Caroline Christensen: Could you share a little about your background and what made you become interested in becoming a historian?

Lillian Faderman: I got my Ph.D. in literature, not in history, in 1967. I started UCLA graduate school in 1962. In all that time, I think we had five women writers, and I’m sure I read hundreds and hundreds of different writers in a five year period. We studied, in my various courses, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, who was a woman who wrote under a man’s name, two of the Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte, and Willa Cather in 20th century literature. I think that was it. You could count them on the fingers of one hand. 

I wanted to do my Ph.D. dissertation on a woman author, but I knew that would not get approved. I thought that would be discouraged, not only by my dissertation advisor but I also thought when it came time for me to look for a job people would look askance at why I wanted to do something on a woman writer who was so much lesser than male writers in the American literature and British literature canon. So I gave up that idea. I ended up doing my dissertation on popular British literature through the lens of one particular writer by the name of BL Farjeon. 

But it always rankled me, because I knew there was another story that hadn’t been told. There were certainly men writers who dealt wonderfully with women like Henry James for example, but I would have liked to have heard more women’s voices. As an undergraduate in the history courses that I took, in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, we found out about Martha Washington, Betsy Ross, and Dolley Madison. That was probably about it. History was told from a man’s perspective, and women were helpmates, and that was it. 

Then the feminist movement emerged in the 1960s, just as I was in graduate school and the second wave of feminism was really triggered by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. When I read The Feminine Mystique, I had a lot of criticism of Betty Friedan and things she did subsequently. But when I read The Feminine Mystique, it was a total euphoria for me. Finally, someone was telling women’s story and the way they had been socialized for women of my generation and earlier generations. It led me to wonder if people were thinking along those lines earlier, and I discovered there was a first wave of feminism. I had to discover all of that on my own; I was never taught any of that in school. To discover that was absolutely euphoric. This whole area of history and literature, as I discovered as a graduate student, that had been banned in effect or considered inconsequential, was never important enough to teach kids or young adults.

So the feminist movement was reborn in the 1960s, but not enough to affect me as I worked on my dissertation. I don’t think word had gotten around sufficiently in academia that there was a feminist movement. I got my degree in 1967, but things began to happen as a result of it. There were all sorts of women’s magazines, there were bookstores that were opening up called women’s bookstores, and then suddenly there was a lesbian feminist movement. To discover that was absolutely euphoric for me. There were all sorts of lesbian journals, many of the bookstores were largely lesbian as I discovered, there were lesbian publishing houses that suddenly emerged in the 1970s, and I was already a professor by then. One of the important things for me was the opportunity in 1971 to begin a women’s studies program at my university. I think there were three or four women’s studies programs around the country by then so this was an opportunity to do real pioneering work.

The women’s studies program started at my university in 1972. It is still going, I am happy to say. Now I think it is called women and gender studies, but for the longest time it was called women’s studies. So I realized there was now a readership for writing about women, and it was another period of great euphoria for me. So, I began my writing in 1975. I had my dissertation already for eight years, I published a couple of college textbooks before that. To finally understand that I could write about women and lesbian history was such a gift for me, and I threw myself into it. So in 1977 and 1978 I published six articles in academic journals about lesbian history. Then I realized I had a book. My first big history book was published in 1981, Surprising the Love of Men. 

Christensen: That’s really interesting. What changes have you seen in writing about women’s history since you started? How has the field changed since you began working in it?

Faderman: In the 1970s there was this huge burgeoning publication of women’s history, wonderful books about women that finally mainstream publishers were willing to take a risk on. I am thinking about Kate Millet’s book, Sexual Politics. Do you know that book?

Christensen: Yes, I have heard of it.

