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Lesbian Ethics Part 3 – Lesbian feminist friendship – Lynne Harne

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Lesbian Ethics. Lesbian History Group Event 3/06/2016

Lesbian Ethics Part 3 – Lynne Harne PDF

 

Following on from Elaine Hutton I am going to talk about the significance of lesbian feminist friendship particularly in terms of the ideas developed by Jan Raymond in her book A Passion for Friends.[i] I will also refer to some of the ideas that were already developing in the lesbian feminist community in the UK about friendship in the early l980s.

 

Jan Raymond built on Adrienne Riches’ ideas from her essay Women and Honour[ii] and those of others such as Mary Daly. . She primarily saw lesbian feminist friendship as both political and personal relationships which could help us to develop more effective politics and women’s political power through female bonding. She saw this as a challenge to what she called hetero-relations and hetero reality defined by the ideology that women primarily exist for men.  She did not view lesbianism as a purely sexual category but also as a social and political category where lesbianism is a choice.

 

She invented an ideal of friendship which she termed ‘Gyn Affection’ and said that it means

 

“Personal and political movement towards each other. As the personal is political so too the political is personal. Although politics and friendship cannot always go together we need to create a feminist politics based on friendship”

 

She saw this type of friendship as sustaining lesbian feminist community and political resistance to male power and male bonding against women. I should also say that she did not necessarily exclude heterosexual women in developing these ideas of friendship, but acknowledged this was much more difficult for heterosexual women. Nevertheless, I believe that for the most part she was referring to the lesbian feminist community.

 

She stated that Gyn affection  is not only a loving bond between 2 or more women but it is also a freely chosen bond which involves reciprocal assurances based on honour (which I interpret to mean trust), loyalty and affection.

 

Despite this slightly romanticised idea of female friendship she recognised it as an ideal to which there were several obstacles.

 

These included certain forms of lesbian separatism which she called ‘disassociation from the world.’ While recognising that lesbian separatism can have value in strengthening bonds between women she also saw long term disassociation from the world, as negative because it fails to confront and challenge male power in the form of hetero-reality and hetero-relations.

 

This argument is similar to one made by Adrienne Rich in an essay called ‘The meaning of our love for women is what we have to constantly expand’ (1977).  Rich argued that total separatism is a ‘temptation into sterile correctness, into powerlessness and an escape from radical complexity’ and that turning our backs on issues like women’s reproductive rights mean that we are turning our backs on compulsory heterosexuality where women are forced for different reasons to have sex with men. She also stated that violence against women, motherhood, childcare and racism were all issues which involved lesbians, so needed to be challenged for these reasons alone.

 

Other obstacles to the kind of personal and political friendship that Raymond was proposing included what she termed therapism;relationism; the tyranny of tolerance and victimism to name but a few.  While I do not have time to discuss all these here I want to focus on some aspects that can still have relevance today.

 

As Elaine Hutton has already highlighted although therapy as a practice is no longer so relevant now, the ideas behind it are.

For example in using the term therapism Raymond talks about ‘a tyranny of feelings where women come to believe that what really counts in their lives is their psychology’ and where a refusal to tell how one feels is seen as repressive and a denial of one’s inner life.

 

She argued that we live in a therapeutic society where self-exposure of feelings is seen as one of the highest virtues. Psychology has created a new type of person the human confessing animal which also leads to the publicising of personal life. Thus in her view therapising where women often act as sisterly co-counsellors is a substitute for genuine female friendship. She argues that the personal is political does not mean the publicising of ones personal life, where the intimate and private are expected to be exposed.  I hesitate to refer to facebook here, but in my view and probably many of my generation facebook is not the place to reveal our most deeply felt thoughts about our lives.

 

In relationism as applied to the lesbian feminist community, she refers to the tyranny of relations where she argues that the lesbian obsession to be in an ‘erotic relationship’ is no different from heterosexual women being obsessed with having a relationship with a man. ‘It seems’ she says, ‘that in one sense, lesbians have replaced men with women as relational objects.’

 

A critique of relationism or what in the UK we called couplism was also being developed here in the early l980s.  For example in a journal called REV/RAD –   the revolutionary and radical feminist magazine couplism was critiqued as a form of relationship where lesbians in sexual relationships do everything together. Such behaviour makes it impossible to have autonomous friendships with either individual in the relationship. Couplism was also seen in relationships where friendships were secondary and friends only became important usually when the relationship was in trouble.

 

I do not have time here to go into more detail on all the obstacles that Raymond identified. She recognised that what she was describing was ideal and that many women had felt betrayed by their personal and political friendships in lesbian feminism. She argued that we shouldn’t have too high expectations of each other and that feeling the ultimate victim of women’s betrayals are the result of too high expectations that women will behave differently from men. She states that in a woman hating world women will internalise and externalise anti-woman values. But that this is only a partial truth, and while we should continue to have high expectations of women, we shouldn’t be surprised when they are not lived up to.

 

References

[i] Janice Raymond l986 A Passion for Friends. The Women’s Press. London

[ii] Adrienne Rich l979 On Lies, Secrets and Silence. Virago. London

 

 

Copyrights © Lynne Harne / Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

Lesbian Ethics Part 2 – Elaine Hutton

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 Lesbian Ethics. Lesbian History Group Event 3/06/2016

https://lesbianhistorygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/elaine-hutton-lesbian-ethics.pdf

 

Adrienne Rich’s Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying was written in 1975. Her introduction said ‘It is clear that among women we need a new ethics; as women, a new morality.’ She went on to say, ‘I wrote Women and Honor in an effort to make myself more honest, and to understand the terrible negative power of the lie in relationships between women.’

I think I first read it in Newcastle on Tyne in the late 70s, and as I remember it was circulated widely among lesbian feminists in Tyneside at the time. Women mainly reached for it to quote bits to each other when they’d split up with a lover, or fallen out with a friend or a group. We focussed on ‘the terrible negative power of the lie in relationships between women’, and conveniently forgot AR’s assertion that she wrote it also ‘in an effort to make [herself] more honest’.

This reaction to the article points up the difficulty of establishing a lesbian ethics. A ‘new morality’ does involve making judgments about the attitudes and actions and politics of other lesbians, and we can fall into many traps in trying to do so.

I’m going to read out some significant passages from the essay, just in case you’re not familiar with it, and/or to give you the flavour.

Just a word – AR constantly refers to ‘relationships’; Julia Penelope – quoted in Changing our Minds, (p 116) says

‘Our relationships aren’t limited to those that are sexual; sexual intimacy isn’t the defining characteristic of a ‘relationship’. Our friendships are ‘relationships’, and our disagreements are relationships, too.’ (1990)

Can we think in terms of this wider definition?

Rich begins by talking about the male idea of honour, and how women in patriarchy have been expected to lie, and rewarded for lying. She then switches to our own relationships.

‘To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship, however, leads one to feel a little crazy.’ etc.

  • Read out a number of statements in her article.
  • Note that within this dense series of dictums about how to conduct ourselves in relationships with other women, individually and in groups, inevitably criticism and judgments are involved.

In Changing our Minds (1993), Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins basically wrote another version of lesbian ethics, in that they mount a detailed critique of therapy and the way it has been taken up by lesbians, causing us to embrace being victims together, rather than enriching each other as activists changing the world. A major part of therapy ideology is establishing a cult of ‘the self’, so that every woman’s experience and opinions are valid, and equal. (‘You’re worth it.’) Perhaps therapy doesn’t have such a hold now, but what’s still relevant is the way the jargon and psychobabble has infiltrated our consciousness – and politics. For instance, ‘just as therapists are not supposed to be judgemental, angry or critical with us, so we are supposed not to be judgemental, angry or critical with each other.’

‘Criticisms are felt as “attacks” and disagreements experienced as “hostility.” (p 148)

Where I stand

I’m totally sympathetic to Women and Honor, and I’ve always thought Changing our Minds a ground breaking book, and dipping into it over the last few days 20 years later I haven’t changed my mind.

