black Flag #1) by Eden Hopewell
• What I’ve been consuming
  • The Witch King by Martha Wells
  • Travelers Along the Way by Aminah Mae Safi
  • Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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

Links to Heather Online

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

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 87 – All the Historic Lesbianisms - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/05/18 - listen here)

Introduction

One of the things I’ve been doing behind the scenes with this podcast is to develop episodes that are contributing—ever so gradually—to the goal of assembling an actual book: a resource book for writing lesbian-like characters in historical fiction. Which was, of course, the original inspiration of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. For example, the trope episodes—in addition to being fun to do for their own sake—will end up being sub-chapters in a section on themes, motifs, and tropes. The various biography episodes will be sub-chapters in a section illustrating various “ways of being” for women who loved women. And some episodes are intended to slowly build up the philosophical structure for understanding and thinking about those “ways of being.”

Today’s topic is to explore the wide range of variables that can make up the ways in which individuals or societies understand and express love between women. “All the historic lesbianisms” as it were. When modern society turned its attention to trying to define and understand homosexuality across the last century, there has been a tendency to look for a single definitive answer. Is it a psychological condition? Is it a sin? Is it a genetic trait? Is it a revolutionary rejection of normative society? Is homosexuality a waystation on the path to dissolving all specific genders and orientations? Is it about sex or is it about love? And so forth and so on.

As regular listeners have probably picked up, my own personal take is that there are almost as many different ways of being a lesbian as there are people who identify as lesbians. (And, as always, this discussion invokes the broad definition of “lesbian” as the word has been used across history.) Both individuals and cultures in the past have reflected that diversity of “ways of being.” This doesn’t mean that lesbians in history are indefinable or indescribable, but rather that they are multi-faceted. There are usually multiple understandings or models co-existing at any given time, with specific models passing in and out of prominence. But those models do have a number of definable attributes, even ones that sometimes seem contradictory.

So what I want to talk about today is some of the attributes that have, in various times and places, contributed to the bundles of features that people understood as relating to love between women. In a given context, there might be distinct “ways of being” that we, today, would group together as “lesbian” but that were seen as distinct back then. The features might shift and the groups of features that were considered to align together might change. All this contributes to the impossibility of creating a unified model of historic lesbianism—that elusive goal of modern sexology.

For historic fiction authors, this isn’t a problem—it’s an opportunity. It means that you won’t always be writing the same type of character in every setting, or even within the same setting. Today’s discussion isn’t so much about categorizing exactly which “ways of being” existed in specific times and places, but to think about the palette of options that have resonances across multiple times and places.

Impetus of Desire

First, let’s tackle the features that I’ll put under the label “impetus or motivation of desire.” What is the understanding of what drives and directs the desires that we would call lesbian or sapphic?

The version that creates the most complications with respect to modern categories of gender and sexuality is the cross-gender or “opposites attract” model. Most historic western cultures had some version of an understanding that someone assigned as female might desire women due to some degree of essential masculine nature. Under this model, desire is kindled by contrast across a masculine/feminine gradient. The masculinity in question might be intellectual or psychological—having personality qualities that were coded as masculine at the time. It might be behavioral—identified by favored activities or preferred clothing. Or it might be understood as manifesting physically. This could be a matter of physical strength or stature, or particular facial features, or it could appear as differences in genital anatomy from what was assumed to be the feminine norm.

This model of desire can complicate the very idea of love between women as one way of viewing it is as assimilating apparently female couples to an underlying heterosexual norm via a transgender lens. Many historic cultures had no context for drawing clear distinctions between gender transgression and transgender identity—and viewed them as equally problematic. So understand today’s discussion, not as co-opting all such relationships as “lesbian,” but as a set of overlaid transparencies where the same picture can be defined and understood via multiple frameworks.

(The “opposites” model can also subsume desire involving an intersex individual, but that’s a rather different topic, which I’ll set aside for now.)

The cross-gender model does not always require a physical component. In some contexts, understandings of love between women will presume that one partner must be masculine to some degree and will assign that role to one participant, regardless of how well it fits. Similarly, within a culture that features this model, female partners may feel pressured to have one woman assume a masculine-coded role within the relationship, whether in terms of behavior or simply the roles taken within the household. And, of course, this model can reflect the self-identification of the participants, where one woman identifies with female masculinity while the other is attracted to it.

A different model of desire holds that like attracts like—that people (in general) will tend to connect emotionally with those who are similar to them. While this model lies behind positive images of femme-femme couples, it may sometimes be invoked to support class, religious, or racial barriers to romantic relationships, as well as being used to argue against mixed-gender friendships. So the consequences of “like attracts like” can be negative as well as positive.

