Looking for the lesbians on patriarchal historical narratives is a subversive activity, requiring researching the lives of so-called spinsters and other women whose eschewing of heterosexuality has been construed as something (anything!) other than attraction to other women. Nuns, for instance… or the Chinese marriage resisters.

Marriage resistance was a “thing” in three districts of the Pearl River Delta from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930’s. In fact, anthropologists have had the temerity to call it a movement. At its height there were an estimated one hundred thousand women refusing to allow men access to their domestic and sexual services through the institution of marriage. They were referred to as the sworn sisters of the Golden Orchid.

How did such an astounding phenomenon arise? Some speculate that it might have evolved from a custom known as “delayed transfer marriage…” which something of a layaway plan for claiming brides. The woman was allowed to live with her family for a period of time after the wedding ceremony.  Here’s a quaint entry from the 1853 Shunde County Gazetteer:

Girls in the county form very close sisterhood with other in the same village. They do not want to marry, and if forced to marry, they stay in their own families, where they enjoy few restrictions. They do not want to return to the husband’s family, and some, if forced to return, commit suicide by drowning or hanging.

This “delayed transfer marriage” was unique to the Pearl River Delta… maybe because this was the center of the silk industry in China—one of the very few industries which employed women. And economic independence, as we all know, is the key to the survival of women-loving women under patriarchy. In China, this was doubly true, because of the heritage of footbinding and infanticide in the regions where marriage was a girl’s only prospect for financial security and her family’s only hope for getting her off their hands.

Obviously, the woman working outside the home could not afford to be hobbled, no matter how erotic her “little Golden Lotus Hook” (putrescent, maimed, and infected bound foot) might be to men. Also, where girls represented earning power, families would be foolish to kill off their potential breadwinners.

And so the girls of Canton were allowed to survive and to develop their bodies. They were also educated.

But there was one more factor in their favor: lack of men. In the nineteenth century large numbers of Chinese men were emigrating to America. Now, some might insist that the “marriage resisters” were not so much militant lesbians, as frustrated spinsters turning to each other, because there weren’t enough good men to go around. But the case can be made that the removal of the men allowed women freer range in expressing their affection for each other.

In addition, there were religious ideologies that supported these women of the Golden Orchid. Many of them worshiped Guan Yin, a goddess of women who herself had rejected heterosexual marriage. One anthropologist recorded this creative explanation for same-sex bonding: If a woman believed she was predestined to marry a certain man, and he happened to reincarnate as a woman, she would still be attracted to him as her predestined mate!

By 1933, the “girls” had begun to form alternative institutions to marriage. Here’s the Gazetteer of Chinese Customs:

Although the two women living together cannot be said to have the form/equipment of a man and a woman, they nonetheless enjoy the pleasure of male-female [intercourse.] Some say that they use friction or rubbing force, others say they use “mechanical devices.” … They adopt a daughter to inherit their property. When the adopted daughter also forms Golden Orchid sworn sisterhood with another woman, the woman is treated like a daughter-in-law.

Apparently, the women of the Golden Orchid understood the need to incentivize same-sex unions along the same lines at patriarchal marriage!

Another way they protected their sisterhood was by organizing “girls’ houses” where the female children of a village lived together until they either married or took spinsters’ vows. It was in these houses that the tradition of sworn sisterhood developed. Here is what Janice Raymond, a former nun, has to say about sworn sisters in her book A Passion for Friends: a Philosophy of Female Friendship:

There were various ways in which sworn sisters were pledged to each other.... a pair of girls or women would take mutual vows never to marry and never to part company. The Chinese term for sworn sisters was “shuang chieh-pai, “ “mutually tied by oath.” Very often, these girls or women had spent a large part of their childhood together... Sworn sisterhood, however was not limited to twosomes. It often comprised a larger association of many women who were committed to each other in friendship and who formed an organized antimarriage grouping.

