This chapter looks at the symbolic function of facial hair as a definitive sign of maleness and the ways a successful courtship of a woman can substitute for the lack of a beard. The “smooth beardless face” is noted in narratives as a giveaway. But beards were not fashionable in the 18th century. And the subject’s “feminine” features might be cited as being an attractive feature to women.
England
Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.
LHMP entry
This book looks at 18th century English depictions of female cross-dressing (i.e., assigned-female persons who are being read as male) and the relationship that has to ideas about female same-sex intimacy.
This is a card with an engraving dated 1820 titled “Love-a-la-mode or Two dear friends” which exists in multiple copies in various collections. Individual copies may be annotated in handwriting to add further information.
Nord takes a deep dive into the lives of three single women who made lives for themselves in 1880s London outside of conventional family structures, but also apart from organized women’s communities and institutions. Nor were these women in unrecognized female partnerships. All three intersected the field of social work in some way, but without approaching it as a female-coded vocation. And all three were loosely connected to each other (as well as to other single women) socially, but in a somewhat loose fashion that did not assume mutual support.
In this article, Binhammer compares the social meanings of three parallel forms of “sexual excess” in late 18th century British literature, and how the three are linked structurally in the popular imagination. Specifically: sex between women, sexualized whipping, and the emotional experience of extreme “sensibility”.
Using the springboard of theoretical discourse around feminism and sexuality around the 1980s, Binhammer uses proto-feminist literature of the later 18th century as a lens for how theories of feminism and theories of sexuality intersect and come into conflict. The focus of 1980s feminist rhetoric narrowly on (heterosexual) sexual dynamics as a source of oppression, contributed to the rise of queer theory as the more dynamic field for examining theories of sexuality.
This chapter examines several lives in the context of sexological theory and the rise of the binary homosexual/heterosexual model of desire. Psychologists pathologized previous models and patterns of same-sex relationships and focused on the sexually adventurous, dominating, “mannish” woman as the core prototype of the lesbian. At heart, these models revolved around “gender inversion” seeing the homosexual (male or female) as someone whose entire life and personality partook of a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth (to use the current terminology).
Part IV – Modernist Refashionings
This chapter looks at examples of intense, perhaps even destructive desrie that didn’t fit neatly into the available 19th century models for female love. So how did these women depict and understand their desires? One method was to displace the desire through taking on roles or working it out through fictional depictions. Some women understood their desire for a dominant position as a type of masculinity, as with the two women considered in this chapter: Eliza Lynn Linton and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).
Part III – Cross-Age and Crossed Love
In looking for models for same-sex relationships, women drew from a number of familiar sources. The mother-daughter bond may be one that modern people find problematic, but many people used this image to express age-differentiated and asymmetrical bonds, regardless of whether the bond included an erotic aspect. [Note: Given that I’ve known heterosexual married couples in which the husband was “daddy” or the wife “mother”, I hesitate to judge female couples differently for using the same language and imagery.]
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