Sometimes it was an arrangement through which a woman writer, artist, scholar, or other professional-Louisa Alcott, for one- evaded the loneliness imposed by ambition without incurring career-crippling burdens. Romantic friendship was a sanctuary from offensive importunacy-male sexual appetite. (Among men, that notion of romantic friendship persisted almost to the eve of the present century.) But soon, among women, other perceptions came to prevail. In the seventeenth century, the friendship of the poet Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda,” and Anne Owen (the pair “delighted not in physicality but in the union of souls and in philosophizing and poetizing”) was perceived as ennobling. But by the mid-nineteenth century, owing partly to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mai, the joke was over: lesbian lovemaking was firmly connected with moral degeneracy, and, a half-dozen decades later, owing to Havelock Ellis and Freud, it was seen as proof of mental disorder.Īttitudes toward love relationships considered to be nonsexual proved less easy to categorize, because more is known about how women themselves conceived them. French libertine poets took it as “merely a prelude to heterosexual lovemaking” respectable eighteenth-century society sealed it off as a mode of transvestite zaniness inevitable among the unreal inhabitants of the world of the theater or among female prostitutes.
In the earliest period, sexual contact between women seems to have been viewed with more humor than horror. The book’s survey of life and literature is divided into three periods-the sixteenth through the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries-and sets under examination two kinds of woman-to-woman relationships: connections understood by contemporaries to be primarily sexual in nature, and connections understood by contemporaries to be either nonsexual or, at any rate, only incidentally sexual in nature.
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