The sworn sisters lived in “vegetarian halls “ or “spinsters’ houses.” The former were residential halls for a somewhat subversive Buddhist sect which had been outlawed for political militancy. Girls living in these halls were expected to practice “self-cultivation “ by eating vegetarian diets and abstaining from sex with men. The “spinsters’ houses” were more secular, and vegetarianism was not required. Both institutions provided for women in their old age. There were retirement and death benefits, and there were also funds for celebrations and for emergencies.

Some of the vegetarian halls had libraries, and in these were found “good books,” treatises written by Buddhist nuns, urging girls to resist marriage and representing such resistance as an act of moral courage. These teachings even went so far as to depict suicide as an honorable alternative to arranged marriages. Sworn sisters, sometimes as many as six, had been known to drown themselves together rather than see one of their number married against her will.

Some resisters went through with the marriage, but refused to consummate it, returning to their families of birth. Other women, “tzu-shu nu,” were “never to marry. “ The tzu-shu nu would have ceremonies to mark their unions with other women, and these were recognized by the whole community. In fact, Chinese newspapers carried accounts of the ceremonies.

Marjorie Topley, the anthropologist who did the original work on marriage resisters in the 1950’s, claims that lesbianism was common among the tzu-shu nu. She notes that lesbian practices were called “grinding the bean curd “—a reference to a dildo made from silk and packed with bean curd.      

The collapse of the silk industry and the threat of Japanese invasion in the 1930’s, forced “sworn sisters” to retire early to their spinsters’ houses, or to migrate to Hong Kong or Singapore as domestic workers, where they lived in “kongsi,” dwellings of women from the same region in China.  The women of the kongsi would not take jobs in establishments which had fired another member of the kongsi. Many of these houses carried on the tradition of marriage resistance, and some even established banks for the purpose of making loans to the members. Single women would sometimes adopt daughters, but it was more common for sworn sisters to adopt jointly.

Although the Communists, who considered the resisters “counter-revolutionary,” wiped out the movement in China, some of the tzu-shu nu were still surviving in the 1990’s survive in Singapore and Hong Kong, keeping alive the tradition of their vows: “that there might be nothing but truth us.”

As an interesting footnote, Chinese revolutionary, feminist and writer Qiu Jin exchanged vows of eternal friendship with poet, calligrapher and reformer Wu Zhiying in 1904... the same year she began wearing men's clothing. She marked the occasion with a poem called "Orchid Verse"... perhaps a reference to her earlier sisters of the Golden Orchid?

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And I appreciate the reminder from an anonymous reader to footnote my sources... I did read the entry in  Lesbian Herstories and Cultures... and the other two sources were internally referenced in their article:

Sankar, Andrea. "Sisters and Brothers, Lovers and Enemies:
Marriage Resistance in Southern Kwangtung." Journal of Homosexuality 11:3-4 (1986): 62-82.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

Wolf, Margery, Roxane Witke, Emily Martin, ed. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.

Note to the reader:

Most of the dashes were edited out of Emily Dickinson’s poems when they were first published in 1890. The editors, Mabel Todd Loomis and Thomas Higginson, also “regularized” her spellings and word usages. The poems were not “un-edited” until the 1950's.

Mabel Todd Loomis also suppressed all references to Emily’s lesbian relationship with Susan Huntington Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law and next-door neighbor. There is no mention of Susan in the Letters of Emily Dickinson, published by Loomis in 1895—even though Emily’s correspondence with Susan is voluminous, spanning four decades and including drafts and notes about the poems as works-in-progress. (Loomis was the mistress of Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband.)

The letters were not published until 1998.
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DASHING
By Emily Dickinson's Dash


I am Emily Dickinson’s dash—the hand-off in a relay race. I am “Heads-up!”—“Your turn!”—“Last tag!” I indicate a synapse. I spark the gap, up the ante, pass the baton. I am the very first thing that had to go, when they decided to publish Ms. Dickinson’s work—but, no!— I am the second. The first, of course, were the poems that made reference to Emily’s passion for Sue Gilbert.