My difficulty is applying the ethics to the lesbian community, in a bid to change the world.

As long ago as 1981, I wrote an article entitled ‘Reflections on the break-up of a lesbian relationship’, in which I stated ‘Because of the confusions and lack of patterns for our behaviour, it’s very easy for us to accuse each other of acting like men, of not having rid ourselves of ‘the patriarchy within’, …for instance, the word ‘patriarchal’ can be used to apply to all kinds of lesbian feminist behaviour. We can call monogamy patriarchal because of all the associations of property/possession. But we can also call non-monogamy patriarchal when it’s expressed as ‘Why should I deny myself as many sexual partners as I want just because my lover feels hurt? Why should any of these women put demands on me? I’m free to sleep with them all’. In the latter case, we have the problem of morality. In trying to invent a new existence, we hurt others.’

I think I was saying we can play with words and concepts to our own advantage. (Friggin’ Little Bits, a lesbian singing group in Newcastle in the 1970s, wrote lots of songs that showed how lesbians tied ourselves in knots trying to invent new ways of relating, while not being able to discard notions and feelings of possessiveness, ownership and jealousy. – ‘I’m yours, you’re mine, fuck anyone else’ go the words of one song).

A list of devices lesbians use against each other in the name of ethics/morality roll off my tongue….

‘You’re aggressive/entitled/abusive…acting like a man’; ‘you’re silencing me/negating my experience’; ‘right and wrong are patriarchal concepts, smacking of Catholicism’; ‘let me discuss your racism with you’, etc. I’m sure you can all think of examples…

So, is there a relevance for lesbian ethics today?

  • How do we begin to live up to it?
  • Is it possible to be critical of other lesbians/ lesbian lifestyles/ politics without setting ourselves above them?

Note that as a political movement, being critical and asking questions has meant we are denigrated as the ‘thought police’, and now, of course, as TERFS.

Elaine Hutton, June 3rd, 2016

Copyrights © Elaine Hutton / Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Lesbian Ethics Part 1 – Sheila Jeffreys

Published on by Angela C. Wild1 Comment

Lesbian Ethics. Lesbian History Group Event 3/06/2016

Lesbian Ethics Part 1 – Sheila Jeffreys PDF

What is lesbian ethics?

In the 1980s Lesbian Ethics was a hot topic in a way that is unknown today. In the US the journal Lesbian Ethics was published from 1984 into the 1990s. In the UK the journal Gossip: a journal of lesbian feminist ethics was published from 1986 onwards by Onlywomen Press in response to the US version. Lesbian ethics was understood to cover analysis and theoretical exploration of issues concerning lesbian personal lives, sexuality and relationships. There was not a clear distinction between ethics and theory. Indeed the UK publication, Gossip, covers a wider ground of lesbian theory with much material on lesbians in fiction and in the movies, for instance. The US journal is a little more limited in scope.

Origin in the male left?

Lesbian feminists in the WLM considered that the personal and the political should reflect each other. They were not alone in thinking this. Many had come from the left where thinkers in the 1960s and 70s talked about what they called ‘living the revolution now’, how activists and revolutionaries should conduct their ‘private lives’ in consonance with their political beliefs and aims. They talked about prefigurative forms, i.e. creating forms of practice that would prefigure what would happen after the revolution. For those on the left this related to issues such as squatting, non-monogamy, sharing resources. These ideas travelled over into the WLM as we saw last meeting in relation to squatting.

Non-monogamy

In particular, the idea that the correct politics of relationships entailed non-monogamy was adopted by some within feminism and particularly lesbian feminism. This idea had its origins with sexist men who wanted widespread sexual access to women and were able to lecture non-compliant women that they were too hung up on seeking ownership and property in another person and deeply bourgeois ‘romantic love’, rather than ‘free love’. Within heterosexuality these ideas benefitted men but not women so much.

So, some of the ideas of living the revolution now came to lesbian feminism from the male left, though lesbian feminists added their own interpretations. Other ideas came specifically from lesbian feminism and included radical critiques of the male left ideas. Lesbian feminists agreed with the radical feminist understanding that the personal is political, i.e. issues of personal life are shaped by political structures. Lesbian ethics could be seen as a way to turn that around and accept that the political is personal, i.e. political values should form the foundation of the way in which we live our personal lives. Lesbian feminists often took these ideas very seriously indeed. The idea that we should not be looksist, for instance, was interpreted by some to mean that we should not ‘fancy’ other women but engage in sexual relationships with them solely on  the basis of their right on political ideas.

Feminist philosophy

In the 1980s, lesbian feminists in the US in particular, began to address these ideas within discussion of what was called ‘lesbian ethics’. From 1984 an important journal was published by Jeanette Silveira in California, called Lesbian Ethics. This published articles by many of those involved in discussing what we in UK were probably still calling the politics of the personal, such as Julia Penelope, Bev Jo, Sidney Spinster, the UK novelist Anna Livia, and the Bloodroot Collective which ran the feminist vegetarian café and bookstore in Connecticut and first delivered their paper at the W.I.T.C.H. lecture series in Boston, Women’s Intellectual Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

Lesbian Ethics featured a regular “Readers’ Forum,” offering short pieces by many contributors on special topics set in advance. Memorable topics have been “Non? Monogamy?” (1: 2, Spring 1985); “Lesbian Therapy” (3: 3,Fall 1985); “Femme and Butch” (2: 2, Fall 1986); “Sex” (2: 3, Summer 1987); and “Separatism” (3: 2, Fall 1988). Articles covered topics such as lesbian nuns, sado-masochism, Dyke Economic, fat oppression, lesbian violence and the possibility of lesbian community.

Gossip, in the UK, republished some of the articles from Lesbian Ethics in the US, notable Julia Penelope’s series The Mystery of Lesbians, but also pieces by UK lesbians like me on butch and femme, separatism, AIDS, fat oppression, lesbian movies and literature.

In the late 1980s in the US, lesbian ethics became a field of teaching and literature in philosophy departments in universities where lesbian feminists were teaching. Philosophy in the academy seems to have taken a rather different form from here in the UK, where universities have not nurtured feminist philosophers. In the US however, a number of academic lesbian feminists were been able to incorporate issues such as sadomasochism into the remit of philosophy in a way that I think would have been unthinkable in the UK. These remarkable and exciting US academic lesbian feminist philosophers include Marilyn Frye, Sara Lucia Hoagland, Claudia Card, Joyce Trebilcot and Jeffner Allen. For example, Sarah Lucia Hoagland published her book, Lesbian Ethics, in 1988, Claudia Card published Lesbian Choices in 1995, and Jeffner Allen’s collection Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures was published in 1990.

 

Sado-masochism

Lesbian feminist ethics was concerned with how lesbians related sexually with each other. In concert with the idea of living the revolution now, there was some outrage and horror when, in the early 1980s, the ideas of a lesbian sado-masochist movement were imported from a group of San Francisco dykes who called themselves Samois, into the UK. The revolution was, of course, to be about equality, so how could a sexual practice based upon the eroticising of  extreme differences of power, be consistent with our revolutionary aims. We did not want to create a future, through our actions in the present which continued to eroticise women’s inequality.

 

We understood that the eroticising of women’s inequality was the foundation, the very bedrock of the way in which sexuality was constructed under male supremacy. We did not see sex as ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ but as a form of thinking and behaviour that is shaped by the power relationship of men to women. Women are born into inequality and only have powerlessness to eroticise. Heterosexuality embodies women’s masochism and powerlessness, in makeup and clothing, high heeled shoes for instance, having to show bottoms in skirts and not be able to climb trees etc. Men, very clearly, find women’s subordination sexy and this is the very basis of their sexual response. Pornography and men’s writings make that extremely clear. Men are trained to be initiatory and aggressive towards women sexually. Women are expected to eroticise submission and this works fairly well. Collections of erotica and women’s sexual fantasies show women eroticising men’s power. Mills and Boon novels feature big, strong men and women as swooning fans. The murder of women, rape and all forms of sexual violence against women and children  are ordinary aspects of men’s sexual sadism. We argued as lesbian feminists, and I argued in my book Anticlimax, that for women’s revolution to have any chance of success it was necessary to transform sexuality so that it featured the eroticising of equality because, as I wrote in my paper in Lesbian Ethics onSM, it was hard to fight oppression when you responded sexually to the boot that kicked you into submission.

