'Lesbian' means . . .

Our website gives us the words: 'same-sex sexual orientation'.  That seems right, and yet at the same time not right, not enough. There is something thin about the statement, something flat, insufficient. I'll try to explain by going back a bit in time, retracing some steps.

I am trying to remember the first time I heard the word 'lesbian'. Not as a child in the 1940s. Nor as a teenager in the fifties. Not even as a young adult. It was not a word that anyone around me uttered.

We did not hear much about sex, either. At school sex education consisted of one session only, a Mother and Daughter Night sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, makers of sanitary pads. We watched a film about menstruation, saw diagrams of the uterus and fallopian tubes, were told not to go swimming while we had a period. This happened when we were in high school; for many of us a good two or three years after menarche. I suppose they had a Father and Son Night at boys' schools, no doubt with different content. Regarding sex as  activity, a warning appeared in the form of a cartoon that showed a teenage girl and boy, she dreaming of a house, he of a bed. Best not to be lured. 1

In the years before 1960 there was not much public use of words like 'sex', 'same-sex orientation' or 'lesbian". The word always in clear view was 'marriage'.  It was the future for girls. Even as toddlers we talked about it as we played with the smooth river stones that covered the road outside our house. ‘Lucky stones,’ we called them. If you put one under your pillow you would dream of the boy you were going to marry. A lucky stone for a lucky dream.

Fairy stories, radio serials, popular songs, movies, they were all about girls who got married and gained the title 'Mrs'. In 1947, over in England, our Princess Elizabeth married her prince, although she kept her own name. On the radio there was a serial called 'When a Girl Marries': not 'if', but 'when'. Marriage was inevitable. The very few who missed out were pitied for they were destined to age into a sad and lonely spinsterhood.

And yet, looking back, I realise we were surrounded by spinsters, our schoolteachers among them. Recently I listed the names of all my public high school teachers, four married and sixteen not. For the most part they were strong, intelligent, confident, competent women, some of them members of the Communist Party, active proponents of equal pay.

We seldom wondered why our teachers were not married. On Anzac Day we sat in the school assembly hall, our teachers on the stage facing us (now I think - what a cruel arrangement). We girls would observe each surreptitious wiping of a tear and know its meaning. 'Her fiancé was killed in the war,' we whispered to one another. Now, of course, I wonder how many of our teachers were living in lesbian relationships, but back then the thought never occurred to us.

Two years after I left school I was in Melbourne, attending occasional lectures given by the charismatic, engagingly forthright Melbourne educator Dorothy Ross. It was only this year that I read her biography and learned that she enjoyed a long intimate relationship with fellow-teacher Mary Davis. Not a whisper of it circulated amongst us students of hers in the late 1950s.

Barbara Falk and Cecile Trioli wrote a biography: D.J. Dorothy Jean Ross 1891-1982. Reading it I learned that, as headmistress of Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School from 1939 to 1955, Dorothy Ross introduced progressive innovations, influenced school leaders and curricula, was widely respected.

Her quest for educational insights had begun earlier.  In 1929 , when she visited educational institutions in England, she returned with a copy of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928), a book that circulated among other educated women in Melbourne. The book 'gave many women a framework in which they could explain the passionate friendships they experienced with other women.' 2   Barbara Falk commented that the relationship between Dorothy and Mary was one of many such loving and supportive partnerships - the headmistress of a private girls' school and her female colleague. She names a number of such women, adding that details of their erotic lives are unknown. Such things were not discussed openly in those days, neither with regard to homosexual nor heterosexual couples. Lillian Faderman agreed, writing:

While romantic friends had considerable latitude in their show of physical affection toward each other, it is probable that in an era when women were not supposed to be sexual, the sexual possibilities of their relationship were seldom entertained.3

Of course, people of the early twentieth century had not yet moved on from the Victorian belief that a 'sex act' requires penile penetration. This notion seems never to have gone away and is evident in some of the claims of the contemporary gender-ideology movement.

These memories and stories from a century of so ago beg the question, What is a lesbian relationship? Lillian Faderman, who had studied the history of women's romantic friendships, had this to say:

'Lesbian' describes a relationship in which two women's strongest emotions and affections are directed toward each other. Sexual contact may be part of the relationship to a greater or lesser degree, or it may be entirely absent. 4

Writing only a year later, Janice Raymond stated that the word lesbian denotes more than a sexual preference, more than a lifestyle. It describes a woman who is strong enough to author her own life. To choose to do this is a 'profoundly political act', one that often elicits male hostility. She wrote:

To be a lesbian means to extend what has been called a 'sexual preference' beyond the realm and reality of a sexual category to a state of social and political existence. 5

In my own lifetime I have seen the critical public gaze shift from the female marriage resister ('selfish', 'dried-up') to the lesbian ('unnatural') and then to those who, through their passionate friendships, challenge the political status quo ('man-hating').

Now we lesbians are experiencing erasure. There is pressure from the transgender-friendly establishment for us to redefine ourselves in their terms, as objects of attention from women-identified-men-with-penises, who want to claim us their own.

How do we find our feet, stand firm, resist the ideological swirl?

Perhaps it helps to reflect, trace our steps, consider how things have been before, absorb something of the richness of the stories of others, some still alive, some long dead, many like Dorothy Ross, whose lesbian lives were hidden in plain sight.

So, now I have some questions to ask those of us who name ourselves 'lesbian'. How do we understand the word?  How do we embellish or go beyond that definition 'same-sex sexual orientation'? What are the qualities, values, meanings of our lives?  What is the ground we stand on? Dorothy Ross was fond of the term 'mud and dust', by which she meant the physicality of life, the day-to-day realities. What is our 'mud and dust'?

For myself the words 'resister', 'choice' and 'passionate friendship' are central. I wish I had known more of the personal lives of Dorothy Jean Ross and her associates, those sixty years ago when I was briefly in touch with them. I think I would have appreciated their ways.

1.   This was before the pill arrived (1961) and long before the supporting mothers benefit (1973). Teenage sex carried the risk of pregnancy, abortion,  unmarried mothers' home, forced adoption or shot-gun marriage.

2.   Falk & Trioli, page 144

3.   Lillian Faderman Surpassing the Love of Men: Romanic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  1985, page 414

4.   Faderman page 17

5.   Janice Raymond A Passion for Friends: Towards a Philosophy of Female Affection. 1986,  page 14.

 Cover image is from The Mind Circle - see more historical photos of lesbians here.