TOPSY-TURVYDOM: Gender inversion, sapphism, and the great war

GLQ

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 517-542

  Doan, Laura ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749332375     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2006-001     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. Mrs. Ethel Alec-Tweedie, Women and Soldiers (London: John Lane, 1918), 5.
2. For recent scholarship on women and World War I, see Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
3. Nicoletta F. Gullace, "The Blood of Our Sons": Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
4. Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I. B. Taurus, 1998);
5. Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
6. and Angela Wollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
7. Cited in Gill Thomas's Life on All Fronts: Women in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9.
8. Penny Summerfield, "Women and War in the Twentieth Century," in Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction, ed. June Purvis (London: UCL Press, 1995), 315;
9. and Thomas, Life on All Fronts, 30.
10. Alec-Tweedie, Women and Soldiers, 5. All citations in this paragraph are from this passage.
11. Alec-Tweedie, Women and Soldiers, 2;
12. and Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1.
13. See, for instance, the wartime issues of Ladies' Field, Manchester Evening News, Punch, the Times of London, and War Budget Illustrated, where hostile criticism of women's work in the war is extremely rare.
14. "The New Woman: An Historical Note," Times (London), January 6, 1916.
15. Jenny Gould, "Women's Military Services in First World War Britain," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 121.
16. Jenny Gould, "Women's Military Services in First World War Britain," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Ibid. 1987, 121.
17. In this article I opt for the term sapphism to signal how the term lesbianism may not have held similar meanings in the early twentieth century.
18. Gould offers one example to support this claim, the case of Violet Douglas-Pennant, commandant of the Women's Royal Air Force in 1918. See "Women's Military Services," 121.
19. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 99.
20. The masculinity on view is, of course, part of the familiar stereotype of the English upper-class gentleman, as seen in the casually confident, slightly tilted back stance of the second officer, his wounded arm as suggestive of damaged manhood as of heroic sacrifice.
21. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xxiii.
22. For a discussion of the meaning of Amazon, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65-67;
23. and Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 173.
24. Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
25. Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 114, 115.
26. Emily Hamer, Britannia's Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians (London: Cassell, 1996), 52.
27. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 85, 84. Halberstam bases her reading of Lowther's sexual identity on her association, from 1920, with the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall.
28. While it is difficult to determine how many British women served as ambulance drivers on or near the Western Front in France and Belgium between 1914 and 1918, based on my research in London and Leeds (the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum [IWM], London; the Peter Liddle 1914-1918 Personal Experience Archives at the University of Leeds; and the National Army Museum, London), I would estimate the number to be around a few hundred. The types of organizations were extremely varied and included ad hoc groups that ranged from the Dr. Hector Munro Ambulance Unit and the Hackett-Lowther Ambulance Unit to the betterorganized First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, founded before the war.
29. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xviii-xix.
30. For other good examples of work focused on British culture, see Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: Narrating the Lesbian in Post-war Britain, 1945-70 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006);
31. and Alison Oram, "Her Husband Was a Woman!" Women's Gender-Crossing and Twentieth-Century British Popular Culture (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
32. For work on American lesbian subcultures, see Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993);
33. and Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
34. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, xi, emphasis mine. For a thoughtful examination of "sexual identity as a long process rather than the result of one intense period of medical research and social reform," see also Halberstam's discussion on page 75.
35. Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 16-17.
36. Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi Ibid., 17.
37. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 52.
38. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.
39. The cultural critic Stuart Hall writes that identities "seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, [but] actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being." See "Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 4. Thanks to Bridget Byrne for this reference.
40. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality (1976; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1990), 43.
41. Donald E. Hall, Queer Theories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 30.
42. Anna Clark, "Twilight Moments," Journal of the History of Sexuality 13 (2005): 139-60.
43. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xxi.
44. Judith Bennett, "'Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianisms," Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 1-24;
45. and Martha Vicinus, "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 467-97.
46. Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3.
47. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 21.
48. Bauman, Identity, 29.
