Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster

by Joanne E. Passet

Jeannette Howard Foster was to lesbianism in the mid-twentieth century what out authors such as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin were to gay men. She unapologetically blew the lid off Cold War sexual repression in 1956 with her Sex Variant Women in Literature-the first-ever study of homosexual, bisexual, and cross-dressing characters appearing in more than 300 works, from ancient times to the present. Joanne Passet’s Sex Variant Woman is a fascinating portrait of Foster, who served as the first librarian at the Kinsey Institute before leaving to publish her controversial book. It is also a riveting look into the pre-Stonewall past, the intense sexual repression and persecution endured by homosexuals, the groundbreaking advances put forth by a cadre of activists, and the rise of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation decades later.

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

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 9, 2008

Reviews

[Bookish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking for queer heroes? Consider the life of subversive librarian Jeannette Howard Foster. If you want daring, there’s plenty in this account of how she came to write Sex Variant Women in Literature, the first book to show that lesbian, bisexual and cross-dressing women could be traced back at least 3,000 years through more than 300 texts. As a self-supporting woman at a time when homosexuals were often fired from their jobs, Foster risked her livelihood by self-publishing this cornerstone of modern queer studies under her own name in 1956.

If you want drama, consider Foster’s four year stint working with Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research, right after his controversial 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. There, she faced down the sexual advances of both Kinsey and his associate Wardell Pomeroy, though both men were fully aware that she preferred women. She also found a confidant for her disillusionment with the great sexologist in Hazel Tolliver, a scholar of Latin and Greek hired by Kinsey to translate accounts of sex crimes extracted by Catholic confessors, who became Foster’s partner of 30 years.

Notable lesbians rarely get full-scale biographical treatment these days, never mind those who aren’t as famous as Gertrude Stein or Natalie Barney. So Joanne Passet’s incisive new biography, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, is especially welcome — not just because Foster deserves to be better known as a lesbian author, poet and translator, but because her life spanned all but the last decade of the 20th century, and opens a window on lesbians in the Midwest and South.

Foster’s coming out was both wilder and milder than you might guess. Born in 1895 as the oldest daughter of an upper middle class family in Oak Park, Illinois, she came of age when women’s romantic friendships offered a convenient cover for intense same-sex infatuations. Despite her frowning mother, Foster found self-acceptance as a teenager though fiction like Mary Constance DuBois’s “The Lass of the Silver Sword,” about a school girl’s crush on an older female student, and the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis. Her unrequited love affairs with several female professors led to a breakdown after Foster’s first year at the University of Chicago in 1914. But she regained emotional stability with the help of a sympathetic psychoanalyst, and gradually managed to connect with women who could reciprocate her feelings, sexually and emotionally—though she never quite found anyone who could do both in a lasting way.

In Passet’s fascinating depiction, Foster’s career and her 20-year project of uncovering a lesbian literary lineage were shaped not just by her passionate lesbianism, but by the sexism of her profession. Foster surely had a knack for attaching herself to female teachers who could guide her studies and professional advancement as one of the few U.S. women to hold a doctorate in library science. But they couldn’t protect her from academic sexism’s powerful kick, which kept her searching for a better position every five years or so. Yet in the long run, Foster prevailed in her iconoclastic mission to track down the coded lesbian literature that affirmed her deepest feelings. Living and working in 17 states brought her unprecedented access to lesbian literature in public and private collections from Chicago to Boston to Atlanta, which she cataloged in a single volume for the first time.

The book’s poignant final chapters unfold against the flowering of the lesbian and gay movement in the 1970s, when Sex Variant Women in Literature was plucked from obscurity and reprinted by a new generation of women. Several of them, including Naiad Press publisher Barbara Grier and activist and editor Karla Jay, embraced Jeannette personally after discovering her work, going so far as to visit her in a nursing home in rural Arkansas, where Foster lived near Hazel Tolliver and Tolliver’s later companion Dorothy Ross. Coming after the many years Foster had been pushed aside professionally, it’s a satisfying ending to Foster’s life, which richly deserves Passet’s sensitive and scrupulous attention — and ours.

