Rebecca Jennings

Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender‐Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture

ALISON ORAM Abingdon: Routledge, 2007 Pp. xii + 192. £19.99. ISBN 978 0 415 40007 7 Alison Oram’s latest book, Her Husband Was a Woman!, is a rich and fascinating study of the popular discourse of ...

The Gateways club and the emergence of a post-Second World War lesbian subculture

In recent years, gay male subcultures have emerged as the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Building on earlier histories, which linked the emergence of a male homosexual subculture with the development of commercial leisure venues in a capitalist society, recent work has attempted to map sites of homosexual expression as well as geographies of surveillance and regulation within the urban environment. Drawing on nineteenth-century preoccupations with the modern city as a place of physical and moral degeneracy, historians have traced attempts to control deviant behaviour through legislation and policing, inevitably focusing on the figures of the male homosexual and the prostitute. However, no comparable work has examined the significance of commercial subcultures in histories of female homosexuality in the UK, despite a significant body of lesbian oral history collections, as well as Jill Gardiner’s more recent oral history of the Gateways nightclub, having testified to the existence of a lesbian bar culture in Britain for much of the twentieth century. Why, then, has this aspect of lesbian experience in the past received such scant attention? The answer, I will suggest, can be traced to historical tensions within the lesbian bar community itself, centring on conflicting political agendas in the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite links with a broader culture of public leisure, the lesbian bar community of the immediate post-war decades remained largely enclosed and introspective, developing a network of lesbian sociability which could address the pressing issue of isolation faced by its members. This concern with enabling interpersonal connections reflected the contemporary

‘IT WAS A HOT CLIMATE AND IT WAS A HOT TIME’: Lesbian Migration and Transnational Networks in the Mid-twentieth Century

Her name was Bergitta. You know how I’m good with names. She was from South America. Most exciting woman really. And very stroppy, lots of chutzpah. Used to stamp around the ship, a very interesting woman . . . and then we used to drink together and we used to, we had this thing we should walk, or she called it ‘promenade’, the European thing, and she would take my arm and we would promenade and we would do this. And then we would drink in the bar and then we’d promenade in the night. And it had something to do with the lifeboat I think and the darkness and the Atlantic Ocean, but there was that kiss. (Jones, 31 August 2007)

“The most uninhibited party they’d ever been to”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945–1971

L esbian and gay activists and historians of sexuality have long debated the relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality in Britain. The Counter-Psychiatry Group, founded in London in 1971 by the psychiatric social worker Elizabeth Wilson and her partner at the time, the sociologist Mary McIntosh, was one of the first groups to be formed within the emerging Gay Liberation Front (GLF) there. Influenced by the broader antipsychiatry movement that had developed in Britain and elsewhere in the 1960s, the group challenged the authority of the psychiatric profession to define or treat homosexuality, rejecting the concept of homosexuality as mental illness and arguing that, instead, it was social attitudes toward homosexuality that should be regarded as irrational and “sick.” Turning to political techniques, the London GLF Counter-Psychiatry Group demonstrated on Harley Street and outside London hospitals such as the Maudsley and the Tavistock Clinic to protest against the use of such forms of psychiatric treatment of homosexuality as aversion therapy, brain surgery, and chemical castration. In her oral history of the organization, Lisa Power, a GLF activist at the time, contends that “the gay rejection of the popular, psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuals as sick rather than criminal marked a break with the homophile movement, many of whose adherents had been happy to accept a medical pronouncement that they were unable to help themselves and therefore

Lesbian voices: The Hall Carpenter oral history Archive and post-war British Lesbian history

The article examines life history interviews conducted with lesbians, which form part of the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive at the National Sound Archive. This material is used in order to examine lesbian identities in Britain in the years 1945-1970. The article also explores the issues with using this form of oral history material, in particular, it was necessary to question both how these narratives were constructed to articulate a specific notion of lesbian identity and how they might be deconstructed to reveal the more fractured and contingent nature of post-war lesbian identities. The interviews produced accounts of lesbian experience and identity in the post-war decades, which were profoundly shaped by recent understandings of lesbian identity. It is this impact of contemporary notions of identity on personal narrative, and its significance to the lesbian and gay historian, which forms the focus of this article.