49. For information on these women's experiences of driving on the Western Front, see Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933);
50. Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (London: Virago, 2000);
51. and Kate Summerscale, The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of "Joe" Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1997).
52. Gladys de Havilland, The Women's Motor Manual (London: Temple, 1918), 72.
53. "Nursing in the Making," Times (London), September 25, 1914.
54. De Havilland, Women's Motor Manual, 5.
55. F. W. Stella Browne, "Studies in Feminine Inversion," in Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 64.
56. De Havilland, Women's Motor Manual, 69.
57. Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 114.
58. F. Tennyson Jesse, "A Night with a Convoy: An Eyewitness's Account of the Work of the Voluntary Aid Detachment in France," Vogue 51, no. 11 (1918): 72.
59. David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 129.
60. F. Tennyson Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," Vogue 51, no. 10 (1918): 70.
61. F. Tennyson Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," Vogue 51, no. 10 (1918): 70. Ibid.
62. Ibid.;
63. and Jesse, "Night with a Convoy," 72.
64. Jesse, "Night with a Convoy," 72.
65. Jesse, "Night with a Convoy," 72 Ibid.
66. Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," 70. In Intimate Friends, Vicinus notes the tendency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to "spiritualize" same-sex friendships; see pages xviii-xix.
67. Pat Beauchamp [P. B. Waddell, later Washington], FANY Goes to War (London: John Murray, 1919), 16.
68. Mairi Chisholm, IWM Sound Archive 000771/04. Knocker, a qualified nurse from a middle-class background and, in her own words, an "expert driver and mechanic," was also an adept wheeler-dealer and convinced the Belgian Army that she and Chisholm would be best placed together on the front lines, to drive, nurse, and carry the wounded. Chisholm, the daughter of a well-to-do Scottish family, claimed the pair were so physically strong that they could cross into no-man's-land on foot with stretchers and bring the wounded back to ambulances up to three miles away. The women were known even to haul men twice their size up onto their backs. See Baroness de T'Serclaes (Mrs. Elsie Knocker), Flanders and Other Fields (London: George G. Harrap, 1964), 36.
69. Jesse, "Night with a Convoy," 72.
70. Alec-Tweedie, Women and Soldiers, 2.
71. Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," 70.
72. Beauchamp, FANY Goes to War, 16.
73. Beauchamp, FANY Goes to War, 16 Ibid.
74. Beauchamp, FANY Goes to War Ibid., 261-62.
75. T'Serclaes, Flanders and Other Fields, 37;
76. and Women at War Collection, vol. 1, IWM 3072, 12.
77. Women at War Collection, vol. 1, IWM 3072, 12.
78. G. E. Mitton, ed., The Cellar-house of Pervyse (London: Black, 1916), 113-14.
79. See Vicinus, Intimate Friends.
80. Mitton, Cellar-house of Pervyse, 75.
81. Diary entries, October 23 and October 29, 1914, Chisholm/IWM 67/107/1 20731, Department of Documents, IWM.
82. Diary entry, December 13, 1914, Chisholm/IWM 67/107/1 20731, Department of Documents, IWM.
83. Mitton, Cellar-house of Pervyse, 148;
84. and Chisholm, IWM Sound Archive.
85. Browne, "Studies in Feminine Inversion," 64.
86. Browne, "Studies in Feminine Inversion," 64. Ibid.
87. and Chisholm, IWM Sound Archive.
88. Jagose, Inconsequence, 16.
89. See Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; New York: Anchor Books, 1990);
90. and Hall, "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926)
91. reprinted in Castle, Literature of Lesbianism, 635-48.
92. Sir Chartres Biron's judgment is cited in full in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on "The Well of Loneliness," ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 39-49.
93. Hall, Well of Loneliness, 271.
94. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 85. This observation is made in reference to Lowther.
95. "Postwar Chivalry on the Road," Autocar, January 31, 1920, 214, emphasis mine.
96. "Women True to Type: No Sex War after the War," Times (London), November 2, 1918.
97. Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," 54.
98. Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," 54. Ibid.
99. Edward Carpenter stressed the advantages of the "intermediate sex" in that such individuals possessed a "double point of view, both of the man and of the woman." See The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908; rpt. London: Allen and Unwin, 1916), 38.
100. "Woman's New Place in the World," Times (London), August 25, 1916.
101. Jesse, "First Aid Nursing Yeomanry," 54.
102. The task of the cultural historian, Halperin notes, is to "recover" the "sexual categories and identities" of "individuals belonging to past societies" and then "measure and assess the differences between those terms and the ones we currently employ" (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 29).
103. Clark, in "Twilight Moments," writes of cases that "involved sexual desires, relationships, and practices that did not produce identities" (140).
104. The phrase expressive selfhood is deployed by Chris Waters in his unpublished paper "Crossing Sexual Boundaries in the Victorian and Early Modern Period," delivered at the Thirteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2005. I also paraphrase here, of course, the title of Joan Scott's highly influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50.
105. In the period and place under consideration here, for instance, the major figures include writers such as Bryher, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall, and her partner, Una Troubridge, and the artist Gluck.
106. My sense of identity as a "thing" is influenced by Halperin's comment in reference to Bernadette J. Brooten's use of the phrase female homoeroticism as if it "were a thing - a single, stable object that can be viewed from different perspectives-rather than a social and discursive production in its own right, a culturally constituted category of both erotic arousal and social organization." See the GLQ forum "Lesbian Historiography before the Name?" GLQ 4 (1998): 561.