When this “similarity” model of attraction is featured within a culture, there can be a general acceptance of emotionally intimate relationships between same-sex pairs. Even when same-sex erotic desire is not in the discussion, there can be an expectation that women’s closest emotional relationships will “naturally” be with other women, regardless of their social and legal relationships to men. The difference and similarity models can co-exist within a culture, combining with other features to generate social categories that are considered distinct, despite both involving two assigned-female persons.

But similarity and difference aren’t the only two models that cultures have identified for explaining love between women. Women—or people in general—may be viewed as having the potential to desire people of any sex or gender. That doesn’t mean that such a culture will consider all desires acceptable to act on. The question of whether one acts on a particular desire can be thought to be constrained by intellectual or moral choice, rather than being controlled by the presence or absence of an underlying emotion. When one of the cultural models is this “pansexual” desire, it will have implications for how people interact with each other and how they interpret affectionate or potentially erotic behavior. Is everyone a potential romantic or sexual partner or does society assume that only certain categories of people can provoke desire?

A subset of the pansexual model is one in which same-sex desire is viewed as a matter of “excess.” In this model, someone with typical or normative levels of sexual desire may be expected to direct those desires toward normative objects—that is, objects of the expected sex, age, class, etc. While someone whose level of sexual desire is excessive will fail to discriminate as expected in their objects and will pursue erotic objects that fall outside the norm, including same-sex partners, but also potentially including partners of an inappropriate age or class.

While a given culture may include more than one of these models of desire, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will embrace the idea that individual people may be motivated by different models. That is, there may not be an overt acceptance that one woman may lean toward female partners due to an inherent masculinity while another woman may prefer female partners due to similarity. Cultures rarely have complete coherence in their models of the world, and contradictions won’t necessarily change a world-view, either of an individual or of a society. But certain models may be more or less prominent in a particular time and place, and that mix will shape both internal and external understandings of desire.

Context of Desire

The next angle that I want to consider is closely related to the motivation of desire, but is something more like the cause or source of that desire. Or perhaps, the context in which the reason for desire is understood. This angle lies at the heart of the great Foucaultian debate: is same-sex desire a matter of behavior or of identity? But I’d like to break it down a bit more than just that binary choice.

One type of understanding is that desire—of whatever sort—is innate, something a person is born with. This view is so thoroughly ingrained in modern models of desire that it can be hard to step back and view it as only one option. In historic societies, the idea of innate desire may be tied to theories of personality based on astrology, or based on humoral theory, or caused by something the mother experienced while pregnant, though in general these theories view it as a divergence from the expected state. The innate model may align closely with ideas that physical masculinity causes desire for a female object, but this isn’t always the case.

The other pole of the Foucaultian axis is the understanding that same-sex desire is simply a matter of engaging in specific acts. This may include an idea that it’s a taste or preference in the same way that someone might prefer eating certain foods or wearing certain colors. But the idea is that lesbianism is simply a matter of choosing to perform in a certain way rather than a matter of being a certain type of person.

But these aren’t the only possible contexts that can cause the emergence of certain models of love between women. We can also consider socialization as a factor. Regardless of whatever desires or preferences an individual might have in a vacuum, if their culture presents certain models and patterns of behavior as being acceptable or even expected, that will shape individual behavior. This is the force we see behind patterns like Classical Greek age-differentiated relationships, or the several eras of female passionate friendships. For that matter, we can look at the ocean of normative heterosexuality that we all swim in and see it as a type of socialized orientation that influences people’s romantic and sexual choices regardless of individual feelings.

We can also consider a special case of socialized desire if it becomes a matter of fashion. Particular models of relationships may be valorized in a culture to the extent that people engage in them simply for the sake of status or inclusiveness. As an example of this, we might look at early 20th century girls’ school crushes, where participation in a specific type of romantic script might be considered essential for social acceptance. If a relatively broad definition of love between women is used, we may find all manner of examples driven by fashion.

Expression

The next category to consider when analyzing models of love between women can be thought of as the medium of expression. It can be simplest to fall back on the somewhat over-used Greek vocabulary of love, distinguishing eros from philia from agape, with some people tossing in storge. Eros is a physical attraction. When directed toward a person, it’s most often thought of in terms of sexual desire and involving genital stimulation (though this is not the purely philosophical version of the term). Philia is the bond between people who view each other as equals and partners, based on appreciation and respect. It’s most commonly characterized as the love between friends. Storge is the love that develops within a family based on shared experiences and traditions, and is often described as the type of love between parent and child. Agape is love for humanity in general—perhaps one might think of it as love that forms the basis of community.

