#sorry im rambling but like yeah

[cruelsister-moved2]

ok it's really interesting is it used to be very acceptable and even admirable for young women to have close 'romantic friendships' involving sleeping on the same pillow and writing love letters to eachother and kissing and like, it was assumed not to be sexual but it's a level of closeness that would get 2 men accused of homosexuality instantly. however the main catch here was that they would be expected to eventually give this up and marry a man in order to support themselves like the behaviour was permissible but the long term refusal of men wasn't.

but then in the later 19th century women's colleges started to be a big thing and middle class women were more accepted into the world of work, and that's where you get these Boston marriages of two educated women who are usually both working or else involved with suffrage, social reform, union activity etc. and these were lifelong commitments where two women kept a house together and never married men or had children and it was a very explicit rejection of domestic life.

and THAT is when the idea of lesbian sexuality started to become pathologised and distrust of women being too intimate arose. and it was connected to their refusal to be housewives and mothers but it was also connected generally to the idea that educating women was warping them and destroying the general population of [white] women and thus the future of the race, as well as the fact that connections between women formed at women's colleges were allowing them to a. support themselves independently of a man and b. enter into previously male dominated worlds like medicine and academia.

so if was not really a specific rejection of sexual and romantic activity between women at all, but the fear that women's intimate connections with eachother was loosening the patriarchy's grip over them. some boston-married women were certainly lesbians, but some also seem to have been heterosexual women who just didn't want to give up their career and independence for a lifetime of domestic drudgery, and preferred having someone they weren't romantically attracted to as a close companion over someone who would never see them as an equal.

anyway i think this is really interesting regarding my view that lesbian emancipation is very closely intertwined with women's emancipation in general; if lesbians arent liberated it is also indicative of the status of women in general, and lesbians can never be free except when women are free. I think it's so interesting how the mainstream gay rights movement really flounders regarding lesbianism, because whilst gay men are able to proceed by challenging misinformed prejudice against gay people simply because they're different, lesbian identity is in much more direct conflict with the patriarchy in a way that can never be resolved without dismantling the patriarchy.

society doesn't actually have that huge of a problem with seeing two women holding hands. sweeping away that surface level ignorance the way the modern gay rights movement does ends up just highlighting how much further we have to go, and i don't know that we'll actually make much more progress at all with the gentle "respect people that are different, love is love<33" approach tbh.

im honestly disheartened that the more visible lgbt people become, the more lesbian identity is handled with gloves on, and the less gnc lesbians are centred in our community. this is NOT me playing oppression olympics or minimising the homophobia faced by gay men and bi people, and I haven't even attempted to incorporate the overlap of race and transphobia into this post bc that would become endless and also not my place to elaborate, just my specific observance of the way the current mainstream lgbt movement is failing lesbians. that's not to say it isn't also failing other groups in other ways!!!