The dash is an elevated blank, if you think about it.  It is an appropriation of silence. It indicates an intentional—defiant?—ambiguity. It is the author’s evasion of the literary house detectives. What cannot be named can be synapsed around, and after a while, there is—there will be—a connection.

If you teach yourself to follow the multiplicity of readings in Ms. Dickinson’s poems, you will find the synaptic pathways of your brain altered. They will have become reprogrammed. You will, in short, have a brain that makes connections—dangerous ones—exactly the way Ms. Dickinson’s did. I do not exaggerate. I leave that to the italics, to the exclamation point, to the upper cases.  How do you illuminate, clarify, elucidate—how do you organize— brilliance?  I am her invitations, instead. I am license to jump the track. This is all about speed, about mental reflex. Where there aren’t words, there are always connections.

Virginia and Gertrude were dashing women, also. But Emily was the only one who could dash her brains out. I am the fragments of that broken plank in reason. I didn’t come cheap.

I am horizontal—not hierarchical, but lateral—like hostility. The dash is an outstretched hand.  I can pull you across or ask for a handout. Emily did both at the same time, because she knew too much. She wanted to recruit and be rescued at the same time. If you could follow her thought, she was not alone. That was something. And, then, of course, there was Sue.

Ah, Sue—How to measure the distance between Sue Gilbert’s kitchen and Emily’s bedroom window? No dash in the world could bridge that gap, but I was the gesture. And—yes, let it be said—I was also the taunt: “See what I can do.” Because everyone could see what Sue could do. She could procreate. She could delegate. She could regulate.

But Emily, Emily—one-trick-pony!—Emily could synapse. Sly Emily. Shy Emily. Gay and dashing Emily. Emily was quantum, where Sue was algebraic. Emily was possibility; Sue was probability. Where you locate Emily in time—the “onset of Eternity”—you cannot graph her coordinates in space. When you pinpoint her in “Amherst,” it’s “Good Morning—Midnight—.” I did that for her. I am the quark of punctuation.

What started as morse code for Sue ended up a cryptogram. Clumsy dyke, Emily only wanted to bridge the gap between houses. Naive Emily! Little did she know those houses were galaxies apart, and the little dash—the wistful open palm—(my house or yours?)—was the password through language to the boundaries of thought. And she went there. And every time she did, a part of her never came back. And between what jumped the fence to Sue’s house, what fell through the floor of reason, and what bled out between synaptic gaps—what lived upstairs in her father’s house became more and more translucent—a doppelganger. Emily’s body became the punctuation they craved so much for her. Her body was the period that anchored a life sentence. It was the comma of the essential—for women, anyway—subordinate clause. It was the quotation mark of other people’s ideas, the semi-colon caution light before we can proceed through the intersection. She was all punctuation when she died. Her spirit had fled long ago in great mad dashes. And Sue Gilbert was left holding the memories, which, finally, were containable after the dashes had been deleted.

When love is gone, there is the dash.  The plank in reason breaks when there is no love, no possibility of love left—when every woman’s heart is connected to her body and that body is indentured out forever. No love… no love. The mind has been constructed for denial. It was never designed for truth. Poor Emily. She didn’t know that—until it was too late. Eventually she would have exhausted even the possibilities. That would be enough to stop most people. But not Emily. Lay down Emily’s dashes side-by-side, and they’re like a cattle crossing. Living next door to impossibility, where else could she go but up through the roof—or, as she put it, down through the floor?

Virginia reserved her dashes for letters. They could be mistaken for haste. Her readers had an out. Gertrude alternated with ellipses. She invited sighs—handrails. There are absolutely no sighs associated with the dash. No trailings-off, no “ah, well . . . another day, perhaps . . .” No “if only . . .” where Sue Gilbert was concerned. “If only’s” are for novelists, not poets. Poets are about precision— or nothing at all. When Emily failed to finish a sentence, it was an act of courage, not cowardice. I was her springboard into eternity.

Emily took no prisoners except herself. Her sentences were all meant to be executed. That’s the beauty of the dash. You have to throw the switch yourself. She gave her readers lessons in electrocution.

