Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lillian Faderman. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1999. Pp. xii, 434. $30.00.

It is a sign of the healthy growth of gay historical studies that these two books are aimed at a general audience. Both Leila J. Rupp and Lillian Faderman were among the first to write on the history of lesbians: both have distinguished records of uncovering forgotten documents that highlight the complex ways in which sexual desire can impact politics, literature, and, indeed, the course of history. Both Faderman and Rupp insist that our present either/or categories of sexuality were inconceivable in the past, when definitions and behavior were more fluid. Certainly religions condemned the male sodomite and the mannish woman, but the enforcement of laws against sin were often erratic before the late nineteenth century, when medical typologies gradually began to dominate the public discussion of sexual behavior. Well into the twentieth century, many voices called for greater sympathy and "softness" among men, as well as more forthright honesty and "male" reason among women. And, as both point out, middle-class men and women often did not see their romantic friendships in these early definitions of deviant sexuality.

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But Faderman and Rupp disagree about when and how to use such a word as "lesbian." The former opts for seeing it as an adjective to describe women's "committed domestic, sexual and/or affectional experiences," arguing that "lesbian arrangements freed . . . pioneering women to pursue education, professions, and civil and social rights for themselves and others far more effectively than they could have if they had lived in traditional heterosexual arrangements" (pp. 1–2). Rupp is less certain that we can assign present-day labels to the past. Using the example of her aunt's lifetime friendship with another woman, she unravels the textual complexities historians face when writing the history of same-sex desire. Rupp resolves the issue by using the phrase "same-sex love and sexuality," even as she admits that we often do not know what "sexual" itself means. But she does see "certain common patterns in same-sex sexual desires and acts, romantic liaisons, and gender transgressions across time and place" (p. 10).

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