by Jane Rule
Her lesbian nation may be the unrealistic and personal solution Robin Morgan accuses it of being. Jill Johnston is not a politician. She is an artist who takes the metaphor of politics or myth or common experience for a song of survival which is personal and transcendent at once. Her writing and her public image are all of a piece, the gathering up of fragments of violence and pain that have destroyed so many, the transforming of delusion into illusion, art, in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein,46 but with a voice original and compelling and at moments extraordinarily sweet.
None of the visions of these women should be in conflict. Many of them are beginning to understand some of the reasons for the bitter infighting and denouncing, a pain which has been much harder to bear than the expected attacks from a conservative public. Having had to live so long on the defensive, struggling to justify any one of the various choices of life-style, makes any challenge to that choice terribly threatening. When the challenge comes from someone who should be an ally, the counterattack is the more vicious. The anger that has been released by the women’s movement could not be immediately directed only against real enemies and toward constructive goals. Someone who never before has had to steer that power needs time to learn how, and only the most fortunate don’t have serious accidents, involving not only their own but other people’s lives. Sometimes the cost, particularly to those who choose or simply find themselves in the front lines of change, is tragic and bitter. When Robin Morgan, in personal terror, says she doesn’t want to find herself alone, she is realizing she may be alone without allies anywhere. Her antidote, total support from her sisters, is a myth of not much strength now even for the most ardent members of the liberation movement.
Yet the change that has come already is something not even the most unrealistic optimist could have predicted five years ago. If it seems sometimes at its most unreal right at the center where people like Robin Morgan, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Sidney Abbott, Barbara Love, Jill Johnston (it is tempting to go on and on naming women not only quoted in this chapter but dozens of others as well) stand, it seems miraculous to women who have in the last year or two taken such small, but revolutionary, steps as to speak to close friends or family about the nature of their relationships with other women, perhaps not with the arrogant pride these public women rightly demand but still with a freedom they did not ever dream would be possible. If they fall short of serving the revolution and if in turn they are frankly shocked by and disapproving of the outlandish behavior of their heroic sisters, each can and will make life more possible for the other, even perhaps joyful, not only for those who are willing to get on Jill Johnston’s bus but for those who have simply watched, with amazement, as it passed through town, not only for those with the courage to join Robin Morgan in the front lines but for those who can only feel her fear in their own bones and share her desire to survive it. The silence has finally been broken.
Acknowledgments
FOR HELP IN FINDING books and information, for critical comment and encouragement I would like to thank Shelagh Day, M. Lawrence de Vries, Lovat Dickson, Judith Finlayson, Sally Gearhart, Barbara Grier, Jane Hastings, Karla Jay, Bruce Jones, Virginia Sue Moore, Mary Lowell Sheffield, Dorothy Stott, all the members of my women’s studies seminar, and Helen Sonthoff, who is the companion of all my work.
I am also grateful to the following for permission to reprint from their material:
Trio, by Dorothy Baker, © Dorothy Baker, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, Mass.
The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, © Lovat Dickson.
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, © 1972 Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love.
Lesbian/Woman, by Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon, © Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon 1972, Glide Publications, San Francisco.
Willa Cather Living, by Edith Lewis, © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Not Under Forty, My Mortal Enemy, Lucy Gayheart, The Professor’s House, all by Willa Cather, © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson.
All Passion Spent, by Vita Sackville-West.
Love Between Women, by Charlotte Wolff, © Charlotte Wolff, St. Martin’s Press, Inc., Gerald Duckworth Ltd.
Either Is Love, by Elisabeth Craigin, © Elisabeth Craigin, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Lesbian Nation, by Jill Johnston, © Jill Johnston 1973, by permission of Simon and Schuster.
My Thirty Years’ War, The Strange Necessity, and The Fiery Fountains, by Margaret Anderson, © 1969, by permission of Horizon Press, New York.
Journal of a Solitude and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, by May Sarton, © May Sarton, by permission of Norton.
The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, by Elizabeth Sprigge by permission of the publisher George Braziller, Inc. © 1973 by Elizabeth Sprigge.
The Microcosm, by Maureen Duffy. Permission granted by Jonathan Clowes Ltd. © Maureen Duffy.