“Think like me and see where it gets you.” All dressed in white, talking through closed doors. No need to open them when one can trans-port—literally—with the dash. And the white? Absence of color, that “Element of Blank”—traveling clothes for the synapser? What is the opposite of mourning? Surely not life—That only leads back to death.

The opposite of death is the dash. But it will kill you.

I have been reading the memoirs of Ethel Smyth, a British lesbian composer and part-time militant Suffragist.  In Ethel's methodical way, she decided to commit exactly two years of her life to the Suffrage Movement, and during this time she became a comrade-in-arms, literally, to Emmeline Pankhurst--undertaking to instruct her in the fine art of rock-throwing, so that she could make the desired impact on 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

During this smashing campaign, both Ethel and Emmeline were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison, where they were assigned adjoining cells and where a sympathetic matron would allow them to take tea together and occasionally "forget" to fetch Ethel back to her cell.

Emmeline and Ethel became very close friends, and they continued to stay in touch after 1913, when Ethel's self-appointed term of service expired and she returned to the world of music.  In 1914, Ethel rendezvoused with Emmeline in France during one of Mrs. Pankhurst's periodic flights from arrest in order to recover from the debilitating effects of another hunger strike--this time her tenth!   Under the infamous "Cat-and-Mouse Act," she would have been subject to immediate re-arrest, even though bed-ridden, had she remained in England.

And then war was declared.  Ethel joined the French army as a radiographer, and Emmeline returned to England, where she placed her considerable charismatic powers at the service of the British government, becoming a spokesperson for the government she had devoted so many years of her life to tearing down.

It was during this period that Ethel published a volume of her early memoirs, a large portion of which was devoted to her first lesbian passion, a relationship with one Lisl Herzogenberg.  Lisl, a married woman, had come to Ethel's rescue during her student days in Germany, when she was experiencing a nervous breakdown.  Lisl moved into Ethel's rooms and cared for her during the crisis, bathing her and feeding her.  Later, she "adopted" Ethel into her home. 

The two women maintained a passionate friendship for seven years.  The friendship came to an abrupt and traumatic end over Ethel's first romantic involvement with a man--who happened to be married to a mutual friend.  Both the husband and wife had told Ethel that theirs was an entirely open marriage, and Ethel, young and naive, had taken them at their word.  Even though their dalliance had been entirely platonic, Ethel was cast in the unsavory role of the "other woman" and socially shunned.  Under pressure from others (most notably Lisl's mother, who despised Ethel), Lisl cut off all contact with her.  A few years later, Ethel found out that she had died.  It was the great tragedy of Ethel's life, and she gave it that weight in her memoirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, however, had no patience with what she considered self-indulgent sentiment.  On reading Ethel's memoirs, she remarked that readers might feel that the whole affair was just a "tempest in a teapot."  Ethel, in her later remembrances about her relationship to Mrs. Pankhurst, noted that, although she laughed at the time, still "between reader and writer a gulf was fixed."  Sure enough, their friendship ended shortly after.

Reading this narrative reminded me of my own experience with heterosexual radical activists.  There was always this "gulf fixed."  For these women, there was a sharp dividing line between their personal lives--usually petrified into social routines associated with long-standing marriages, and their political lives, teeming with activity.  They looked down on us lesbians, whose personal lives were very much in the forefront of our experience-- and inextricable from our commitment to women's causes.

That this priority might play itself out in unstable relationships, heady crushes, profound inquiries into the nature of desire, and bitter factionalizing came with the territory.  Women loving women in the most intimate sense were breaking far newer ground than those who marched with signs or circulated petitions.  While others asked for liberation, we were attempting to determine what that might look like.  And not afraid to look foolish in the process.

Ethel Smyth was working out the most basic algebra of her liberation with Lisl.  Wildly unmothered, she had needed to detach from her mother, a woman whose brilliant youth had been cut short by seven more-or-less consecutive pregnancies, and whose subsequent behaviors towards her children--not surprisingly--were indicative of serious emotional disturbances.  Ethel, through her own form of "hunger strike," had finally obtained permission to study music in Germany, and here she was confronted with the suffocating social strictures for "unattached" females, as well as the brutal misogyny of the music world. 