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was lovely, interesting, and well written. I'm very glad to have read it, and I understand Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature better now than I did before, as well as who she was as a person and the climate she was writing in. She was an enormously interesting, passionate, intelligent, dedicated, and driven woman.

[Becka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant, educated lady that did the most with the life she was given and in her restrictions of the day. Her pursuits, writing and poetry is so good and heart-felt. There is also sadness in how most of her life and loves had to be hidden because of her sexual orientation.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeanette Foster

A wonderful book about our foremother. Read it!,
. Learn the history of women before stonewall who collected and wrote about the twilight world of lesbians

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

The problem with biographies is that they all too often end with the death of a person you’ve come to like and admire. Sex Variant Woman is just such a biography. Jeannette Howard Foster is just such a person. Born in the late nineteenth century, in an era when women had no political or economic rights to speak of and gay people were deemed either irredeemably sinful or pathologically mentally ill, Foster managed to find no shame in being either a woman or a lesbian. For a woman of her time, this was a tremendous accomplishment. It would not be Foster’s only accomplishment.

One of the most influential lesbian scholars of the twentieth century, Foster would spend decades creating her seminal work, Sex Variant Women in Literature, a guide to the lesbian references and characters found in stories told across a variety of cultures and dozens of centuries, the first scholarly work to take lesbianism seriously as a topic. With a commitment bordering on obsession, Foster traveled extensively in her search for material, risking much to find it, and even taking a job or two just for the access they gave her to relevant collections. This search would lead her to become the librarian for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, a job that offered both tremendous intellectual benefits and unexpected professional drawbacks. Throughout her life, Foster would influence and correspond with thousands of lesbians who found themselves reflected in her work and who were inspired by it to broaden the scope of scholarship on the subject of women who love women.

Passet’s biography of this great woman, constructed through a historian’s careful consideration of all possible sources, offers invaluable insights not only into the life and mind of Jeannette Howard Foster, but also into the times she lived in, the influence they had on her, and the influence she had on them. In the intimate details, we find a woman of great humor, tremendous intellectual gifts, and dauntless courage. In the ever-shifting circumstances of her life, we find the constant reminder of all that has been accomplished by Foster and women like her for all women, and lesbians in particular. It is easy to forget, in the days when the religious right looms large, that Foster and her ilk struggled not just against the forces of cultural conservatism, but also against the whole of science and academia to bring the truth to light and to demand the dignity afforded by their human status.

Sex Variant Woman has some minor flaws in that it doesn’t follow the easy chronological order of many biographies and tends to travel back and forth through time as Passet tackles one subject after another in Foster’s life. Leaving one chapter only to enter the next and find Foster years younger than she had been in the last paragraph can be a bit disconcerting, but doesn’t require too much of an adjustment. Overall, it is a book worth reading, perhaps more than once.

Review by Melinda Barton

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-known to seventies lesbians seeking visions of themselves in literature, Jeannette Howard Foster's "Sex Variant Women in Literature," was actually the work of a lifetime, originally published in the 1950s. Born in 1895, Jeannette was aware early on of her feelings for other girls, and with the help of psychologist William Sadler, who she consulted in early adulthood, came to accept herself as a lesbian.

Passet details Foster's education, loves (often unrequited), her creative writing, the restlessness that took her from college to college, career to career, state to state. Starting with a degree in science, she taught high school science for a time. She returned to school to get a Master's degree in English and Creative Writing and again turned to high school and college teaching. She ultimately got an additional BA in Library Science from Emory University, and then returned to the University of Chicago for a Doctorate in Library Science. Despite earning significantly less money than she had as a college professor, librarianship suited Jeanette, and provided her access to libraries that would be important in building the bibliography that would become "Sex Variant Women in Literature."