The quoted passages from Fernhurst, Q.E.D., And Other Early Writings by Gertrude Stein are reprinted with the permission of Liveright Corp. Copyright © 1971 by Daniel C. Joseph, Administrator of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
Notes
Introduction
1. Molly Frampton, St. Catherine’s Standard, March 21, 1964.
2. Lorne Parton, Vancouver Province, March 21, 1964.
3. Anonymous, State Tribune, Cheyenne, November 6, 1965.
4. Winston Mills, Ottawa Citizen, October 24, 1964.
5. Anonymous, Western Mail, England, February 15, 1964.
6. Anne Constance Penta, Best Sellers, Scranton, September 1, 1965.
7. Anita Daughtrey, Bee, Fresno, September 5, 1965.
8. Kildare Dobbs, Toronto Daily Star, May 4, 1971.
9. Lorne Parton, Vancouver Province, April 23, 1971.
10. Dorwin and Verna Baird, Book Mark (radio), 1971.
11. Walter McKinnon, Victoria Daily Times, June 19, 1971.
12. Anonymous, Manchester Evening News, May 18, 1972.
13. Viveca Ohm, UBC Reports, 1971.
14. Han Suyin, Winter Love (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), fly leaf.
15. Jack Wasserman, Vancouver Sun, March, 1964.
Myth and Morality, Sources of Law and Prejudice
1. Jill Johnston in Lesbian Nation and Phyllis Chesler in Women and Madness both invent mythologies.
2. James Donaldson, Woman; her position and influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, and among the early Christians (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), p. 55.
3. Allen Edwardes, The Jewel in the Lotus (New York: The Julian Press, 1959), p. 255.
4. Ibid., p. 255.
5. Ibid., p. 256.
6. Ernest Crawley, The Mystic Rose (New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960), p. 114.
7. The Reverend Dr. Robert L. Treese, Homosexuality: a Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective, a pamphlet (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1966), p. 12.
8. Leviticus 20:13.
9. Evelyn Acworth, The New Matriarchy (London: Victor Gollanz, 1965), p. 35.
10. D. S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Tradition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), p. 61.
11. Genesis 19:5.
12. Ezekiel 16:49-50.
13. Antiquities I, xi, 3:200.
14. Romans 1:26—27.
15. Galatians 3:28.
16. James Donaldson, op. cit., pp. 182-83.
17. D. S. Bailey, op. cit., p. 83.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Ibid., pp. 115-16.
20. Ibid., p. 142.
21. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Pantheon, 1956), p. 95.
22. Ibid., p. 121.
23. Ibid., p. 133.
24. Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (London: Longmans, Green &Co., 1952), p. 32.
25. H. Kimball Jones, Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual (New York: Association Press, 1966), p. 77.
26. Ibid., p. 100.
27. Treese, op. cit., p
p. 2-3.
28. Bruce William Jones, “A second Look at the Bible and the Homosexual,” an unpublished lecture, p. 5.
29. Jones, Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual, p. 75.
30. Lewis Williams, “The Churches: Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Unitarians, where they stand today.” Vector, Vol. 7, No. 8, August 1971, pp. 1-2.
31. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1972), p. 41.
32. Sally Gearhart, The Lesbian and God-the-Father, a pamphlet (Philadelphia: Genesis III, 1972).
33. Robert G. Gassert, S.J., and Bernard H. Hall, M.D., Psychiatry and Religion (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 9.
34. Ibid., p. 50.
35. Acworth, op. cit., p. 79.
36. Gassert and Hall, op. cit., p. 127.
From Sin to Sickness
1. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 43.
2. Dr. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 312.
3. Ibid., p. 308.
4. Ibid., p. 463.
5. Ibid., p. 464.
6. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. II, Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: F. P. Davis Co., 1925), p. 250.
7. Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex (New York: Emerson Books, Inc., 1936), p. 4.
8. Ibid., p. 218.
9. Ibid., p. 224.
10. Ibid., p. 241.
11. Ibid., p. 238.
12. Ibid., p. 246.
13. Ibid., p. 252.
14. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, p. 335.
15. Ellis, Psychology of Sex, p. 216.
16. Ibid., p. 217.
17. Sigmund Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII (1920-22), (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 230.
18. “A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” ibid., p. 171.
19. Ibid., p. 171.
20. Ibid., p. 151.
21. Ibid., p. 149.
22. Ibid., p. 171.
23. Freud, Vol. VII (1901-5), “Three Essays on Sexuality,” op. cit., p. 151.
24. Freud, Vol. XVIII, op. cit., p. 191.
25. Freud, Vol. XVIII, op. cit., p. 154.
26. Freud, Vol. VII, op. cit., p. 229.
27. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Collected Papers, Vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959).
28. Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, Vol. 1 (Grune & Stratton, 1944), p. 291.
29. Ibid., p. 291.
30. Ibid., p. 292.
31. Ibid., p. 294.
32. Ibid., p. 376.
33. Ibid., p. 353.
34. Ibid., p. xii.
35. Szasz, op. cit., p. 2.
36. Ibid., p. 4.
37. Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (New York: Harper, Colophon Books, 1972), p. 12.
38. Ibid., p. 17.
39. Ibid., p. 46.
40. Ibid., p. 72.
41. Ibid., p. 52.
42. Ibid., p. 65.
43. Ibid., p. 172.
44. Ibid., p. 181.
45. Ibid., p. 74.
46. Ibid., p. 89.
47. Ibid., p. 92.
48. Ibid., p. 93.
49. Ibid., p. 181.
50. Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 14.