 

In the early 1980s revolutionary feminist lesbians such as myself would go to conferences and set up workshops to discuss sadomasochist fantasies. Our practice was to ask women what sort of fantasies they had and make them seem funny and laugh at them. We considered that laughter was the best response and would take the power out of the fantasies, which would not be capable of creating such a sexual frisson after a roomful of women had rolled about laughing at them. In 1984 we set up the group Lesbians Against Sado-Masochism in London, and I wrote the piece, Sado-Masochism: the erotic cult of fascism which was published in the US journal Lesbian Ethics in 1986, and then became the appendix of my book The Lesbian Heresy in 1993. In the 1980s the term sado-masochism was used whereas the term BDSM is used today.

 

The ideology of SM

In the early 80s there was a detailed ideological defence of sado-masochism mainly created by gay male practitioners. Not surprisingly, SM was central to the sexuality of gay men, as they had ‘damaged’ masculinity and therefore eroticised powerlessness and powerful, aggressive masculinity in the way that women were expected to do. Many books and articles were written by them, and critique was thin on the ground. The forms of defence put forward were that SM was a valuable form of practice because it created a particularly powerful and pleasurable sexual response. Gay sex that did not focus on SM was called disparagingly at the time, vanilla sex i.e. colourless, or bambi, and seen as namby- pamby or niminy-piminy. SM sex was called by gay men ‘heavy-duty’, i.e. the real thing.

 

At that time there was a rather small underground fetish scene of het SMers. The most publicly promoted form of SM was gay sex, and indeed, as I argue in my book Unpacking Queer Politics, sm became the mainstream and accepted expression of gay male sexuality and gay male porn. The promotion of sado-masochism influenced lesbians who were part of a mixed gay scene.

 

SM dykes

SM dykes defended their position in slightly different ways from the gay men. Some practitioners made it clear that SM was a solution for them to the problem of having a damaged sexual response as a result of sexual abuse by men, usually their fathers or stepfathers. I can remember speaking against SM at conferences where young women would jump up from the audience and say that SM had healed them from the PTSD they suffered from sexual violence. They said that it enabled them to ‘feel’ and broke down the defensive wall they had built up to guard against sexual feeling lest it trigger the trauma of the abuse. In reply I would always say that that just created a constant cycle of abuse and offered no way out. The feminists speaking out about sexual violence from fathers within the WLM joined what were called Incest Survivors’ Groups in order to practice feminist consciousness-raising and self-help to heal from trauma. SM groups, it seemed were the new anti-feminist alternative, aimed at recycling rather than healing. Many feminists weighed in with critiques at the time, and the book Against Sadomasochism (1982) was a useful collection of pieces from very well-known feminists including Kathleen Barry, Diana Russell, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker. One defence lesbians made in the 80s of SM was that it was OK for lesbians to do it because no men were involved and women were each other’s equals. Thus they could truly consent to the practice and no inbuilt power imbalances existed. Articles and memoirs in the book showed how the practice of SM functioned within abusive relationships wherein one lesbian could punish her partner for infidelity, for instance, by humiliating her and causing pain.

 

Alice Walker’s piece was particularly powerful. She argued that sm was racist because it eroticised and recycled the abuses of slavery. She explained that SM dykes played out scenarios of master slave, with white mistresses and black slaves in dog collars and on their knees. This she saw as counter-revolutionary, sexist and racist in the extreme.

 

In the early 80s in London there was much use of Nazi imagery by SM gays and SM dykes. The swastika was an important SM symbol and both gay men and lesbians into SM wore them. It was in response to this that I wrote ‘Sadomasochism: the erotic cult of fascism’. I argued that at a time when skinhead youth were beating up black gay men, and particularly disabled gay men, in the toilets at gay clubs, it was entirely inappropriate to be promoting the eroticising of fascism.

 

There were some within the WLM who considered that fighting SM was an unnecessary distraction, rather an unimportant side alley for feminists. The radical feminist journal Trouble and Strife, for instance, in the early 80s put the shoutline ‘Not the sadomasochism debate’ on its cover in order to show its disdain for the issue. But SM proved not to be a minor issue, tangential to mainstream feminism. The huge expansion of the porn industry mainstreamed SM. The defence by many gay male and some lesbian practitioners made SM chic, such that it became the trendy and progressive way to do sex. The effect now is that many young heterosexual feminists I speak to say they have been involved in SM. They have mostly got out by the time I talk with them but it is clear that SM is very big now in mainstream heterosexuality. But, more importantly, the promotion of SM has so influenced everyday malestream sexuality that what were once seen as SM practices are now routinely carried out against women in heterosexuality, practices such as what is called ‘rough sex’, anal sex which leads to teenage girls having to wear butt plugs because of the damage to their bodies, or even the choking of women, for instance. None of this was ordinary practice when I was a young heterosexual woman at all.

 

Far from being a diversion, the SM that we combatted so valiantly in the 80s, now called BDSM, has become de rigueur in much heterosexual practice in the present. BDSM is mainstream and not looking particularly niche and revolutionary any more. However, at this time there is vanishingly little in the feminist or lesbian communities online or off of the ethics of sexuality and everyday life and relationships. Sexual practice, in particular, is hardly examined. Whereas it was politicised as crucial to women’s oppression in the WLM it has now been almost entirely reprivatized. Women do not speak of how troubled they are by SM sexual fantasies now. I see no discussion of how our sexual practice fits into the revolution we are trying to create.

 

Copyrights © Sheila Jeffreys / Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

How to become a lesbian in 30 minutes Part 2 – Elaine Hutton

Published on by Angela C. WildLeave a comment

‘How to become a lesbian in 35 minutes’- Municipal Lesbian Feminism and Lesbians in education. Lesbian History Group Event 5/12/2015

Lesbians in Education in the 1980s.

I’m going to talk about the Girlswork movement within the Youth Service in the 1980s, which arose out of second wave feminism, but first take a brief retrospective look at the Girls Club movement which began in first wave feminism.

2)  Girls’ Clubs

  • In 1911, the National Organisation of Girls’ Clubs was formed (this is at the height of the Suffragette’s militant campaign for votes). Some volunteers were members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, suffragettes – striving for change in women’s position. Between the wars, in 1931, NOGC adopted a constitution with objects such as ‘to arrange deputations to government departments and public bodies, in connection with the social, educational and industrial equality of girls and women’ – so it continued to fight for women’s and girls’ rights.
  • In 1938 there were 352 affiliated girls’ clubs in London. The London Union of Girls’ Clubs (LUGC) employed 4 paid women staff, owned 3 camp-sites, a swimming pool and a country club, for the sole use of young women. Until the 1950s the youth service was not a paid professional area of employment, so it was mainly run by volunteers. All officers, members of committees and club workers were women.

The basic message, throughout this time, was ‘– understanding and valuing girls and ensuring they get equal shares.’ (Jane Dixon   A Short History of the Girls Club Movement in London)

2)   So what happened?

