The Stone Wall: An Autobiography

by Mary Casal

Mary Casal was the pen name of Ruth Fuller Field (1864-1935), a lesbian artist, teacher and entrepreneur.

The youngest of nine children, she was born Ruth White Fuller, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of musician Joseph Fuller and his wife Lydia, and the niece of painter George Fuller. Field's memoir recounts her life story: her journey of self-discovery and loving relationships with women, her tomboy childhood and instances of sexual abuse at the hands of men, her failed marriage and her contact with the lesbian community in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Touching and evocative, THE STONE WALL is a window into an astonishing life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, LGBT, Queer, Historical

227 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Sterre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating autobiography by a lesbian woman, born in 1864 in the countryside of Massachusetts. Published in 1930, it was incredible to me how some of her experiences and thoughts are so recognizable, and how her opinions and theories about gender and sexuality are so ahead of her time. For example, she argues for better sex education for children as she finds that shaming them for their sexual feelings is counterproductive. Also, she recognizes that women have sexual desires that need to be met just as well as men do. But of course, there are huge differences between her views and today’s beliefs as well: She believes masturbation causes illness, is overall very sex negative, and condemns gay men for being weak. It made me wonder how society’s views will develop in the coming 90 years and how people then will look back on our current thinking.

Apart from all this, it’s simply a beatiful story of the eventful life of a loving and intelligent woman, even though I became a bit bored nearing the end when it’s all about ‘then I moved there and met this person who then moved away and I moved again’.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

A glimpse into a truly alien world. Casal was born in the 1860s and loved women her entire life, yet her sensibilities (she's vehemently anti-masturbation, for example, believing it to cause insanity) are so at odds with the modern queer world that I spent much of the reading bemused. I strongly recommend finding Sherry Ann Darling's unpublished doctoral dissertation on Mary Casal online, entitled A Critical Introduction to The Stone Wall, as it provides real biographical information on Ruth Fuller Field, the woman behind the Casal pseudonym.

[Kaymarion Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This autobiography first published in 1930 is a clear and concise account of a lower middle class white New England (Western Massachusetts) woman's experience of her sexualness. Unusual in its frankness it provides a prime example of untalked of #MeToo moments in late 1800s-early 1900s, including not just childhood abuse but struggles with marital sex , intimacy with other women, and entre into the subculture of inverts. An important document of American herstory.

[Audrey C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book brightened but also ruined my life. It was ahead of its time with genuine lesbian romance, but all of the drama that came with it devastated me. SCREW YOU, JUNO