Dear LE,

Thank you, Julia, for your essay (“Heteropatriarchal Semantics,” LE 2:2) which untangles the confusion I've always felt in LE (and elsewhere) about butch/femme, masculine/feminine talk.

My own experiences: I was a child during World War II and absorbed all those posters and movies of heroic women – remember? I also grew up a third-generation Ashkenazy (Eastern European Jew) in a similar community in New York City. Much later, after I came out a second time at 33, I was very puzzled by the definitions of butch I heard around me. I was also embarrassed and ashamed because I hadn't the slightest desire to fix cars, play softball, fight, be “physical” and all the other things I saw/heard were “truly lesbian” or “truly butch.” I was usually characterized as a “butchy femme” because, although I liked clothes and sewing (which I learned from my father, originally, and later taught myself; he had learned it from his mother) and didn't fix cars, etc., I was articulate, “bossy,” pushed everyone around, insisted on doing so, got openly angry and passionately bitter about sexism, and so forth.

I have just realized that when I was called “male-identified” (by other lesbians) or “ femme,” what the lesbians around me were perceiving wasn't the same split I made between “masculine” and “feminine” because theirs was Gentile. Mine was Jewish.

No man fixed cars or was athletic in my neighborhood; no man I knew ever fought physically with another. To the first- and second-generation shtetl descendants around me, what was reserved to men, and what made them superior to women, was not the qualities Julia lists but intellectuality, scholarship, and religion, all activities denied women. The third-generation Jewish boys I knew at college were quite viciously sexist, but it never would have occurred to them to claim a monopoly on cars or athletics; what they claimed for their own was poetry, philosophy, science and fiction, all the things I loved the most.

They were the rabbis, the melameds (teachers) I wanted so passionately to be.

As for clothes and jewelry, first- and second-generation Ashkenazy women wore them much the way their ancestors did: not so much as badges of “beauty” or “weakness” but as loudly competitive signs of wealth.