Author's Note

In Chrysalis No. 8 Nancy Sahli had published “Smashing: Women's Relationships Before the Fall,” an essay in which she made the important point that during the last two decades of the nineteenth century a good many women's close relationships were damned by the label “lesbian” as a way of defusing the feminism that was then extremely active in Europe and the United States. (Neither feminism nor this particular tactic used against it has disappeared, obviously.) Unfortunately she also claimed that her examples were “not lesbian” when it seemed pretty clear to me that some of them were. It seemed to me then (and seems to me now) that the worst possible way of countering such accusations was to insist that the women in question were not lesbians, a tactic that left the “charge” of being lesbian unchallenged, as if a woman's “lesbianism” somehow invalidated her feminism. Hence this letter.

Dear Editors,

Nancy Sahli's essay was delightful. And yet there are things in it that present a real problem, one that has appeared recently in other women's publications: Judith Schwarz's article on Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman, and Lee Chambers-Schiller's review of Miss Marks and Miss Woolley, both in Frontiers IV:1; and Judith Hallett's very peculiar essay on Sappho in Signs IV:3. To varying degrees all these pieces present the appearance of uneasily backing into a subject that all of them are either soft-pedalling or (in the case of Hallett) denying outright.

Here is Sahli, insisting that “the” point is not “whether these relationships were sexual, even on an unconscious level” and protesting Krafft-Ebing's identification of a woman who dressed in men's clothing (in 1884), wrote “tender love-letters” to another woman, and disliked the idea of relationships with men, as a lesbian. Why? Because her affair was “platonic.” And again, Sahli protests the identification of Olive Chancellor, in The Bostonians, as a lesbian since “nowhere in the novel can one find evidence of any variant sexual behavior.”

Explicit sexual activity seems some kind of Rubicon for Sahli, on the other side of which lies Heaven knows what.