That Ethel was able to find the nurturing and the shelter so critical to her survival was a miracle.  That she found it in the bosom of a heterosexual marriage was profoundly subversive.  That she and Lisl were able to sustain the intensity of their love for seven years in the face of both their dependency upon male privilege is astonishing.  And it was the devastation of the final break which released Ethel forever from any and all concessions  to conventional morality. 

When I think of Mrs. Pankhurst's hunger strikes, her violence against her own body, and her total capitulation to the worst extremes of patriarchy--namely war, I am called to reconsider the definition of militancy, of radicalism.  It was Ethel's fearless quest to feed herself, to feast on the love of another woman, even in the heart of their respective heterosexual prisons, which inspires me with hope for a revolution.

So Jodie Foster gave a speech at the Golden Globes this year. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. Lots to love: She acknowledged she was lesbian. She acknowledged the support of her former partner and co-parent. She was clearly frightened and did it anyway. Yay!

Lots to not love, too. She never said the word “gay” or “lesbian.” When she talked about coming out “a thousand years ago,” she did not make it clear that she had remained professionally closeted for decades after that.  And then, of course, there were the cutaway shots to her best buddy Mel Gibson, gazing adoringly at her, during her speech. Mel Gibson, whose record for unrepentant domestic violence, and anti-Semitic and misogynist epithets have made him anathema to most folks with a conscience.

Folks have asked me what I thought of her speech. I don’t have too much to contribute. It’s the half-empty/ half-full thing. But there is one question I would raise:

What if Jodie Foster is a butch? Yeah, I know, “Have you SEEN the woman?” But to that I say, “Have you seen her in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?” Have you seen her pre-Taxi Driver? And then I would ask, “How much do you understand about butch identity, butch culture, and butch oppression?” How many butch celebrities have there been prior to Ellen, and even now?

What would happen to a lesbian butch girl, not only growing up in Hollywood, but coming of age, after a series of tomboy roles, with a turn as a pre-teen prostitute at the age of fourteen—and getting nominated for an Oscar? And then discovering that one’s performance in this role attracted a stalker who shot the President in a bid for her attention? Artificial worlds with incredibly narrow and highly incentivized gender roles. And then massive, public trauma around that gender role, even as one received a nomination for the nation's top award for it? Confusion much?  And this was an era before “gender dysphoria” was a thing.

Another thing I find interesting about Foster is her choice of adult roles. Lots of female avenger/protector roles. And then there was Nell. For all the mockery, Nell was not of this world. She was someone whose identity had evolved free from gender roles. She spoke her own language. Hollywood, of course, femmed her up… but the story… ! The story is an intriguing one, and the film might have had more integrity if it could have committed to the androgyny that, at least to this viewer, would have been intrinsic to the situation.

The butch identity, when not disparaged, is erased. Butch oppression is subsumed under the rubric of homophobia. There is no language for the multiple dissociations that occur when a lesbian butch lives a publicly closeted life and has an appearance that can be mistaken for a heterosexual femme icon… or when she tries to adopt a public persona to go with that.

But there are clues. For instance... one might be giving an acceptance speech in which one has difficulty figuring out one’s audience, or the tone one should adopt… resulting in a confusing monologue in which voice and focus alternate wildly. One could find it easier to split off alarming aspects of another person’s identity also… such as a history of domestic violence. One could make comments that indicate a certain dissociation from one's own body or appearance. One could be insanely uncomfortable.

 I have no idea about what's going on with Jodie Foster. But butch invisibility is something about which I do care, as a lesbian playwright whose work features butch women. Not all tomboys are just immature fems. Some of them are butches, and that road is not an easy one. And let us just imagine a different Hollywood. What if an actor like Foster could have moved into a canon of adult roles featuring grown-up, tomboy women? What if she could have had celebrity cachet as a gorgeous masculine woman? Would she have gone for it? And how might that have changed everything?