51. Ibid., p. 4.
52. Ibid., p. 259.
53. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 101.
54. Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), p. 447.
55. Ibid., p. 448.
56. Ibid., p. 447.
57. Ibid., p. 450.
58. Ibid., p. 467.
59. Ibid., p. 478.
60. Naomi Weisstein, “Psychology Constructs the Female,” Women in a Sexist Society, Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (eds.), (New York: Signet, 1972), p. 210.
61. Ibid., p. 211.
62. Ibid., p. 215.
63. Ibid., p. 217.
64. Martin S. Weinberg and Alan P. Bell, Homosexuality, an Annotated Bibliography (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 287.
65. Szasz, op. cit., p. 85.
66. Ibid., p. 13.
67. Ibid., p. 5.
68. Ibid., p. 7.
69. Ibid., p. 208.
70. Ernest Van den Haag, “Notes on Homosexuality,” The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society, Henrik M. Ruitenback (ed.), (New York: Dutton, 1963), p. 297.
71. Ibid., p. 297.
72. Robert Lindner, “Homosexuality and the Contemporary Scene,” The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society, p. 59.
73. Simone de Beauvoir, “The Lesbian,” The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society, p. 234.
74. Clara Thompson, “Changing Concepts of Homosexuality,” The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society, p. 46.
75. Ibid., p. 43.
76. Frank S. Caprio, Female Homosexuality (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 85.
77. Ibid., p. 8.
78. Ibid., p. 11.
79. David Reuben, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1969), 217.
80. Ibid., p. 219.
81. Ibid., p. 219.
82. Michael Barsley, The Left Handed Book (London: Souvenir Press, 1966), p. 206.
83. Ibid., p. 206.
84. Ibid., p. 209.
85. Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., “Psychiatrists Approve Change on Homosexuals,” The New York Times, April 9, 1974.
Radclyffe Hall
1. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Pocket Books, 1950), p. 188.
2. Ibid., last page.
3. Ibid., p. 350.
4. Ibid., p. 351.
5. Ibid., p. 389.
6. Ibid., p. 154.
7. Ibid., p. 52.
8. Ibid., p. 29.
9. Ibid., p. 61.
10. Ibid., p. 200.
11. Ibid., p. 151.
12. Ibid., p. 42.
13. Ibid., p. 102.
14. Ibid., p. 92.
15. Ibid., p. 96.
16. Ibid., p. 108.
17. Ibid., p. 303.
18. Ibid., p. 127.
19. Ibid., p. 300.
20. Ibid., p. 177.
21. Ibid., p. 146.
22. Ibid., p. 83.
23. Ibid., p. 18.
24. Ibid., p. 21.
25. Ibid., p. 111.
26. Ibid., p. 143.
27. Ibid., p. 314.
28. Ibid., p. 423.
29. Ibid., p. 76.
30. Ibid., p. 77.
31. Ibid., p. 202.
32. Ibid., p. 253.
33. Ibid., p. 217.
34. Vera Brittain, Radclyffe Hall, A Case of Obscenity (London: A Femina Book, 1968), pp. 50-51.
35. Hall, op. cit., p. 98.
36. Ibid., p. 314.
37. Donald Webster Cory, The Lesbian in America (New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1965), p. 23.
38. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1972), p. 22.
Gertrude Stein
1. Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings (New York: Liveright, 1971), p. 65.
2. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1933), p. 85.
3. Ibid., p. 82.
4. Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings, p. 59.
5. Ibid., p. 59.
6. Ibid., p. 56.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Ibid., p. 60.
9. Ibid., p. 63.
10. Ibid., p. 63.
11. Ibid., p. 62.
12. Ibid., p. 64.
13. Ibid., p. 64.
14. Ibid., p. 65.
15. Ibid., p. 67.
16. Ibid., p. 67.
17
. Ibid., p. 68.
18. Ibid., p. 60.
19. Ibid., p. 66.
20. Ibid., p. 66.
21. Ibid., p. 55.
22. Ibid., p. 73.
23. Ibid., p. 86.
24. Ibid., p. 88.
25. Ibid., p. 110.
26. Ibid., p. 102.
27. Ibid., p. 80.
28. Ibid., p. 104.
29. Ibid., p. 126.
30. Ibid., p. 123.
31. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (Connecticut: New Directions, 1933), p. 46.
32. Ibid., p. 51.
33. Ibid., p. 106.
34. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 57.
35. Ibid., p. 240.
36. Stein, The Autobiography, p. 87.
37. Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 44.
38. Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings, p. 96.
39. Stein, The Autobiography, p. 16.
40. Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings, p. 58.
41. Stein, The Autobiography, p. 83.
42. Ibid., p. 83.
43. Ibid., p. 83.
44. Ibid., p. 174.
45. Ibid., p. 174.
46. Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings, p. 71.
