About book Odd Girls And Twilight Lovers: A History Of Lesbian Life In Twentieth-Century America (1992)
"The only constant truth about The Lesbian in America has been that she prefers women" (pg.308).This book took me nearly a month to read simply because there was so much information to consume. I would never have dreamed that the history of American lesbians was so complex and ever-changing. Faderman paints a marvelously detailed picture of a subculture in constant flux as it adapts to the changing society around it. She maps the transformation of "The Lesbian in America" from 1) isolated and surprisingly tolerated incidents of "romantic friendships" in the nineteenth century to 2) medically curious "sexual inverts" in the early 20th century, a definition which lesbians tended to distance themselves from to 3) "chic" curiosities during the sexual revolution of the 1920s to 4) demonized "vampires" in the economically depressed 1930s to 5) women gradually finding an identity in institutions like the military during the 1940s to 6) an oppressed minority hiding from the law during the hyper-paranoid 1950s to 7) the dual working-class butch/femme and middle-class "sophisticated" cultures of the 1960s to 8) the radical lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s to 9) the more modern, sex-positive, fully realized lesbian community of Faderman's modern day.The book is almost twenty years old, and segments have not aged well, such as Faderman's prediction that cultural feminists with their emphasis on "politically correct" sexual practices would one day beat out the "sexual radicals" who promoted sexual freedom (the sexual radicals, as we can see today, have come a great deal farther). But, aside from a few dated predictions, the book is an LGBT classic. The history of lesbianism is impeccably researched and tells a story that few people in my generation, even those involved in the LGBT community, have heard about. And it's an important one, too. The history of American lesbians as Faderman depicts it is entirely tied up in their American society- in the economic climate, in the attitudes towards sexuality, and in the women's rights movements of the times that surround them. At first Faderman's assertion that lesbian sexuality is shaped by the times seemed problematic to me, a member of the "essentialist" Born-This-Way generation, but by the end of the book it was clear to me that by sexuality, Faderman meant identity. While lesbian attraction and sexuality has been around as long as male homosexuality, lesbian identity took much longer to become what it is today. "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers" attempts to retrace that process and does a better job than any book of the genre that I've read.
A history of the emergence of identities and subcultures. Lillian Faderman's political argument is omnipresent, interpreting her source material: to take a random example from early on, she writes about social reformers, "Some of those women were cultural feminists, fueled by their belief that male values created the tragedies connected with industrialization, war, and mindless urbanization and that it was the responsibility of women, with their superior sensibilities, to straighten the world out again. Their love of women was at least in part the result of their moral chauvinism. Others were less convinced of women’s natural superiority, but they wanted to wrest from society the opportunities and training that would give women the advantages men had and thus permit them to be more whole as human beings. Their love of women was at least in part a search for allies to help wage the battle against women’s social impoverishment." In her introduction, she writes, "in the debate between the "essentialists"... and the "social constructionists"... my own research has led me to align myself on the side of the social constructionists." Throughout the book, she looks to identify the circumstances that led women toward or away from centering their emotional and erotic lives on other women, intertwined with a search for autonomy.Faderman is not a graceful writer, but this is nonetheless an interesting pioneering work drawing on sources that are becoming increasingly available as more research is done. She interviewed nearly 200 women, too; that's the advantage of doing recent history. I found that the chapter on subcultures in the fifties and the one on the lesbian-feminist movement particularly caught my attention.
Do You like book Odd Girls And Twilight Lovers: A History Of Lesbian Life In Twentieth-Century America (1992)?
I can't really recommend this book unless you need it for an academic reason. Faderman's research is excellent, but the writing is sometimes dull and repetitive, so it's not an easy book to read cover-to-cover. More troublesome, her rhetoric is both obvious and extremely dated. The book was originally published in 1991, which should have put her into second-wave feminism, but her reasoning and politics come off as even older than that, and therefore anachronistic and occasionally irritating. In all it's not a good read, as such, but it is a useful reference book and bibliographic source.
—Maggy
Lillian Faderman's book clearly & elegantly draws together the history of women loving women in the United States. I acquired a new reading list from perusing her endnotes and bibliography! Other readers have pointed out the problematic parts of Faderman's work--her focus on white women's experiences at the expense of marginalized communities-- but overall this book is a valuable academic & personal resource. It is lovely to be able to refer people to such a scholarly yet accessible work on lesbian history.
—Korri
I'm nearly at the end of this book. Overall I've enjoyed it, except for the constant over-simplification of working-class lesbian identities. Faderman suggests several times that, historically, working-class lesbians only adopted butch/femme roles because they reverted back to mimicking heterosexual culture in the absence of more diverse images of lesbianism... pretty patronising and seems very simplistic. Aside from that she makes some interesting observations, it's been a real eye-opener for me.
—WildWords
