Lesbian/ Woman

by Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon

Case histories and personal experiences document the Lesbian attitudes, life styles, and problems in a heterosexual social structure

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Lesbian, Feminism, Queer, History

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Del Martin was born as Dorothy Louise Taliaferro on May 5, 1921, in San Francisco. She was the first salutatorian to graduate from George Washington High School. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at San Francisco State College, where she studied journalism, and she earned a Doctor of Arts degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She was married for four years to James Martin and retained his name after their divorce. She had one daughter, Kendra Mon.

Martin died on August 27, 2008, at UCSF Hospice in San Francisco from complications of an arm bone fracture. She was 87 years old.Her wife, Phyllis, was at her side. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered that the flags at City Hall be flown at half-staff in her honor.

Reviews

[SueB · Rating 5 out of 5]

i confess I stole the book from my working class suburban library in 1981 when I was 19

maybe the guilt was too much for me and that's why I had to open "Gifts of Athena" Cleveland's only Feminist bookstore 20 years later...to make books about women and queers available to any baby dyke who wanted them...and she maybe could see some folks that looked like her and maybe she wouldn't have to steal books to avoid looking the Lady librarian in the eye...and maybe she could know she wasn't the only one, and that actually dykes looked a lot of different ways and that we laughed and cried and loved and fought and built community and wrote books...

RIP Del you did so much for so many...

[JULIE · Rating 3 out of 5]

A classic cultural (and now historical) book written by two women at the forefront of the gay and lesbian movement prior to Stonewall. After Del Martin died on August 29, 2008, I picked up the book from the library but wasn't sure I would even read it, given all the other books on my shelf. Once I started, I realized what a good reminder it was of how far lesbians have come. So many of the women Del and Phyllis [Lyon] met through the Daughters of Bilitis struggled with their sexual identities and the pressures around them to conform to what they were expected to be. Their courage and fortitude set an example for all of us to simply be who we are without shame.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, my gosh. I'd completely forgotten about this book. I read it as a teenager at my local public library. If I remember correctly, I stuffed it under my shirt, and then read it in a back corner tucked inside another less conspicuous book. I was a baby dyke needing to know that there were other womyn like me. Ah, that was so many years ago!

[jes · Rating 3 out of 5]

a great insight into the workings of lesbian movements in the 70s. it is a bit uncomfortable reading 70s lesbian-feminism in the 2020s, but it also shows how far we have come until then and since then.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never really got the idea of time capsules until now. This was just amazing to read. I can't remember who said it, but the thing about being gay is that there isn't really a family to teach you about where you came from. You don't get the history of your people unless you go out and find older gays and ask them questions. Or read books. Or listen to the Making Gay History podcast which is an incredible gift to those of us who were born post-Stonewall.

I live down the street from the Lyon Martin Women's Health Center. I realized this in the middle of reading this book.

Besides being informative and wonderfully normalizing of us lesbians (which is the point), I can't stress enough how snarky this book is. I laughed many, many times at some of the dripping sarcasm embedded in their lines, or their parenthetical asides. If you think homophobes have ridiculous reasoning now, you can't imagine what they said in the 70's. And Del and Phyllis were not having it. I wish I'd know about them earlier in my life.

[Gayle Pitman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently had the privilege of meeting Phyllis Lyon and having an in-depth conversation with her about her life. She and Del were way ahead of the curve back in the 1950s when their relationship began and when they started the Daughters of Bilitis. Although Lesbian/Woman was written forty years ago, it's amazing to me how much of it is still relevant today. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, through their own experiences and with conversations of other members of DOB, present a picture of the lesbian experience in the 1970s, right at the cusp of the gay liberation movement. It's a classic.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mothers do seem to be curious about the subject. When Paula told her mother she was a Lesbian, she followed up by saying, "You can ask me almost any question you want about the subject." But when mother asked how Lesbians made love, Paula told her that was one of the questions she wouldn't answer. Several weeks later the mother told Paula that she had found out what Lesbians do. "How?" asked Paula. "I went to bed with one," replied her mother. "It was a very pleasant experience." Poor Paula, bound by the ground rules she herself had set, could not ask her mother for the details. (62)

I find this very hilarious.

A good book. Comprehensive and interesting, though there wasn't anything that felt particularly noteworthy to me. Probably because this is the first of the bunch and really set the rules for the ones to follow. I enjoyed reading about the personal stories the authors inserted, due to their experience with hundreds of Lesbians as founders of the Daughters of Bilitis.

[Eli Schuster]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGOnoP...

I found the above video posted by someone I don't know on one of my ex's walls on Facebook. It is an interview done by different teens, each of them interviewing a different older person of the gay community who came out in the 1950s. The lesbian that was interviewed was the author of this book's life partner, who helped write the book: Phyllis Lyon. It was inspiring! I find it funny that one of the men who was interviewed talked about getting kicked out of ROTC for being gay, and I dated a girl for a while that was in ROTC in highschool, and just graduated! Lol

[Kathy Gilbert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book because I had read an article about Del Martin in the Portland news around the time of her death. I thought a book written about the lesbian lifestyle as it existed 30 years ago, written by someone of her age and experience, would be fascinating. She and her partner were together for over 50 years and spent their younger years in a much different social climate, when it was apparently pretty dangerous to be openly homosexual. The book was mildly interesting, but I lost interest and didn't finish it.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome book written by two trailblazers, Del Martin & Phyllis Lyons. If you identify as a Lesbian, this should be on your must read list. This is one of those timeless books, full of history & common sense advise for women. I highly recommend it!