Category: 1900s
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Flamboyance and Fortitude: Butch-Femme Relationships in 2024
Butch-Femme relationships play an important role in lesbian history. What does the Butch-Femme relationship mean today?
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Boston Marriages and the Language of Lesbian Relationships
Maybe it was two women in your history textbook. Maybe it was your unmarried great aunt and her live-in ‘best friend’. We are all familiar with the story: two women are designated close friends by historians, family members and society, despite the pair’s decision to unite and entwine their lives like any marriage between a…
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How Should We Tell the Stories of “Bad” Lesbians from History in a Culture of Us vs. Them?
How do we write on complex, even harmful, lesbians from history in the age of “us vs. them”? How do we present the facts in a way that doesn’t omit the person or the truth? Is writing on a person from history ever objective, considering the historian has their own interests, motives and interpretations, and…
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Girlfriends or Gal Pals? Decoding Intimacy Between Women in Old Photographs
Love between women has existed forever, despite the crumbs of documentation and the meddling with evidence. Homosexuality didn’t begin with gay rights awareness in the 20th century. However, society still denormalises same-sex love as a new trend. In style. A fad. An abomination. A political choice. An act of rebellion. Bow-bowww. They’re wrong. Women lovin’…
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The Lesbian Pinball: Gay Liberation vs Women’s Liberation
Lesbians are pulled between solidarity with gay men, because of homophobia, and straight women, because of misogyny. We have prioritised solidarity with gay men or straight women at different points in history, depending on the contextual concerns.