OK, here we go. I am going to read this book and live tweet it and when I am done we are all going to understand Anne of Green Gables SO MUCH BETTER

The citation:
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women. Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Summary, from the publisher: "Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships"

Some "exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture

"and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women.

"Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law."

/End publisher's summary

Give me a minute here

Reading the overview now. Two important points: this book focuses on England from 1830-1880. "Lesbians" as a group were not recognized as existing, though sodomites were an "obsession." Also, straight people didn't exist either. They get invented in the 1880's.

Here's the quote"

"A new sense of heterosexuality, as a distinct sexual orientation formed in diametrical opposition to homosexuality, made marriage and the family the province of male-female unions" (6)

Lesbians get "invented" in the 1890's when some dudes did some studies about sex and started talking to women and realizing they were having sex with each other and were like DEAR GOD THIS IS A NEW THING. lol.

Meanwhile, women had literally been marrying each other for years.

There's some stuff about dolls and how they were homoerotic objects and, like, I will need to know SO MUCH MORE when we get to that chapter but I am probably as anxious to find out what is going on here as I am here for it.

this is where my brain is going idk

Previous scholars noted the, um, "'passionate' language used between female friends, then throw up their hands: 'There is no way of speculating the exact emotional, much less physical meaning of such relationships" (9)

*stares directly into camera*

Big "there is no way to know" energy ngl https://twitter.com/kasiababis/status/1231946043178340353?s=20

"Smith-Rosenberg contended that before the invention of homosexuality as a pathological form of deviance, sensual and emotional intimacy between women were accepted elements of domestic family life" (10)

I DESPERATELY NEED TO RE-READ ANNE OF GREEN GABLES OMFG

There's a bit making a correlation between "friendships" and "erotic friendships" and it seems important and I am hoping to understand why soon.

We need to jettison our modern concepts that have made "strict divisions between men and women, homosexuality and heterosexuality, same-sex bonds, and those of family and marriage" (13) because what's going on here is different and not part of the binary

"Women's erotic fantasies about women were at the heart of normative institutions and discourses, even for those who made a religion of the family" (13) and so it doesn't make sense to look at them as deviance or reason anyone would feel shame

Gals being pals in-fucking-deed

The weirdest part to me so far is that sodomy was so much more horrifying to the people at the time? Not just this time, I guess. I saw the same thing when I was researching medieval nuns. Penetration was the wicked thing. So sodomy was BAD. But lesbian sex? Only bad if dildo

Probably this thread is not the place to get into the many varieties of female-female sex that do not require a dildo.

Love this point. Queer women have always existed. "Cultural construction" often comes down to "at what point did some white dude make the observation and write it down" https://twitter.com/aankphd/status/1291072466282897409?s=20

I am going to miss a ton of the nuance as I do this OBVIOUSLY, but after reading the introduction only, I'm like, yeah. Y'all gon be wanting to go get a copy of this book for yourselves. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/between-women-friendship-desire-and-marriage-in-victorian-england_sharon-marcus/437079/item/17923899/?mkwid=%7cdc&pcrid=448918240737&pkw=&pmt=&slid=&plc=&pgrid=104755242616&ptaid=pla-927269736418&gclid=CjwKCAjwsan5BRAOEiwALzomX7XeXNBDNtg_7eUrg7sOuXUwCrZx759YV0oOcJLvs0W9bUSiCW0UzRoCyHkQAvD_BwE#isbn=0691128359&idiq=17923899

oh my god this poem she quotes of a woman talking to her "friend":

Did you miss me?
Come and Kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Eat me, drink me, love me
Laura make much of me

THIS WAS IN A CHILDREN'S ANTHOLOGY

I have to go do an errand really quick and will continue the live tweet after.

OK I AM BACK

In the car I was thinking about this point on how to ~be penetrated was the bad thing. And that made me think of the lesbian separatists we read about yesterday and how being penetrated was so "humiliating" and what a strong word that was. https://twitter.com/BlessedPioqueer/status/1291077419177250819?s=20

Honestly, the "humiliation" angle makes a bit more sense in this context? For one, the misogyny is just right there. To be penetrated as a man is (I think) a hanging offense in this time period. But... it's fine for women? You can see why the RadFems were like, "Hell to the naw."

Anyway, back to the book. So, apparently in ~France there were plenty of sapphics & the English were very offended by their existence. But then they would go and publish those "suck my juices" poems and have books full of women in bed together kissing and confessing devotion?

Very confusing.

the author thinks it was because in England, "a woman’s emotional and sensual connection to another woman helped unite her to a beloved husband, whereas the French lesbian canon highlighted the antagonisms between sapphism and bourgeois ideals of marriage" (15)

SEX WITH WOMEN KEEPS FAMILIES TOGETHER

Cannot convey with words how very much I am here for this and how desperate I am to go re-read every Victorian book I ever achingly loved as a queer child without ever understanding why

now we are talking about pornography and the Victorian porn of women dominating other women by whipping them?