I bring in this set of models because if we go looking for female same-sex relationships in history and we are focused entirely on eros, then we spend our time squabbling over “did they or didn’t they?” But if we integrate all varieties of love into our models then we can see how that expression—whether in terms of what the participants experienced, or in terms of how society understood their relationship—can represent a continuum of possibilities. And here we need to look at different types of expression both as viewed by society and as experienced within the relationship.

For example, societies might embrace and support women’s relationships if and when they were understood as involving philia or storge, but look askance at ones seen as involving eros, regardless of what happened between the women in private. Other societies might consider it expected that women might feel eros for each other (while also having strong opinions about how they act on it). Social models of love between women might expect the bond to rely on eros—an esthetic appreciation for each other—or on philia—an intense friendship—or on storge—a modeling of family relationships. And the couple themselves could have the same range of understandings. They might base their relationship on ideas of marriage, or on friendship, or think in terms of being sisters or even a mother-child relationship. (And I want to remind listeners that male-female couples have historically used the same types of symbolic models within their marriages. We aren’t talking about literal incest here.)

Physicality

When we’re looking at all the various models of love between women, one axis that we mustn’t ignore is how that love is expressed physically. And—once more—we can view this both in terms of how society imagines what’s happening, and how the participants in the relationship engage with it. As I regularly point out, when we’re discussing a wide swath of time and space, we can’t assume that there’s a clear, agreed-on definition of what constitutes “sexual activity” and what falls in some other category of erotic or sensual interactions. This topic needs a whole discussion to itself, but the key point is that the exact nature of the physical relations between two women could be a key factor in how their relationship was categorized and understood. So even if a society (or the women in a relationship) had clear opinions about women having sex, it also matters what sorts of acts they would categorize as “sex”. Is a kiss just a kiss, or do different types of kisses carry different meanings? Is cuddling and fondling considered sexual or simply pleasurable? Do social attitudes towards a female couple change based on what type of activities people believe they’re engaging in? I’m not going to set up some sort of menu or hierarchy here, but simply note it as yet one more facet of the variety of relationship models.

Multiplicity

When we look at how relationships between women are integrated into other social relationships, we must consider several possible expectations, especially in terms of how women’s relationships compare to mixed-gender relationships. Do women (or the society they live in) expect love relationships between women to have the same sort of exclusivity as is expected from male-female relationships? (Which isn’t to say that they’re necessarily exclusive, but simply are the attitudes towards exclusivity parallel.) Or are multiple same-sex relationships considered the equivalent of having multiple friendships—some may be more important than others, but having one doesn’t preclude others? Do women in same-sex relationships (or the society they live in) consider same-sex and different-sex relationships to conflict or to exist in parallel? That is, do the two types of relationships exist within separate spheres with different roles? Or are they considered to be in conflict and competition with each other? In models where they’re considered to be in competition, this can increase male hostility to love between women. Conversely, in models where the two types of relationships exist in parallel, the greater social and economic forces supporting male-female relationships can make it difficult to give both equal priority. And, of course, in contexts where polyamory is an accepted practice, these dynamics shift accordingly, although historically in Western culture, those contexts tend to be limited to radical social movements.

Social Evaluation

The final set of axes I want to consider here have to do with how love between women is evaluated in relation to social norms, both by the women involved and the cultures they live in. We can see these same evaluations still playing out today in different subcultures, which should remind us that people’s experiences are never uniform. One contrast can be whether a same-sex relationship is viewed as assimilating to social norms and patterns, or whether it’s seen as transgressing and conflicting with those norms and patterns, or—as another possibility—if it’s viewed as entirely apart from the norms of male-female relationships: not the same, but also not challenging them.

Is love between women viewed as somehow pure and elevated and “better” than male-female relationships? Or is it considered degraded and debased? For example, do we have a model like romantic friendship, or one like the image of prostitutes engaging in recreational lesbianism? Both views can co-exist and align with different relationship models present in the same society. Is love between women considered something that cultured and sophisticated women engage it? Or is it considered uncultured and common (in a negative sense)? Sophistication isn’t always considered a positive trait. In some contexts, love between women is considered the provenance of the aristocracy or of decadent artistic types, in contrast to more conservative middle-class values.

Conclusions

My purpose in laying out all these categories of variation is to think about a system for describing and classifying all the different lesbianisms that we find in history. It should be obvious that it’s impossible to come up with any definition that would fit them all—and we shouldn’t try to come up with that universal definition. But we can look at the evidence from particular times and places to identify the relationship models that were present—all the various models—and thus to understand what sorts of sapphic characters might exist within those contexts and how they would interact with their societies. And that is an essential part of creating believable characters in historical fiction, in the same way that a character should wear appropriate clothing and inhabit appropriate landscapes. Understanding these models is not a limitation, but rather an opening of possibilities.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Social models of women loving women
• Variables and features of those models

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)