Here’s hoping that future, with all its options, becomes a reality for other tomboy girls.


Thanks to Kathleen Carbone for her insight and inspiration in writing this blog.

“…truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”—Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor.”

I recently revisited the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in Fayetteville, New York. It was something of a pilgrimage, as I consider her one of my spiritual foremothers. In fact, I took her last name as my own.

The visit brought to mind a quotation by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, on the subject of truth. She spoke of it as an “increasing complexity.” Historically, I have preferred my truth monochrome, monothematic—because I find comfort in certitude. It’s a near relation to rectitude, and rectitude purchases indemnity. But I digress.

Matilda Gage was a Suffrage worker. She was part of a triumvirate, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the leaders and the strategists of the movement. They hung out together. They were comrades-in-arms and best friends... until they weren’t. And that moment came in 1890, when Gage discovered that Anthony had gone behind her back  to recruit Stanton in brokering a deal to merge the National Women's Suffrage Association with a rival Suffrage organization made up of conservative, Christian women. Gage woke up to find herself ousted from the organization she had helped lead for twenty years... and well on her way to being written out of history.

This was why I had chosen to be her namesake, actually: Because Gage had refused to compromise her principles in the name of expediency. She would not compromise in her opposition to a “white-women-only” Suffrage campaign, nor would she compromise on her opposition to the Church. In fact, she had written an entire book, Woman, Church and State, unmasking the misogyny of Christian history, supporting her thesis that the exploitation of women was not some oversight or side effect of Christianity, but was it’s entire raison d’être. In other words, Christianity could not be redeemed.

I loved Gage’s radical vision. I loved her refusal to compromise, even when it cost her so dearly.

But, standing in the Gage House nearly three decades after taking her name, I found myself revisiting my own history as well as hers. And her history was that of a married, middle- class woman with four children and a husband who supported her. Gage did not have to earn her living, nor did she have to worry about how she would survive in old age.

My history, since coming out, had been that of a low-income, single lesbian who supported herself largely through touring around the country and giving lectures and performances. Standing in the Gage House, I realized with a jolt that my life experience had more in common with that of Susan B. Anthony—a single, working-class lesbian who supported herself with public speaking—than with Matilda Gage.

And this realization caused me to revisit that historic betrayal of 1890.

Susan B. Anthony had co-founded the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President. That movement has been mocked as a bunch of tee-totaling Miss Grundies attempting, with hysterical fervor, to police the harmless dissipation of others. In fact, it was a movement of battered women, of activists against domestic violence. It was a movement of survivors of sexual abuse and especially of incest. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman could not own property, could not inherit, could not own her own wages, could not own her own children. Wife-beating and marital rape were legal, and any woman attempting to seek relief through the courts would face an all-male jury. The woman who married an alcoholic was in for a lifetime of terror and abuse, and so were her children. Outlawing liquor appeared to be the quickest way to seek relief legislatively from this nightmare, and the Church was more inclined to support temperance than women’s enfranchisement.

Anthony’s roots were in this movement of survivors. The personal stories of suffering that she encountered would be familiar to any rape crisis or shelter worker. The needs were immediate: shelter, food, protection, medical attention, social services for the children.

Anthony had moved away from the temperance movement to the movement for Suffrage, but those roots and those experiences continued to inform her activism. Standing in the Gage House, which is in a lovely middle-class neighbhood of large houses with landscaped yards, I began to experience the increasing complexity of that so-called betrayal.

Gage’s uncompromising stance, pristine in its radicalism, could have  delayed Suffrage by decades--or even centuries, depending on how deeply the Church was alienated. How would that position read to a woman like Anthony? Might it not look like a function of class privilege? Gage, with her feminist and middle-class husband, might be willing to die before seeing her goals realized, but for women in desperate circumstances, delay could be fatal.  Even limited power, limited Suffrage, would be a foot in the door, a toehold… a something for so many women who had nothing. And these conservative Christian women had resources, lots of them. Was it easier for a woman who was not needing to support herself to turn down that money on principle than for a woman  scraping out a living on the lecture circuit? A woman for whom marriage could never be an option?

