Jane Pirie & Marianne Woods
LHMP entry
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.
The central premise of this chapter Is to examine how the law came to acknowledge the existence of sexual “indecent assault” by one woman against another. But the case used to illustrate this concerns a midwife who was hired to examine the virginity of an underage girl being procured for prostitution. The case had a number of complicating factors. The men doing the procuring were anti-prostitution activists and journalists, working to demonstrate how easy it was to obtain such victims. One focus of such campaigns was to raise the female age of consent from 13 to 16.
Part II: Queer Relationships
This pair of chapters presents four biographies of women’s live affected by law or religion. These aren’t people with public significance but we still have a picture of how their desires conflicted with heterosexual expectations. We also get a picture of how attitudes towards women’s same-sex relationships were complicated and situational.
The existence of masculine women throughout the ages challenges assumptions about the nature of masculinity and why the connection between men and masculinity has remained so secure. While some hold that the phenomenon of the “virile woman” is recent, and tied to feminism, or as a sign of the loosening of gender conformity, these positions overlook the history of masculine women. [Note: H says, “a character who has challenged gender systems for at least two centuries”, but of course it’s been happening much longer than that.]
It’s always interesting to see the intersection of very different takes on the same set of historic data. Interpretations of the “romantic friendship” phenomenon and how it related to social reality are a great example. In contrast to interpretations that take middle-class models of romantic friendship as naively “innocent” of sexual overtones, Moore suggests that the concept of romantic friendship always existed in parallel with--and was a direct response to--awareness of the possibility of sexual relations between women.
As we enter the 19th century, this chapter centers around the famous 1811 trial in which two schoolmistresses, Miss Woods and Miss Pirie, were accused by a student of lesbianism and successfully sued the student’s guardian, Dame Gordon, for libel. The focal point of the trial was the argument that proper English ladies simply were not capable of behavior of that sort, while the lawyers for Dame Gordon dug into history as far back as Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans to demonstrate the existence of the behavior that the two women were accused of.