  • All was lost after WW2 with the appointment of men at the top. In 1946, the London Union of Mixed Clubs and Girls’ Clubs was formed, as mixed work was seen as a progressive experiment. In 1949 there were 50 girls only clubs, by 1960 there were 7. The growing emphasis on ‘professionalism’ led to an increase in the number of male full-time youth workers, with women being employed as part-timers or working voluntarily. In 1960 the title of the organisation became ‘London Union of Youth Clubs.’ Girls had been completely disappeared.
  • Girls’ lack of involvement in this context was predictable. As early as 1952, as more men took on leadership roles, they were offered courses in how to work with girls, as ‘many men have experienced difficulty in planning a programme to interest girls…’
  • Henceforth, girls were treated as a ‘problem.’ During the 1960’s, they were offered activities such as grooming, fashion, and jewellery making – that is, channelled into femininity.
  • By the 1970s and 1980s, youth work – funded by local authorities all over the country, was thriving. However, it had effectively become ‘boys’ work’ with all the resources now going into men and boys. When girls did attend clubs or centres they remained ‘invisible’, and didn’t compete with boys for the use of facilities, equipment or attention, unsurprisingly given the way they were treated. This was the situation when lesbian feminists started getting jobs in youth work in the late 70s and 80s.

3)  How the 12 borough wide Girls’ and Young Women’s Projects were born.

  • In the mid-1970s, with the surge of the British women’s liberation movement, feminist youth workers, predominantly lesbians, came together to organise, and challenge mixed work and what happened to girls within this. But when women workers initially tried to set up girls’ only nights in youth clubs, they often experienced (literally) violent reactions from boys. Generally they got no support from male workers, as by then the predominant ideology in youth work was that of ‘soft policing’ of delinquent boys. Women workers were seen as inadequate if they couldn’t ‘control’ i.e. pander to, violent young men, or weren’t prepared to tolerate their behaviour. A small group of dedicated women fought hard to re-establish the right for girls to be provided for equally, often at great cost to themselves. Women making these ‘demands’ were described as ‘difficult’, women’s libbers, and in some cases sacked by male workers.
  • Here are some typical responses by male youth workers:

There is some harassment of the girls by the boys but this is only healthy natural teasing. I firmly believe in the integration of girls and boys and see no need for specific work with girls…In fact, two girls are taking part in a pool competition (Out of Sight, p 27)

It is important to find the right type of woman to work with girls. …Women who believe that girls have a positive role to play but are not strong feminists. I dislike feminist views; they only rouse hostility in men and boys. (Out of Sight, p.24)

  • Against this background, women youth workers fought hard and finally prevailed. So the Girlswork (political term) movement was born, or re-born. Youth Services throughout UK took on ‘working with girls’, and the National Association of Youth Clubs had a Working with Girls unit (Leicester) to give support, training, and provide resources and ideas for the national Girls’ Work movement.
  • London borough youth services were part of ILEA, the radical authority headed by Ken Livingstone. After the pioneering and successful models of Camden and Islington Girls Projects, which also, incidentally, set up the first very successful Young Lesbian groups, the rest of the 12 London boroughs followed. These projects tended to attract feminists and lesbians – for instance, I applied for a job and hadn’t been a youth worker before this, and had no background in youth work.

  Tower Hamlets Girls Project- Snapshot

I was employed by Tower Hamlets Girls Project (1984-88), and often worked closely with Hackney Girls Project, which had also employed a lesbian. In the time I was there we had a great deal of freedom to do what we wanted.

Among the aims of my project (which of course we wrote ourselves) were:

  • To work with girls and young women all over the borough, in an anti-racist and anti-sexist way, with young women with disabilities and young lesbians.
  • to develop innovative provision which challenges the traditional roles of women.
  • to develop the confidence of girls and young women in their abilities and opinions, and to enable them to question and make appropriate decisions about their own lives.
  • Also, to be a resource for girls’ work in the borough, to campaign for and support girls’ work, monitoring how resources are allocated and supporting women workers in their work with girls, as well as co-ordinating borough-wide events for girls and young women, and to  initiate training for workers on issues associated with girls’ work

Because of ILEA’s radical policies at the time, we had money, and access to resources. There was a central Learning Resources branch. Lots of videos were available, which generated discussions and ideas – for example, Motherland, (1983) – ‘based upon the personal  testimony of 23 women who came to Britain from the West Indies in the 1950s’, talking to their daughters who were youth club members; How can I ignore the girl next door? (how to become a lesbian in 35 minutes), young lesbians talking about their lives; Danny’s Big Night – scrutinising male behaviour critically; these videos were usually made by youth projects, with the help of arts’ workers.

Provision for girls quickly took on feminist approaches. e.g. with part-time lesbian feminist youth workers, I ran a number of evening girls’ groups, where we discussed anything and everything – e.g. why would you want to get married? what do you want to do with your life? At times, these became young women’s consciousness raising sessions, so girls disclosed abuse, and raised issues of being bullied. (We always tried to deal with problems that arose in their lives). We worked with community arts projects to make videos, e.g. Four Corners, a video shopfront project collaborated with our project, so several groups made short videos on ‘fostering’ and ‘sexual harassment’ – they chose the topics, wrote the ‘storyboard’, improvised the acting out of scenes, and learned to use the equipment to video their stories, then we showed them publicly. Over time, in different youth club sessions, they explored ideas and issues which affected them, such as authority and freedom, racism, relationships with friends, siblings, parents, parents’ partners – the space and time to do this became invaluable. I also started running girls’ groups in several schools, at lunch-time and after school, and even did sessions in school-time with sympathetic teachers – always insisting on single-sex groups, which felt like a coup, given schools were generally more conservative in their approach.

e organised several girls’ activities weeks across Tower Hamlets and Hackney, and employed a number of tutors to do ‘non-traditional activities’ with groups of girls. The organisation of these was formidable, getting venues, transport, tutors, and working out the timing. I employed lesbian feminists whenever I could, including the van drivers.  Activities included car maintenance, self-defence, horse-riding, carpentry, computers, drama/video.Several times, we took groups of girls away, to Oaklands Women’s House in Wales, to do activities such as mountain-biking, pony trekking and canoeing. The main aim was to give them a sustained experience of an all-women environment. Here, predictably, anti-lesbianism emerged, which manifested itself as resistance to the two women who were teaching them canoeing. On the second day the whole group came down to the stony bank in skirts, high-heels and full make-up, rather than jeans and warm jackets…we dealt with it by going back to the house and having a discussion, which didn’t resolve everything, but we were careful to confront their stereotypes and prejudices and talk about why they held these attitudes. (Their resistance to lesbianism was a demonstration of ‘femininity’!)

We organised training for both full and part-time youth workers – sexual abuse (including what to do when girls disclose), how to approach non-traditional activities, challenging heterosexism, working with girls in ‘mixed’ youth clubs.

The full-time Girls’ Project workers throughout London met regularly together around the boroughs to discuss problems, conflicts with management, conflicts with each other. These meetings had the effect of making us a united and coherent and politically formidable grouping of women.

5) Young lesbian groups

I set up one quite late on in my years working there – it didn’t really come out of the project organically, so didn’t last long. I think the most valuable work I did in the project was running and organising young women’s groups, where they had the opportunity to reflect on their lives, and perhaps gain a different perspective. The strength lay in showing them strong women, a lot of whom were lesbians, as the girls I worked with were often quite young. So it was youth provision for girls which offered, among other things, wider possibilities than heterosexuality – and femininity. (pass round photos).

Within other girls’ projects, young lesbian groups emerged as a genuine development as the need arose, and had a feminist basis, as radical work with girls meant young women were able to see lesbianism as a positive political alternative to heterosexuality.

This is illustrated by statements made by a young lesbian,

I began to realise that there was a political affiliation, in some places, with lesbianism …I had thought it was just purely sexual, and then I finally realised that it had a lot to do with politics…And how it can be a political decision not to sleep with men…                                                                                        (Talking about Young Lesbians, p.29)

However, a number of young lesbian and gay groups, funded mainly by the GLC and partly by ILEA London Youth Committee and other sources, functioned at the time. The London Gay Teenage Group received funding from the GLC, and though it’s never stated, there was a tendency in such groups to put male interests first in groups that didn’t emerge from young women’s projects.  For instance, there were a number of underlying assumptions behind lesbian and gay youth work:

  • young lesbians and gay men were born that way and therefore have special needs,
  • sexual preference/orientation is the prime definer of homosexuality,
  • lesbians and gays are the same as/as normal as, heterosexuals
  • and lesbians are no different from gay men.