The Boy-Child in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community

Abstract With the development of second wave feminism and the emergence of an increasingly visible and articulate community of lesbians within feminist circles in the 1970s, an influential strand of radical feminism began to advocate separatism as a political strategy for lesbians. Simultaneously, the Australian women’s movement was opening up a space in which it was possible to acknowledge the dual role of some women as lesbians and as mothers, and a small minority of lesbians were using artificial insemination and other methods to conceive children in the context of lesbian relationships. The co-existence of these two strands of lesbian feminist thought gave rise to a new issue: that of the place of the boy-child in lesbian feminist ideology and communities. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival research, this article explores the debate about boy children in Australian lesbian feminist circles in the 1970s and 1980s. A range of views were expressed, from the suggestion that boy children presented an opportunity to raise a new generation of pro-feminist men, to the view that the boy child threatened women’s autonomy and need for sisterhood. This article traces the development of these arguments and considers the impact of the debate on the mothers of boys, their boy-children and the broader lesbian feminist community.

A Fully Formed Blast from Abroad?: Australasian Lesbian Circuits of Mobility and the Transnational Exchange of Ideas in the 1960s and 1970s

I n 1 9 7 3 t h r e e A u s t r A l I A n w o m e n —Kerryn Higgs, Robina Courtin, and Jenny Pausacker—returned to Melbourne, having spent two years in London. Later the same year, New Zealander Alison Laurie arrived home after a nine-year stint overseas, which included periods of time living in England, Scandinavia, and the United States. The return of all four had a catalytic effect on lesbian politics in their home communities. Pausacker, Higgs, and Courtin were credited with precipitating a physical and ideological shift away from mixed gay politics toward a feminist perspective on lesbianism. As Laurie herself put it, her arrival made it appear that “lesbian feminism hit Aotearoa New Zealand as a fully formed blast from abroad, but fell on fertile ground, among many of the lesbians from gay liberation for starters.” Contemporary accounts certainly present the women as agents of change and their return as a significant event in the history of Australasian lesbian activism. To a certain extent their impact can be explained by the personalities of the women themselves. All were intelligent, creative women who continued to be influential writers, scholars, and activists throughout their lives. As Jenny Pausacker noted, “Kerryn published the first lesbian novel for adults in Australia. I published the first lesbian novel for young adults in Australia, and Robina’s the venerable Robina [a Buddhist nun]. So we

A Room Full of Women: lesbian bars and social spaces in postwar Sydney

Sydneys lesbian scene changed significantly between the 1940s and 1970s from mixed private social networks to a more gender segregated public scene. For many lesbians in the early post-war decades, private friendship networks defined patterns of socialising and this impacted on the development of lesbian identity, limiting the scope for the emergence of distinctive lesbian subcultures and styles. Increasing numbers of women joined camp men on the commercial scene in the 1960s but the emergence of feminism in the 1970s prompted the development of new women-only spaces and encouraged increasing gender segregation on the commercial scene.

Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–1945

and welcome addition to the body of literature surrounding the much-misunderstood Kindertransport episode, as well as writing on British migrant, British–Jewish and contemporary British history more generally. It adds further depth to our knowledge of the real experiences of the Kindertransportees—both the Scottish ‘forgotten’ 800 and the young migrants more generally—and the way they were received and conceived by the majority community and the existing Jewish minority. It acts as a corrective to stilldominant ‘celebratory’ views of the episode and casts further doubt on British tolerant, welcoming and liberal historical self-characterisations.

Sandra Willson: a case study in lesbian identities in 1950s and 1970s Australia

In 1959, a young Sydney lesbian, Sandra Willson, shot and killed a taxi driver as a form of protest against social attitudes toward lesbianism. She spent 18 years in prisons and psychiatric hospitals before her release in 1977. Taking Sandra Willson as a case study, this article will explore the ways in which social disapproval of lesbianism was expressed in 1950s Sydney and the impact this had on women’s lives, relationships and identities. By the time of Willson’s release in the late 1970s, Sydney represented a very different place in which to articulate a lesbian identity; a place in which same-sex desire was beginning to be acknowledged in the press and in cultural media, and where feminist and gay activists were challenging long-standing negative attitudes toward homosexuality. Sandra Willson’s experience offers an opportunity to trace shifting notions of lesbianism between the 1950s and the 1970s in Sydney and to consider how these broader patterns of cultural change might have impacted on individual women. This article has been peer-reviewed.