Faderman: That came out in 1970. It set the tone for the decade I think. It really encouraged me to try to write and publish with mainstream publishers, as I have for most of my career. Most of my books have been published by mainstream publishers. A few have been published by university presses. I think my experience is typical of women historians and subsequently lesbian historians. For me by the 1980s, there was never a problem in attracting a mainstream publisher. My 1981 book, Surpassing the Love of Men, I can’t imagine a book like that being able to find a publisher in the 1950s when I became a lesbian or the 1960s when I was a graduate student. It would have been unheard of, impossible. But by the 1970s when I got my contract, it was possible and that was the first book of its kind. Many have followed. I won’t say it’s an industry, but there’s no difficulty in getting a book about lesbians published as there would have been in the 1950s or 1960s, except for those horrendous lesbian pulp novels. It’s a whole library now, an entire library. But in the ‘50s and ‘60s it would have been impossible, by the ‘70s it was just beginning and by the ‘80s it was gathering some momentum.

Christensen: What stories about LGBTQ history do you think are the most important for high school students to know?

Faderman: Let me focus first on lesbian history. I am interested in LGBTQ history as well, but most of my early writing was about lesbian history. I fear that is often overlooked. What I think students need to know about lesbian history is that love between women was not always pathologized. I talk in my book Surpassing the Love of Men about an era where these passionate relationships between women existed and people didn’t think about the sexual possibilities of those relationships. What they saw was that they were passionate, that women were devoted to one another, that they wrote love letters to one another. There was even a term for it that started in England in the late 18th century, it was called romantic friendship. In 1849 an American writer—he was primarily a poet but he also wrote novels—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published a novel called Kavanagh. In Kavanaugh, he presents two women who are in love with each other. He doesn’t deal with the sexual aspect; all they want is to be together, and they write each other these lovely love letters. They take every moment they can to communicate with each other, which was a real challenge in the days before cell phones or even telephones or even effective mail systems. Henry Wadsorth Longfellow says about that relationship that it was a rehearsal in girlhood for the great drama of women’s life. 

What he means by that is when women are young, in the mid-19th century, it would be terrible if they were hugging and kissing and getting too close to men before they were married. But, they can rehearse with each other. They can practice with each other; they can hold each other, write passionate love letters, and sleep together and use the language of romance. What really went on in most of those relationships we’ll never know. Some of them were surely sexual, others may not have been. But the point is that kind of devotion, that kind of selection of another woman as your soulmate was acceptable in the 18th century and the 19th century as it would not have been in the 20th century. 

There was a period in which things changed. I’ve written about this in my books Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. The sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing—there were many of them—were European men in the 19th century who wrote about women’s sexuality. They turned their attention to love between women and they pathologized it. They talked about lesbians as men trapped in women’s bodies. That’s language that we might use for trans people these days, if a trans person feels they are trapped in the wrong body and they have to get into the right body now. But the sexologist pathologized it for all women who loved women. What happened is romantic friendship couldn’t exist anymore, and I think it made a huge difference in the way women felt about each other. The kind of self-consciousness that didn’t exist when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was talking about love between women as a rehearsal of girlhood before the great drama of women’s life. It didn’t exist in the 18th century when the term “romantic friendship” was apparently coined. So there was a consciousness of being pathological or morbid as a result of the writings of the sexologists in the late 19th century. I write about the very clear transitions. 

There was an early 20th century writer by the name of Mary MacLane who wrote two biographies. One was in 1902, and she talks about her great passion for another woman without self-consciousness at all. In 1917, she talks about her passion for another woman and she is aware of it being more vilified. It’s an entirely different language because the intellectual culture had changed and the popular culture had changed by the early decades of the 20th century.  

Christensen: That’s really interesting, thank you. If you were to suggest that we include women by name in the course proposal is there anyone you would recommend?

Faderman: Yes, absolutely. I wrote a book called To Believe in Women, and I talk about how women got the vote, how women got into the professions, how women helped give America social consciousness. There are some really remarkable women that I talk about in detail. One is Emily Blackwell. Her sister, for some reason, is more famous because her sister was the first woman to go to medical school in the United States. Emily was about the third. Elizabeth, the sister, did some work as a doctor in the states and then she spent most of her life in England. Emily stayed in the states, and had a relationship with another doctor, Elizabeth Cushier. Together they founded a women’s hospital and really did pioneering things as doctors. I talk about this in To Believe in Women; I think it’s the way they helped and nurtured each other that made their pioneering work possible. That was certainly what we would call these days a lesbian relationship. I can’t imagine Emily and Elizabeth used that term themselves because that term was largely pathologized by the end of the time they were doing their work. It was exoticized. 