We can see how this thinking leads directly to the situation we have today – LGBT.

These assumptions created a context for the work, which meant certain forms of provision were more acceptable than others. Groups were advertised as offering support, advice or counselling. Courses were run for lesbian and gay youth workers, on ‘counselling skills and healthy living’ to deal with internalised oppression. This emphasis on the route to healthy homosexuality was insidious, as it reflected the ideology of the individualised solution, where anger and potential action against oppression were contained. The counselling model was more acceptable to local authorities, as it did not upset the status quo. .

One outcome of this was that lesbianism was restricted to small groups where young women had already defined themselves…so it didn’t ‘spread’. There were several instances within the Girls’ Projects of lesbian workers being told by their officers that it was inappropriate to come out to young women in other groups, even if they asked directly. I asked my manager what support I’d get if I came out in a school, as the girls were already making comments about my short hair and manner of dress and she told me it was inappropriate to talk about my private life, as she, the manager, wouldn’t come out as a drug user.  (However, it was always acceptable for heterosexual workers to talk about families and male partners and kids). The same (white) officer told me Asian women wouldn’t attend a training day challenging heterosexism, because ‘Asian people think it’s rude to talk about sex’ again revealing her own prurient view of lesbianism and racist assumption that no lesbians are Asian.

6) How did it all disappear? (again)

  • As said already, the Girls Projects met regularly to plot, and strategise, but after a time management London-wide tried to bring in targets and outcomes, which we resisted for a long time. The intention of this was to bring the projects under control.
  • Trendy supportive men invented ‘Boyswork’ which, of course, they’d had all the time, and attempted, sometimes successfully, to steal our hard-won resources to do it. They put out pamphlets and booklets stealing our language and ideas – sounds familiar? But there was always opposition, and a critique, of their attempts to undermine us, as we were a strong united group.
  • In less radical hands, and with women workers who weren’t feminists, girlswork became, ‘makeup’, grooming, cooking, crafts – non-threatening training for heterosexuality and femininity (history repeats itself, as similar activities were offered in the 1950s and 1960s). .
  • Thatcher abolished the GLC and then ILEA so it was a matter of scrambling around for another job for all of us. The fact that the government found it necessary to take the step of abolishing the GLC and ILEA shows what a threat the radical values had become.
  • Bringing in Clause 28 was a direct and deliberate thrust at political lesbians and our values – The amendment was enacted on 24 May 1988, and stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Gay men subsequently did not support lesbians, insisting they were born that way and couldn’t help it so needed tolerance and understanding, whereas lesbians, myself included, declared proudly in large meetings fighting the clause that our aim in our various projects was indeed to ‘promote homosexuality and pretend family values.’ We didn’t express it that way, of course – we said we encouraged young women and girls to look critically at the family and marriage, and show them there were other ways of living outside of the nuclear family (this wasn’t news to them, as the majority already were!)

7) What can we learn from these experiences?

  • Girlswork existed before the war, from the turn of the century, and was wiped out, and in the 70s, with 2nd wave feminism, we fought for and brought it back.
  • We named ‘anti-lesbianism’ and fought unashamedly and upfront for lesbian rights and values and for the right of young women to become lesbians. We resisted mixed groups, and stood out for single sex groups, and had the research and evidence to demonstrate that girls preferred that (Subsequently, in my next job with Bucks County Council Youth and Community Service, I did a research project which also showed girls preferred single sex groups and exciting activities, and it was suppressed by the head of service).
  • We were a united group who fought for what we believed in, and constantly met, argued, discussed, face-to face, what we should be doing. We also stood united against undermining of the work, and supported each other against unsympathetic managers.
  • We were ‘out, proud and identified as lesbian feminists.’

 

Copyright © Elaine Hutton / Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Resources used

Hutton, Elaine, Girls’ Own Story, (later titled Sabotage in the Youth Service), 1985, unpublished thesis for Diploma of Youth and Community Work

Lloyd, Trefor, Work with Boys, National Youth Bureau, 19854 

National Organisation for Work with Girls and Young Women – Background and History

This is a leaflet which includes references to articles by Louie Hart, Val Jones, Val Marshall, Pratibha Parmar, Gilly Salvat, and Jane Dixon

Within the leaflet, I have used information from the following:

Val Marshall ‘The Working Group for the recently formed national organisation for Work with Girls and Young Women explains why the re-establishment of a Girls Work Organisation is long overdue’, published in Youth in Society, June 1983

Jane Dixon   A Short History of the Girls Club Movement in London

Val Marshall Girls are People too.Out of Sight: A Report on how the ILEA Youth Service in the Camden area is meeting the needs of Girls and Young Women, 1982

Tower Hamlets Girls’ Project Report, September 1984 – July 1986

Trenchard, Lorraine (ed),   Talking about Young Lesbians, London Gay Teenage Group, 1984

Trenchard, Lorraine & Warren, Hugh, Something to Tell You, London Gay Teenage Group, 1984

Trenchard, Lorraine, & Warren, Hugh, Talking about Youth Work, London Gay Teenage Group, 1985

Youth Work Unit, Working with Girls: A Reader’s Route Map, National Youth Bureau, 1981

Lesbian Feminism into the Mainstream – Lynne Harne

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‘How to become a lesbian in 35 minutes’- Municipal Lesbian Feminism and Lesbians in education. Lesbian History Group Event 5/12/2015

The 1980s saw the development of a new phenomenon – municipal lesbian feminism, when some lesbian feminists in London began to work for and influence local government – most significantly the Greater London Council (GLC) and the Inner London Education Authority. As well as addressing sexism, the GLC adopted the concept of ‘challenging heterosexism.’ Funding was given to some lesbians projects and training was developed for staff on how to challenge heterosexism in the workplace. The concept of challenging heterosexism also impacted on the Inner London Authority most significantly in the youth service through the development of girls work and some young lesbian groups. The talks discuss what lesbians involved in this work were able to achieve and the opposition to it.

Municipal lesbian feminism in London 1981-1987

Dr Lynne Harne became a lesbian feminist activist during the l970s. In the l980s she worked as a research and policy officer for Rights of Women on lesbian and child custody issues, then became an equal opportunities officer with specific responsibility challenging for heterosexism at the GLC and then worked for the ILEA and was a member of the feminist lesbians in education group. In the l990s she became an academic.)  

I am going to talk about a brief moment in the l980s when lesbian feminism became mainstreamed in London focussing on the Greater London Council and its sister organisation the Inner London Education Authority. The Greater London council (GLC) was abolished by Margaret Thatcher in l986, but the Inner London Education Authority survived another 4 years before it too was abolished in 1990.

The wider political context

The wider political background to this is that the Tories had won the general election in l979 but many local authorities were being run by left wing labour councils. Ken Livingstone became the labour leader of the GLC in l981 and decided to open up the work of the council to improve equal opportunities for working class people, black and ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities and lesbians and gay men. It was known as the Rainbow Coalition.

The GLC Women’s Committee and the Funding of lesbian feminist projects

Initially, there was a lesbian and gay working party which was heavily dominated by gay men and gay male interests but lesbian feminism began to have an influence when the Women’s Committee was established in l982. Several lesbian feminists went to work for the women’s committee support unit during this time and established that lesbians had different needs and interests from gay men.  The Woman’s Committee began for the first time to fund lesbian projects – for example it funded the lesbian custody project at the women’s legal organisation Rights of Women and also funded some workers at Lesbian Line (a phone line for lesbians only) as well as funding other women’s projects mainly run by lesbian feminists such as Women in Manual Trades. It even purchased the lease of buildings so that they could be women only and provide women only services. One of these was 54 Featherstone Street (now called Tyndall Manor) and as far as I am aware remains the only building in London just for women and women’s services, today.