Among the places that Jeannette worked was Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research. Kinsey hired her as a librarian, but micromanaged her work, refusing to let her catalog the library using either the Dewey Decimal system or the Library of Congress system. Ultimately fed up, she left this high paying job.

An out and passionate woman who had spent much of her life in urban areas, Jeannette's final years were sadly spent in a tiny Arkansas town where she was forced back into the closet when she went into a nursing home. But her correspondences with many friends and colleagues kept her spirits up, until her former partner, concerned that their secret would be discovered, had all Jeannette's mail delivered to her, and started to withhold much of it.

Highly recommended to academic libraries, public libraries with an LGBT collection, and special LGBT interest archives and libraries.

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good biography on Jeanette Howard Foster, who wrote the first really comprehensive lesbian history in fiction. I enjoyed learning about her life, but reading about the challenges that lesbians of her generation faced, was eye-opening. As a contemporary lesbian, whether I decide to come out of the closet is more or less a personal choice. For women of Foster's generation, loving women really was the love that dare not speak its name. Public shunning and humiliation were only relatively minor consequences of being out, job loss, vandalism of your home and economic discrimination were very real threats for women in the early and mid 20th century. Prior to that, lesbians in "Boston marriages" went frequently unnoticed, because the idea that women had any sexual life of their own was so foreign to society. But once women who loved women began to get noticed, they quickly became feared, ostracized and persecuted. The fact that Foster pursued her book and had it published under her own name, speaks of extraordinary courage considering the political climate in 1957. My one quibble with this biography is that it tells very little about her personal relationships with lovers. We are told who they were and how long the relationships lasted, but very little else. In particular her last significant relationship remains largely unexplored, and I think that this detracts from the whole picture of her life. Foster was a very private woman and destroyed much of her personal correspondence prior to her move to a nursing home, so this may explain why, but still it left a little bit wanting for me. Otherwise a very readable and enjoyable biography, and due to a day sick in bed I was able to finish it in one sitting.

[Louise Chambers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book! Fascinating, well researched. I had the feeling that the author had interviewed Dr. Jeanette Foster in person because the narrative read almost like a conversation (all the interviews occurred after Foster's death). I had never heard of Dr. Foster, one of the first women to receive a doctorate in Library Science, and a lifelong Lesbian. Foster worked with Kinsey at the Sex Institute, and many other places during her long career. Her Sex Variant Women in Literature is a classic work of research. What is even more fascinating to me is that she flourished in the repression of the McCarthy era homophobia, and went on to be instumental in the Lesbian Pride movement of the 60's and 70's, participating in Daughters of Bilitis with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and writing for the Ladder. My Lesbian heroes such as Barbara Gittings, Barbara Grier, and Judy Grahn, are women that she was fast friends with, so I'm mystified as to why I knew nothing about Foster until I read about this book in the Gay and Lesbian Literary Review this fall. Now I want to read this book again, and read Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched biography of a woman born in the early 20th century who meticulously documented references to lesbian women, activity and inclination in history. Her list of such works was the only source of literature with lesbian content until the 1970's. A truly brave woman. A woman driven by her own need to find others like her stretching back through the centuries, and then share her knowledge with other women with the same need.

She really is one of our heroes.

A fascinating read.

One thing I would like to ask biographers is: do we really have to go back to great grandparents and grandparents? If so, why? A few summary sentences would suffice. And, if you must go into all this detail, please, please provide me with a genealogy chart so I don't have to remember their names and who they are. I beg of you. Thanks.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about a PhD in Library Science, who wrote one of the first books on lesbians in publishing. Foster helped many women find a way to validae their sexuality and also contributed an important work to scholarship. In fact, her work began as a way for her to validate her own sexuality. Also interesting was that Foster was Kinsey's librarian.

[Maggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellently researched and dynamic biography. I loved the meticulous but engaging retelling of Foster's story.

[Sarahsketti · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dry at times, but I loved learning about a lesbian hero I knew nothing about.

[Tricia Scully · Rating 5 out of 5]

The research for this book is absolutely remarkable!