I did not see that one coming tbh.

"our contemporary opposition between hetero- and homosexuality did not exist for Victorians," (20) and while it seems "unlikely that the middle-class female majority who wrote adoringly of their friends or enjoyed reading about adult women whipping teenage girls were actively

"engaged in sex with women" there were a "small but real number of Victorian women who did have sexual relationships" (20) and the big question is, how were those relationships seen? Are we really talking about gal pals? What about the women who married each other?

Kind of disappointed they didn't ALLL have sex with each other. NGL.

Like it makes sense. But I am disappointed.

This part worth reading in its full. Also lol at the endless debates about whether women ever had sex with each other or not.

Also, hard agree on it not mattering if they had sex or not? If they were seen as spouses, THAT is the important thing? It's not like we look at every married couple ever & go OMIGAUD HOW MUCH SEX DO YOU THINK THEY HAVE

Honestly we are way too obsessed with other ppls sex lives

"marriage was legitimated by activities other than sex" (21)

OK that is the end of the introduction and now we are moving into Chapter 1: Friendship and the Play of the System

"understanding the divergent uses of the term “friend” among Victorian women allows us to distinguish between two distinct relationships that often went under the same name: sexual and nonsexual intimacies between women" (25)

WOMEN WHO HAD SEX WERE CALLED "FRIENDS"

I don't even care that women who were intimate but did not have sex were also called friends.

I JUST LOVE FRIENDSHIP SO MUCH.

Apparently this dual meaning goes back to the Middle English, which I think is fantastic. Friend could mean friend BUT ALSO could mean sexual partner.

Prob where boyfriend/girlfriend comes from tbh.

So the basis of this chapter is going to be a lot of "life writing," including letters and diaries and such that women wrote about their lives.

Anne Lister's writings about her "seductions of numerous women" have been mentioned and I am very much excited about this.

talking a lot about the difference between friends and sexual friends and lesbians and women who married each other and tbh I'm confused at this point. If I figure it out, I will let you know. Or if YOU understand the difference, please help us.

maybe part of the reason it's hard to understand the difference is that the Victorians didn't particularly care to draw those lines?

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY MOVED HIS WIFE'S FEMALE LOVER IN WITH THEM

"As lenses for viewing the past, the heterosexual paradigm of the family, the deviance paradigm of homosexuality, and the continuum theory of lesbianism have all become cloudy, preventing us from seeing the diverse forms family [...] took" (32)

the nuclear family is the WORST version of the family and this is the hill I will die on

Now she is talking about the "startlingly romantic" language women used to talk to/about each other

"fell in love with Miss Geraldine:
"I adored her [...] content to sit at her feet like a dog"
"my heart turns to you as it was won't to do"
"I want desperately to see you"

I am starting to feel like I am more of a Victorian queer than a modern queer???

My kids' dad (who is gay) lives in the basement apartment. I live upstairs with my fiancé, who is a woman. We all work together as a family. Our queer relationships function to preserve the unit.

Victorian AF

Loving the distinction between "official" norms and the unofficial ones.

"Cross-dressing could lead to scandal and arrests, but lifewriting attests that many youths who adopted the clothes of the other sex were treated as amusing pranksters" (38)

"In her 1857 autobiography Elizabeth Davis recalled “enjoying” herself “extremely” when she dressed as a man to accompany a fellow housemaid to a party and noted that her employers simply “laughed” when they caught her" (38)

Wonder how different it would be for boys dressing like girls though

Now reading about friends versus "friends" and it is TRICKY because we can't always know

"The question “did they have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted
with a claim that women in the past were lovers—and it is almost always unanswerable" (43)

"If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defin-
ing a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex" (43)

But OBVIOUSLY people had babies and society survived so they had sex and probably just didn't talk about it.

IMPORTANT
"two types of relationships often confused with friendship, indeed often called friendship, but significantly different from it: 1) unrequited passion and obsessive infatuation; and 2) life partnerships, which some Victorians described as marriages between women" (44)

Now we are talking about the "unreciprocated passion" that Edith Simcox had for George Eliot. And UGH. THE YEARNING. (44)

"Simcox called “the love- passion of her life,” her longing for George Eliot as an unattainable, idealized beloved whom she called “my goddess” or, even more reverently,
'Her'" (44-45)

"Tellingly, though twentieth-century scholars often refer to Simcox euphemistically as Eliot’s devoted “friend" (45)

OK. I have to take a break for dinner. More soon.