Lillian Faderman > Quotes

“Love between women could take on a new shape in the late nineteenth century because the feminist movement succeeded both in opening new jobs for women, which would allow them independence, and in creating a support group so that they would not feel isolated and outcast when they claimed their independence. … The wistful desire of Clarissa Harlowe’s friend, Miss Howe, “How charmingly might you and I live together,” in the eighteenth century could be realised in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If Clarissa Harlowe had lived about a hundred and fifty years later, she could have gotten a job that would have been appropriate for a woman of her class. With the power given to her by independence and the consciousness of a support group, Clarissa as a New Woman might have turned her back on both her family and Lovelace, and gone to live “charmingly” with Miss Howe. Many women did.”
― Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

“Some women who married and also had lesbian relationships were genuinely bisexual. Many others married because they could see no other viable choice in the day.”
― Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

“Of course many of us were loaded with self-hate and wanted to change. How could it have been otherwise? All we heard and read about homosexuality was that crap about how we were inverts, perverts, queers — a menace to children, poison to everybody else, doomed never to be happy.”
― Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

“Perhaps rage was an inextricable part of lesbian-feminism, because once these women analyzed the female's position in society they realized they had much to be furious about.”
― Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

“... it is in our century that love has come to be perceived as a refinement of the sexual impulse, but in many other centuries romantic love and sexual impulse were often considered unrelated.”
― Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

“A woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her it know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.”
― Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

“Education continued to come under particularly strong fire...: If women learned how to manage in the world as well as men, if they learned about history and politics and studied for a profession, of course they would soon be demanding a voice and a role outside the home. The medical doctors soon discovered that education was dangerous to a female's health.”
― Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

“To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women.”
― Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

“hey’d say that heterosexual women become feminists when they finally understand that society doesn’t allow them to be complete and free human beings— but lesbians had always understood that. Feminists are finally realizing that sex roles dehumanize women— but lesbian had always understood that; they’d always refused to a cape the limitations and oppressions opposed by the womanly role.”
― Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle

“Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.”
― Lillian Faderman, Woman: The American History of an Idea

“In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $110 million in today’s money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers [including homosexuals] from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy; lobotomy; sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for ‘behavior modification.’ It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn’t change his behavior he would die (10).”
― Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle

“Hale was among the first in a very long line of women who stepped far beyond the home but had phenomenal success in telling other women that the home was where they belonged.”
― Lillian Faderman, Woman: The American History of an Idea

“Margaret Fuller, America’s first female public intellectual and a contemporary of Beecher, was her antithesis. In 1840, Fuller became editor of the era’s premier highbrow magazine, The Dial. She was then thirty years old.”
― Lillian Faderman, Woman: The American History of an Idea