I remembered the words of Florynce Kennedy: “'Nothing but the best for the oppressed' translates to ‘nothing for the oppressed.’” And I remembered the words of another legendary activist, Bernice Reagon Johnson: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”

And Anthony was lesbian. Let us never forget that. She did not love men, did not want men. She desired women. She understood that her tribe could never experience security or domesticity in our relationships until women had equal access to education and to jobs. In 1890, she was seventy, in an era before Medicare and Social Security. She was also often desperately lonely in her touring work. One of her lovers had been Anna Dickinson, who  also supported herself as a public speaker. How much could Stanton with her seven children and Gage with her four understand about their lives? And, it is important to remember that the temperance movement leader was Frances Willard, also a lesbian.

Was it Gage who betrayed Anthony in her refusal to compromise, holding their Suffrage organization hostage to a radical vision that was so far ahead of its time? It was easy for Gage to explore spiritualism and other metaphysical systems, when she was not dependent upon the Church as a support system that could provide community, emergency health care, and financial relief, as well as ideological support for the purity and sanctity of womanhood--a lifeline to women struggling with the contempt and violence of their spouses. How relevant would the historical violations of the Church be to these women who had nowhere to turn but the Church?  Was it realistic to expect them to catch up to doctrines of radical feminism in their lifetimes?

I left the Gage House overwhelmed. It was difficult to resist the temptation to think I had been wrong. Right and wrong have no place in “increasing complexity.” The world has need of radical and visionary thinkers, as well as for the pragmatic, on-the-ground, coalition-building, compromise-making activists. There will always be a tension between the two positions, and that tension can provide a healthy check against the excesses to which each is liable. 

The Gage House stood as a bulwark of rectitude for me in my younger days, when I was in the process of reinventing myself. Today my appreciation of it has increased in complexity. Today it is an invitation to go deeper, to challenge everything--even to examine  my beloved foremother through the lens of  working-class, lesbian activism.

Take a tour of the Matilda Gage House website. This essay, narrowly focused on a specific facet from my own experience, does not in any way do justice to this remarkable woman, who did "walk her talk" in so many radical ways. Her home was on the Underground Railroad, and, because of her coalition work with Native women in her area,  she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation. Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, would author the beloved Oz books, with their gender-bending heroines. Her crusade for separation of Church and State is especially relevant today. Sally Roesch Wagner is the visionary and pragmatic Executive Director of the Gage Foundation, and, I am privileged to say, a friend and colleague.

The Internet is abuzz with the posthumous outing of astronaut Sally Ride. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and these appear to be divided into two camps. Some folks wish that Dr. Ride, as an iconic astronaut, had been out publicly as a powerful role model in the LGBT community. Indeed, there is a posthumous campaign on Facebook to point out the fact that, because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy will not be able to receive federal death and pension benefits.

Others, taking their cue from Dr. Ride’s sister, support her decision to remain publicly closeted, citing her right to privacy and attributing her reticence to her Norwegian background. Others point out the excessive and unwelcome attention to her gender and personal life (“Do you wear a bra in space?”) to which the media subjected her as the first woman in space. The Washington Post wrapped up their defense of her closet with this summation: “… Ride lived in a world where we should all live, a place where we celebrate someone for her accomplishments and not her sexual orientation.”

Actually, Washington Post, a lesbian orientation is an accomplishment. Historically, and certainly in Dr. Ride’s lifetime, living a lesbian life has meant overcoming substantial obstacles and negotiating myriad oppressive situations. Living a lesbian life has meant excommunication and expulsion from religious organizations; discharge from the military; disinheritance and estrangement from families of birth; incarceration in mental asylums; harassment, discrimination and firing in the workplace; loss of housing; loss of educational opportunities; being banned from teaching jobs; loss of custody of one’s children; loss of partnership benefits including pensions and health insurance; and loss of one’s career.