However the committee also gave funding to more libertarian feminist organisations such as  English Collective of prostitutes and later loaned money to Sheba publishers which began to publish lesbian porn in the late l980s.  In addition, it contributed to funding the setting up of a lesbian and gay centre which ended up never being used by lesbian feminists because it was taken over by the BDSM  brigade and  was probably the first so called lesbian and gay centre to allow male trans to use the women’s toilets.

The influence of lesbian feminism and the battle against heterosexism

Following on what had already happened in the women’s liberation movement the women’s committee underlined identity politics which became viewed as a series of separate oppressions or isms i.e. sexism , racism, disablism and later heterosexism. Within this approach, however lesbian feminists were still able to have an impact on the policies and some of the practices of the GLC through, for the first time challenging anti-lesbian attitudes and discrimination. On a broader level we raised the idea of compulsory heterosexuality as a social institution, through the concept of heterosexism and challenged ideas that lesbians and gay men are ‘born that way,’ and are sad victims of their biology.

Heterosexism the last ism to be addressed represented the first political and ideological confrontation between lesbian feminists and gay men at the GLC, highlighting the difference between lesbian feminist politics and the increasing libertarianism of gay male politics at the time.   Already working in the GLC was an established gay male mafia who believed they were born that way and could not help being gay and this was the approach they wanted to take in challenging lesbian and gay discrimination.

However the lesbian feminists argued that in tackling heterosexism we should state that sexuality was socially constructed, and that heterosexuality was a compulsory institution and was coerced. 

How Heterosexism was defined.

The lesbian and gay version was set out in the leaflet ‘Harrassment of lesbians and gay men..and how to challenge it at the GLC’ (l985) this leaflet was circulated to all 15 thousand GLC employees at the time

This is an extract from it

‘Lesbians and Gay men exist in all cultures, races and classes and religions and have existed throughout history.

People are not born with a particular sexuality they acquire it

Heterosexism is a set of ideas and practices which assume that heterosexuality is the superior and therefore only ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ form of sexual relationship.’

The gay male mafia strongly objected to the wording that ‘people acquired a sexuality’ rather than being born with it and tried unsuccessfully to get this phrase removed.

The Women’s committee version on challenging heterosexism went even further to include an analysis of the coercive nature of heterosexuality and encapsulated contemporary lesbian feminist analysis. This was reflected in the handbook called ‘Tackling Heterosexism: A Handbook on Lesbian Rights’ which was published just before GLC abolition in l986.

‘In the same way (as sexism), it has become clear that heterosexuality liked the assumed superiority of men is not natural but acquired. The fact that a majority of women and men choose it as their preferred form of sexuality has more to do with persuasion, coercion and threats of ostracisation than with its superiority as a form of sexuality.

In a heterosexist society the pressure is on right from childhood through adolescence and into adult life to ‘choose’ heterosexuality. So intense is that pressure that most heterosexuals do not even experience any sense of making a choice and so universal is it that most do not even experience it as a pressure. Women’s magazines, for example are full of information on how to be heterosexual – and rarely give an alternative…People are rewarded for fitting into the heterosexual model and punished for not doing so. Such a dominance spreads far beyond what happens in individuals personal and private lives, into every aspect of the way society is organised.’ 

It also spelt out the relationship between heterosexism and sexism in the following statement.

‘Mainly because of the impact of the women’s liberation movement, sexism has over the past 20 years received increasingly serious attention. Because many lesbians have felt they have more in common with heterosexual women in the struggle against sexism (men’s power over women) than gay men, much less attention has been paid to heterosexism with which sexism is intricately related.…

While gay men are often under threat of violence from heterosexual men, lesbians are even more likely to be attacked and in addition they experience sexual harassment, whether or not their sexuality is known. While gay men are often despised or mimicked for not being real men, Lesbians arouse anger for challenging the assumption that women need a man emotionally, sexually and financially. They are accused of trying to be like men by rejecting what are regarded as essential feminine mannerisms or ambitions – infact any woman who refuses to acquire and display these is threatened with being labelled lesbian, whether or not she is.

‘Lesbianism represents for most men and many heterosexual women the least attractive and most threatening type of womanhood. To call a young woman a ‘lessie’ is very common at school if she steps out of line by showing affection for girls or women or does not focus on making herself attractive to boys or men in the modes laid down by heterosexism. ‘Lessie’ ‘lesbian and ‘dyke’ are tantamount to forms of abuse used to control the behaviour of all women. For this and many other reasons heterosexism and its relationship to sexism are issues for all women.’ (GLC Women’s Committee, Tackling Heterosexism: a Handbook of Lesbian Rights, l986; ps 5-7)

Much of the women’s committee analysis was also reflected in a training manual on challenging heterosexism for use with workplace employees, which it was hoped would be used by other local authorities on abolition. (GLC Equal Opportunities Group, Challenging Heterosexism in the work place: a training resource pack for Personnel and Training Staff in Local Authorities, l986)

The mainstream response

Perhaps not surprisingly, more than any other equalities policies developed at the GLC, the women’s committee policies to tackle sexism and heterosexism, became the main target of the Tories in arguing for its abolition and were taken up by the rightwing media.   To quote from Linda Lee Potter of the Daily Mail in an article entitled ‘Now Big Sister is watching you,’ in l984.

‘Militant GLC feminists are said by the Tories to be launching a £700,000 campaign dedicated to proving heterosexuality can chain, fetter and oppress our lives.

Hate

They’ve already worked themselves into hate over pretty models in bras and suspenders on the underground, tried to get beauty contests banned and want to install women watchdogs in factories to censor and preferably sack any man who dares to wink at a female colleague. They would at a stroke abolish eyelash curlers, coloured nail varnish and makeup.

Butch

Literature described as subversive would naturally include anything escapist like Barbara Cartland. Instead we’d be encouraged to strip down and reassemble a lorry.’

On the abolition of the GLC some inner London local authorities did set up their own lesbian and gay equality units, but the radical influence of lesbian feminism on municipal policies and practice had stalled indefinitely.

Lesbians in Education and the Inner London Education Authority

The Inner London education authority (ILEA) which controlled and funded school education for the inner London boroughts was much more cautious and conservative and never took up the GLC policy of challenging heterosexism. It did fund research into discrimination against lesbian and gay students in schools and published a report on this, but took the approach that ‘they were born that way,’ and therefore could not help it.  Unlike the GLC it also dealt with lesbian and gay discrimination together, rather than separately.

At the same time the ILEA  did not have an employment policy which prevented discrimination against lesbian and gay teachers or nursery workers. Openly lesbian or gay staff could still face dismissal because of the power of head teachers and school governing bodies. Following the abolition of the GLC, the ILEA did adopt a policy to prevent discrimination in employment against lesbian and gay teachers in l986, but in practice little changed since it was left to headteachers and governing bodies to implement it.

The Sexuality and Relationships project

Following the report on discrimination against lesbian and gay students in schools the authority funded a Sexuality and Relationships project which was headed up by a heterosexual woman and had one part-time gay male member of staff to develop resources on lesbian and gay issues to be used in schools. This meant that inevitably lesbianism was hardly addressed.  One of its most unfortunate  resources on parenting was a book entitled Jenny lives with Eric and Martin, which was taken up by the rightwing press, to argue that ILEA was promoting child sexual abuse, by having such a book. The book was not supported by lesbian mothers who were demanding that schools provide appropriate resources on lesbian households for their children.

On the more positive side the ILEA did fund a Women and Education Resource Centre which did provide resources for use in schools and youth projects and included books for children of lesbian mothers such as ‘I have lots of Mommies.’

