{"id":340,"date":"2015-01-05T16:34:14","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=340"},"modified":"2015-01-05T16:35:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:35:37","slug":"lesbian-mystiques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2015\/01\/05\/lesbian-mystiques\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesbian Mystiques"},"content":{"rendered":"

To mark\u00a0the fiftieth anniversary of <\/em>The Feminine Mystique<\/a>, CCF<\/a> hosted an online symposium reflecting on where we are today. Judy Howard offered this short essay on <\/em>Lesbian Mystiques.<\/p>\n

Betty Friedan highlighted the many ways that cultural images and expectations of gender in the 1950s and 60s held women back.\u00a0 The expectations derived most obviously from patriarchy, which Friedan recognized, but also from white supremacy, capitalism, and heterosexism, which she did not.\u00a0 In Friedan\u2019s time the feminine mystique certainly constrained women\u2019s senses of themselves and their possibilities, but at least it recognized women as a group. \u00a0The \u201clesbian mystique,\u201d by contrast, denied lesbians even existed.\u00a0 The concept was literally inconceivable.\u00a0 In the 19th<\/sup> century, Queen Victoria is rumored to have flatly proclaimed: \u201cWomen don\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course there were lesbian subcultures and activism throughout the ages, even during the heyday of the feminine mystique. A group of us living in Madison WI at the time, not exactly Friedan\u2019s suburban middle America, organized what we rather inflatedly called a national conference of the National Lesbian Feminist Organization.\u00a0 And there were the womyn\u2019s music festivals, at least one of which continues to this day. \u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/div>But through most of the 20th<\/sup> century, to the extent that lesbians were recognized at all, they were viewed as masculine, butch, man-hating (ironically) dykes. Femmes were not regarded as similarly lesbian, since they looked like \u201cnormal women.\u201d\u00a0 Lesbians were also assumed to be working class \u2013 out of the middle class mainstream.Through most of the 20th century, to the extent that lesbians were recognized at all, they were viewed as masculine, butch, man-hating dykes. They were also assumed to be working class. The National Organization for Women excluded lesbians in the late 1960s.<\/span><\/p>\n

These assumptions were held not only by the larger culture, but also by heterosexual feminists, who were worried that recognition of lesbians would endanger the feminist movement.\u00a0 Friedan herself is infamous for coining the phrase, the \u201clavender menace\u201d in the late 1960s, when the National Organization for\u00a0Women excluded lesbians.<\/p>\n

\"National<\/a>
National Lesbian Feminist Organization group at an ERA March, Washington, D.C., July 9, 1978
Photograph by Joan E. Biren (JEB), from Joan E. Biren Papers. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps in reaction to this invisibility and intolerance, lesbians in the ’70s held images and self-definitions that were also limited in some ways. There was an essentialism about 1970s lesbians, evident in an assumption that lesbian behavior predicted a lifetime of lesbian preference and identity. Other even more profoundly unrecognized identities, especially trans identities, were conflated within lesbianism, complicating the presumed \u201cessences\u201d all the more.<\/p>\n

These essentialisms have changed markedly in the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 A recent New York Times<\/em> essay by Michael Schulman<\/a>, \u201cGeneration LGBTQIA\u201d<\/a> (January 9, 2013) makes clear that today we recognize a far broader and more fluid dimension of sexual possibilities.\u00a0 One\u2019s sexual partners are not assumed to always fit one gender profile: they change, they play. Whether or not this fluidity will grow into more stable patterns as these women (and men) age is an open question.<\/p>\n

More generally, there has been an astonishingly rapid transformation in public opinion about gay men and lesbians in recent years. In November, for the first time, three U.S. states approved same-sex marriage by popular vote.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Minnesota defeated the same kind of anti same-sex marriage measure that had passed everywhere it was introduced in the previous 15 years. We can now marry in a number of states, including my own.\u00a0 We can give birth to children; we can adopt children.\u00a0 We can serve openly as Presidents and Provosts of major institutions of higher education.\u00a0 We can serve openly in the military.<\/p>\n

<\/div>I do not mean to suggest that discrimination against lesbians is a thing of the past.\u00a0 Still, the degree of prejudice and ignorance has been dramatically reduced (in the U.S., certainly not in all global regions), through exactly the kind of consciousness-raising and collective action that Friedan helped pioneer for the women\u2019s movement as a whole.Discrimination against lesbians is not a thing of the past, but the degree of prejudice and ignorance has been dramatically reduced in the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n

Judith A. Howard<\/a><\/span> is in the sociology department and is the divisional dean of social sciences at the University of Washington. She is the coauthor of\u00a0Gendered Situations,\u00a0Gendered Selves: A Gender Lens on Social Psychology<\/em><\/a>, now in its second edition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To mark\u00a0the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, CCF hosted an online symposium reflecting on where we are today. Judy Howard offered this short essay on Lesbian Mystiques. Betty Friedan highlighted the many ways that cultural images and expectations of gender in the 1950s and 60s held women back.\u00a0 The expectations derived most obviously from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":495,"featured_media":341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[470,245,55,13,2998,21526,176,45,306],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-discrimination","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-inequality","tag-lesbian","tag-lgbtq","tag-sexuality","tag-social-movements","tag-transgender"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/files\/2015\/01\/4087pop.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/495"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}