These are specific oppressions, and living with them results in adoption of strategies, formation of alliances, invention and creation of alternative systems of support. There is the weightlessness of an invisible identity that defies the gravitational pull of what many experience as compulsory heterosexuality, and this weightlessness comes with both freedoms and challenges. There is a certain traction and grounding that come from rooting oneself in societal norms.  The oxygen of societal acceptance and approval is taken for granted by those for whom it constitutes the air they breathe. In the closed space of the closet, there is a suffocating lack of circulation. Dr. Ride lived her life in a secret orbital, and the special conditions of that orbital informed her choices, her character, and her legacy.

Dr. Ride’s sister stated that Sally did not believe in labels, the inference being that lesbianism is a label.

Newsflash: Being lesbian is an identity, and nothing could be further from a label. When you label me, you spraypaint an offensive epithet on my front door. That’s not pleasant for me, but I can paint over it. It does not affect who I am or how I live. When you insist that “lesbian” is nothing more than a label, what you are doing is very aggressive. You are attempting to evict me from my home, deny me access to my community, cut me off from my heritage and history, appropriate a tremendous body of literature, and disappear my culture. Insisting that my identity is nothing more than a label supports heterosexist hegemony and isolates and marginalizes me. It’s also more than a little pornographic, because attempting to reduce the richness of lesbian history and culture to a personal sexual practice is the hallmark of a fetish.

And in case the apologists of the closet are relying on the “born that way” argument to trivialize lesbian identity, they should understand that lesbians are not gay men. Lesbianism has always represented an empowering choice in patriarchal cultures.

Time out for a brief history lesson: Here in the US, until the invention of reliable birth control, women could not practice heterosexuality outside of marriage without risking extremely severe consequences. I am talking about the stigma of the notorious “fallen” or tragically “ruined” woman, with the searing rejection of out-of-wedlock children—often relinquished for adoption under economic, or religious, or social—or all-three—pressures.

On the other hand, the socially sanctioned expression of heterosexuality—marriage—was a dangerous and degrading institution for women. In an era before birth control, women could not deny their husbands sex, and this could mean serial pregnancies for two decades or more, with the attendant toll on both psychological and physical health. It often meant too many children to protect or provide for. The rates for infant mortality were nearly as high as the rates for death in childbirth. Wives could be raped and beaten with impunity, could not inherit money, could not own their own wages, vote, serve on juries (critical factor in rape trials), could not own their children.  Husbands could have their wives incarcerated indefinitely in mental asylums. This was still true through the middle of the twentieth century.

The woman with enough self-esteem to insist on control of her body; the woman with dreams of creative, entrepreneurial, or intellectual work; and the woman whose childhood experiences of male sexuality were traumatic enough to preclude her fulfilling the obligations of the marriage bed had two choices: celibacy or lesbianism. Many women chose lesbianism. And many of these, not surprisingly, were women of achievement. Scratch around under the surface of these thousands of exceptional, historical “single women,” (as Ride was presumed to be) and you will usually find the lesbianism.

Dr. Ride made her choices during her lifetime, as we all do, weighing her priorities and considering consequences. For many women whose lifework is with children, and especially in the field of education, the closet has been compulsory.

But Dr. Ride is dead now, and, in exiting the planet, has exited her closet. There is no reason to attempt to stuff her legacy back into that prison, except of course the usual heterosexist impulse to erase lesbian achievement, impoverish our history, appropriate our lives. What is the motivation behind that impulse? Could it have something to do with the fact that a disproportionately high number of women of pioneering achievement are lesbians… and especially in arenas traditionally dominated by men? Why is this still true today? Clearly the label theory will not provide us with an answer. We can only begin to understand this high percentage of lesbian achievers when we begin to explore and celebrate the resistance, the iconoclasm, the strategic brilliance, the hard-won integrity, and the deep gynophilic passion that are indigenous to lesbian identity. Dr. Sally Ride embodied all of these qualities, as a lesbian, and they cannot be separated from her accomplishments.

This essay was originally published in On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking, July 27, 2012.