Girls and young lesbian  groups

The most innovative work involving lesbian feminists was developed through the ILEA youth service which was prepared to fund girls groups and young lesbian groups. The youth service was less constrained than school education because it was a non-statutory service and could argue that it was meeting the needs of girls and young women whose participation was voluntary. This is discussed in the following talk by Elaine Hutton on girls work.

Feminist Lesbians in Education

The group feminist lesbians in education was set up to act as a support and campaigning group to challenge heterosexism in education in London. It consisted of teachers, youth workers, students, lesbian mothers and others interested in changing education policy and practice. In 1987 it produced an issue of Gen a journal produced by the women and education group in London It documented the continued resistance of ILEA to challenge heterosexism in schools, the problems for teachers, school students and lesbian mothers in being able to be open about their sexuality to schools, as well as the more positive developments in youth work and in the development of lesbian feminist resources.

The backlash

But by l987 the writing was on the wall. The Tory government was looking for an excuse to abolish the authority and the very limited work it had done on developing resources for schools on lesbian and gay issues became the prime target and the authority was not even prepared to defend this work. The Jenny lives with Eric and Martin book also served as the rationale for the government to introduce legislation (section 28) which would make it illegal for local authorities to intentionally promote homosexuality or publish materials which promoted homosexuality or promote the teaching of homosexuality as ‘a pretendedfamily relationship’. Lesbian feminism was also under attack from sexually libertarian lesbians who wanted to imitate the gay male lifestyle and the demise of its influence was reflected in the joint lesbian and gay campaign against section 28 and the subsequent development of ‘queer politics.’

References and resources

GLC Women’s Committee, Tackling Heterosexism: a Handbook of Lesbian Rights, l986

GLC Equal Opportunities Group Challenging Heterosexism in the work place. A training resource pack for personnel and training staff in local authorities.

Gen Challenging Heterosexism, l987.

Lynne Harne ‘Dangerous Liaisons Reasserting male power through gay movements’ in Lynne Harne and Elaine Miller    ‘All the Rage Reasserting Radical Lesbian  Feminism’   Womens Press, l996

 

 

 

Copyrights © Lynne Harne / Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lesbian History Group and lesbianhistorygroup.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

 

Lesbian Mothers up against the Law.

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Authors
Dr Lynne Harne on Lesbians and Child Custody
Helen Brown on Lesbian Self-Insemination

In the mid l970s lesbian mothers leaving heterosexual partners began to lose custody of their children. Lesbians were also attacked for seeking artificial insemination by donor.
Lynne Harne talks about how lesbians began to resist this legal discrimination and Helen Brown outlines her experience in the first lesbian self-insemination groupin the late l970s.

We know that some lesbians in first wave feminism who were in heterosexual marriages did have children. Vita Sackville West being one of the most famous. Others were adopting and bringing up children. Some women growing up in the l950s and 60s remember being looked after by ‘aunties’ who were clearly in retrospect lesbians, but kept quiet about it, because of attitudes towards lesbianism at the time.

By the mid- l930s the patriarchal backlash against lesbians had taken hold and they were increasingly being defined as sexually predatory.i Those who had any involvement with children such as ‘spinster’ teachers began to be viewed as lesbians and therefore a possible danger especially in single sex girls’ schools.

Lesbian teachers were pathologized by sexology and the spread of Freudian ideas and these attitudes continued post-war and into the l960s, where those working with children were forced to keep quiet about it for fear of losing their jobs.

Lesbian mothers and child custody
During the early l970s the emerging lesbian feminist liberation movement was enabling heterosexual women with children to leave their husbands or unmarried partners, become lesbians and live in lesbian only households.

Women who were lesbians prior to the Gay and Women’s Liberation movements, but had married and had children in order to conform to hegemonic heterosexual norms, also felt safe enough to declare their lesbianism and finally leave oppressive marriages. But during the mid l970s the fact that lesbians had and were bringing up children was considered a huge threat to the hetero-patriarchal order, in the family courts dealing with divorce and separation.

It has to be remembered that although lesbianism had never been made illegal in the UK, this was due to the patriarchal fear that if women knew about it they would desert men in droves! It is not surprising then that in the l970s, state institutions such as the family law courts still viewed lesbianism as deviant and perverse.

Lesbian mothers were regarded as likely to ‘corrupt’ children, and to threaten fathers ‘natural authority’ in the heterosexual nuclear family. Vengeful fathers who were left by women who became lesbians, felt their patriarchal right of sexual access to women was threatened and their paternal right of ownership of children in families was undermined. They contested custody of the children, on the grounds of mothers being lesbians and sometimes also for feminist activism.

This was in contrast to the treatment of heterosexual mothers in custody disputes who, since the early l970s usually kept custody of their children on divorce or separation. However, this practice was based on the assumption that heterosexual women would remarry and resume their subordinate and dependent position on another man, with the children coming under the authority and control of a stepfather.

The attitudes of the family courts towards lesbians are illustrated in two lesbian custody cases which began in l975 and were reported in l976. The first (Anon), reported in the Family Law Journal in l976, involved a case where the mother was living with her lesbian lover and was about the custody of a 5-year-old boy. The boy had lived with the mother and her lover for 2 years before the case came to court. This case illustrates many of the fears the family courts held at the time about lesbian influence on their childrenii

Children growing up to be lesbian or gay. The judge’s decision, based on that of two psychiatrists who had been called as expert witnesses for the father’s side, said this boy would be “blemished” by growing up in a lesbian household … in particular his “psycho-sexual development” would be affected through witnessing the mother and her lover sleeping in the same bed. In other words, it was felt he would probably grow up to be gay and in the view of the courts this was unacceptable. The fear that the children themselves would grow up to be homosexual was seen as one of the major negative influences of being raised by lesbians in the l970s.

Children not conforming to traditional sex roles and stereotypes. Another factor in the judgement was that he would “not grow up along strong normal masculine lines. “ In other words, he would not learn to dominate girls or play with traditional boy’s toys, such as guns and cars. The threat of lesbian mothers undermining ‘normal’ gendered roles is also a key aspect of later cases.

The shamefulness of being lesbian – lesbian mothers causing children to experience social stigma. The third aspect of the judgement stressed the shamefulness of being lesbian and that the child would also grow up to be ashamed and embarrassed by his mother. “He might grow up accepting her whilst not approving of her. It would mean the decay of society if people adopted that attitude.” Labelling lesbianism as ‘shameful’ and something which would cause children ‘extreme embarrassment and hurt’ was a strategy, which was felt to be unanswerable, as it was assumed that this attitude was shared by the general population.

Lesbian feminist activism. The second unreported appeal case (W v W) involved a lesbian mother with two daughters, twins aged 11. The mother had already lost custody of the girls in a lower court, but they were still living with her because the father had no alternative accommodation to offer. He wanted the girls to be put into care. His case was based on the mother’s lesbian activities and her attachment to the Women’s Liberation Movement.

At the end of the case, the mother kept custody of the girls but only because the father and his new wife could not accommodate them. Her lover was ordered not to come to the house and have no contact with them. The mother was described as having “a dangerous influence” on the children as she was “obsessively wrapped up in the feminist cause”. The judge said, “it is quite obvious that the girls’ lives are highly abnormal and that it is only common sense to say that these children ought to have a more normal life in a more normal family among less vehemently minded people.”

Later cases which involved boy children focussed specifically on the supposed impact on the child’s ‘gender identity’ – (a concept which had only been invented by psychologists in the l950s This fear was based on the idea that boys might not realise they were the male sex (despite having male genitals) and would grow up to be ‘transvestites.’ Concerns about ‘gender identity’ were also linked, as they are now, to traditional gender roles and stereotypes, which the WLM was already challenging. The concern that girls brought up by lesbians would reject oppressive feminine roles and that boys would not be masculine enough were regarded as real threats to male supremacy.