The way it was exoticized is that French writers such as [Charles] Baudelaire wrote about love between women being really aesthetic and decadent, as well like Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. I’m sure Emily and Elizabeth never thought of themselves as evil. They wouldn’t have used that term about themselves. The original title of his book was Le Lesbian, the lesbians, but it was published under Le Fleur de Mal, The Flowers of Evil, and lesbians play a central role in the late 1840s. He really exoticized and there’s a lot of shock value in what he writes. Most middle class women in particular, who loved other women, would really have avoided the name lesbian in the late 19th century and much of the decades of the 20th century. 

I would also include Jane Addams, who won a Nobel prize, who did absolutely remarkable things such as bring the whole profession of social work to the United States. She founded one of the first settlement houses in the United States. Much of her life was spent with another woman, Mary Rozet Smith. I’m going to give you an asterisk here about my experience having written about Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith. I first wrote about Jane Addams in my book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. I wrote about her relationship with Mary Rozet Smith. When the book came out, I was invited to speak all over the country. Jane Addams had a settlement house called Hull House in Chicago. I was invited to speak there at a women’s book story. I talked about various people in my book and then, because I was in Chicago, I talked about Jane Addams and the audience was very receptive. I noticed there was one woman who was frowning all the time. Afterwards she came up to me and didn’t have a book in her and so I knew she didn’t want me to sign a book. So finally she got to me in the line and she said, “I’m a docent at Hull House. How dare you write about Jane Addams that way? She was not a lesbian.” As though she knew Jane Addams personally. The reason I am telling you this is that now at Hull House, they have a plaque that talks about Jane Addams and her forty year relationship with Mary Rozet Smith and how Smith was not only her life partner but also made so much of her work possible. Smith put a lot of money into the house and worked in Hull House with immigrant women in particular. My point is that things have changed so much since the 1990s when Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers came out. Now they put up a plaque to Mary Rozet Smith at Hull House and recognize her relationship with Jane Addams. I would definitely want to add Addams, because she did so many wonderful things for social work. And she was one of the first American women to win a Nobel Prize; she won it in the 1930s. 

Then of course the suffrage movement absolutely must be included. In my book To Believe in Women, I talk about Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Susan B. Anthony, I think I make a good case, certainly had what we would call lesbian relationships with women. I found this wonderful letter at the Anthony archives at Smith College in which she writes to a close friend, “I am going to Chicago to be with my new lover Emily Gross.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading, in her handwriting, at Smith College in the archives. She wouldn’t have used the word lesbian herself, as I mentioned earlier about women in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but her emotional relationships were certainly with other women. 

Anna Howard Shaw lived for many years with Susan B. Anthony’s niece, Lucy Anthony. That was clearly what we would call a lesbian relationship. I think I document that really well in To Believe in Women. 

Carrie Chapman Catt, who was the head of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, when women finally got the vote, lived for many years in what was clearly a lesbian relationship. So I think in a unit on suffrage, those three women should be included and the fact that they had same sex relationships that were emotionally important to them and important for their lives, for their comfort, for who they were. It can be brought out very well I think. 

Christensen: Thank you. Our last question is, do you support the creation of an AP women’s history course and if so, can you share why you support it?

Faderman: Still, despite the current administration, all over the country are women and gender courses and I think an AP history course would get a student very well qualified to do well in those courses, to even do advanced work in those courses rather than simply a general education course, but upper division courses. I think it’s crucial for women students particularly, but not just women students, male students too, to understand what women have done to make America the country that it is. I think in a women’s studies course, an advanced women’s studies course, the students are best prepared to make those arguments and share them. Yes, I think it would be wonderful if there was an AP women’s studies course. 

Christensen: Thank you so much!