Lesbian feminist resistance
At the beginning of the l970s some lesbians with children joined the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). However, since this organisation mostly reflected the interests of gay men, the issue was never discussed. By l973 most lesbians had left GLF and at the first lesbian conference in Canterbury in l974, lesbian mothers began to talk to each other about having children. The same year a new women’s liberation demand was formulated at a conference in Edinburgh. This stressed women’s right to determine their own sexuality and included an end to discrimination against lesbians.

Lesbian mothers at that time however got little support from other lesbians. For many women being lesbian meant they had freed themselves from the cultural imperative which defined women – that of being mothers. They assumed that it was lesbian mothers own fault if they had ‘chosen’ to have children. The fact that many lesbian mothers had not at the time felt they had made that ‘choice’ was not recognised. This meant that lesbian mothers had to begin to organise mainly on their own.

The group Action for Lesbian Parents (ALP) was set up in l976 as a support network and to share legal information. Solicitors were at the time advising women to keep quiet about their lesbianism when they left men, or, if this was impossible to seek out evidence that their children would grow up ‘normal.’ The group began to contact radical psychologists to produce research, as well as making contact with similar groups in the US who were using some initial research, to demonstrate this ‘normality.’ iii

Moreover, as other lesbians began to realise that lesbian mothers were being discriminated against specifically because of their sexuality, support for them increased in the lesbian feminist community. By the early l980s lesbian feminism had grown in strength. It became the dominant force in the WLM and was beginning to have a wider impact. The concept of ‘heterosexism’, for example was being used to challenge the assumption that only heterosexuality was normal.

In l982 the feminist legal organisation Rights of Women agreed to apply for funding from the Greater London Council (GLC) to set up the Lesbian Custody Project. This project would research legal discrimination against lesbian mothers and provide them with a legal advice service as well as developing a network of lawyers who could fight lesbian custody cases, using recent psychological research on lesbian mothers and their children to show their children were no different from others.

The Findings from the Research.
‘Normality’ is an extremely loaded concept since it reflects the dominant cultural values of the time. Having to prove their children were ‘normal’ was not only insulting but it created contradictions for lesbian mothers. This was because many were trying to challenge sexist and heterosexist values in bringing up their children.

Nevertheless, as the research demonstrated it was hard to challenge these cultural values, when they were reinforced in the social environment outside the household; for example in nurseries and schools. Also nearly all the children had continuing contact visits with their fathers. Thus, the initial comparative study between lesbian mother households and those of heterosexual single mothers found no significant difference between the two groups of children.

For example both groups demonstrated quite traditional gendered behaviour in their play activities. Perhaps more significantly in terms of the concerns of the courts, the research showed that children of lesbian mothers were no more likely to get teased or bullied at school than children growing up with single heterosexual mothers.

Later follow up research on the adult children from the original study found that there were more positive benefits growing up in a lesbian household, although these would not necessarily be viewed as such by judges. For example adult children of lesbian mothers were found to be proud of their mothers’ lesbian identity and young women in particular were more positive about their mothers’ lesbian partners, than girls who had grown up raised by heterosexual women with a new male partner.

Other research which looked at children of lesbians who had grown up in lesbian households from birth and without fathers (see below) found further positive benefits for children growing up in lesbian familiesiv

Challenging heteropatriarchal culture
From the early l980s onwards lesbian mothers and daughters often went on collective holidays together, for example at women only holiday centres and this meant that these girls could socialise with children of other lesbian mothers and therefore feel less isolated. Lesbian mothers were also confronting anti-lesbian attitudes in schools and demanding that primary schools had story books that addressed growing up in lesbian families.

However dealing with the health services was more problematic, as health professionals had been trained to regard lesbianism as a neurotic illness and often blamed mothers when their children had health problems.

By the second half of the l980s lesbian mothers were in general winning custody cases and this no doubt can be put down to the research, as well as a broader changes in social attitudes. Nevertheless, during the period l975-l986 many lesbians did lose custody of their children and often did not even see them until they were much older.

This was because many vengeful fathers slandered mothers to their children an encouraged them to refuse access visits. Another shocking aspect was that fathers who fought legal disputes against lesbian mothers to gain child custody included socialist men from the ‘new left’. These men also used heterosexual socialist feminist partners to give anti-lesbian testimony in the courts.

Lesbians choosing to have children and the ‘lesbian baby boom.’
By the late l970s there were lesbians who were choosing to have children through artificial or self-insemination. This meant the sperm donor would be anonymous and there would be no legal father around to contest custody, or to directly control mothers. In l978 the London Evening News got a heterosexual journalist to pose as a lesbian seeking artificial insemination by donor at a private clinic, seeking the support of lesbian groups to do this.

The paper then published an anti-lesbian expose about lesbians having children through this means. Action for Lesbian Parents organised a sit-in at the newspaper’s offices and demanded the right to reply. Pro-lesbian slogans appeared in Parliament Square, at the Law Courts, and outside the offices of the British Medical Association.

Other lesbians set up self-help insemination groups using groups of gay men as donors. Women would support each other by going to collect the sperm, thus keeping the name of the donor anonymous. An account of such a group is given below. However, for some lesbian feminists, lesbians choosing to have children remained controversial and their continued to be debates about the ‘lesbian baby boom.’

Lesbians who wanted to adopt children had a far harder time. This was due to the fact that social workers like health workers had been trained to see lesbianism as a mental illness, as it was defined as such until the Mental Health Act, 1983!

By the early l990s it also became possible for lesbian partners to obtain legal shared custody with biological mothers (Harne and Rights of Women, l997). But all these changes had involved ongoing political struggle by lesbian mothers – a struggle which has now largely become lost. By the mid-l990s lesbian parenting had become accepted as a ‘life-style’ which could be assimilated into mainstream culture and which no longer posed a threat to the dominant heteropatriarchy.

On being part of a lesbian self-insemination group

Helen Brown

I was one of a group of women who set up a feminist self-insemination group in London in the late l970s. I was part of the group as support for my partner – I was already pregnant but my partner wasn’t getting pregnant and was very depressed – we thought there had to be a better collective way and put an ad in the London Women’s Liberation Newsletter to meet other lesbians who wanted to get pregnant.

The group met regularly and carried out loads of research about self-insemination. This was about the same time there was the big scandal in the Evening News – a front page headline about a Dr Strangelove, in a private clinic who did artificial insemination for lesbians – A friendship group of gay men read it and wondered what they could do to support lesbians who wanted children – so the two groups got together and stayed together till everyone was pregnant.

Then some of us stayed together even longer, meeting regularly to discuss childcare and mothering issues – a source of great support – we are all still in contact. There were challenges to us wanting children. I had one discussion with a woman who said I was betraying the lesbian cause – she also said that mothers couldn’t help fuck up their children and it wasn’t fair to bring children into the world. Also there was quite a lot of bad feeling about what if the children were boys. I had no sympathy for this view – I felt that women had been punished for centuries for giving birth to girls and I wasn’t going to accept being punished now for giving birth to boys.

But the support we were offered was far greater than the criticism. – ever since the children were tiny other lesbians wanted to get involved-e.g. we lived in a shared house and the others in the house took responsibility to share different nights – we had a shared crèche with 2 other children and mothers and then they went to a community nursery- We were always able to work and combine childcare.We did have hassle to get acceptance at the school and the health services couldn’t accept that our children had two mothers and no fathers. Also because one child was disabled we had to hassle for further support for him.

i Alison Oram (l989)’ Embittered, sexless or homosexual, Attacks on spinster teachers l919-l939’ in Lesbian History Group(eds) Not a Passing Phase. (London. Women’s Press)

ii Ii Rights of Women Lesbian Custody Group (l986) ‘Lesbian Mothers’ Legal Handbook’. (London, Women’s Press)

iii Sue Allen and Lynne Harne (l988) ‘Lesbian Mothers – the fight for child custody,’ in (ed Cant and Hemmings) Radical Records. Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History. (London, Routledge)

iv Lynne Harne and Rights of Women (l997) Valued Families – The Lesbian Mothers Legal Handbook, (London, Women’s Press).