Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Thursday, June 9, 2011

Report by Marc Stein

Approximately sixty people attended this session, which focused on the ongoing relevance and usefulness of the category “lesbian” in historical scholarship on women.

In a presentation titled “Building a Circle of Lesbian Couples in the Small Towns of New York, 1930-42,” Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy (University of Arizona) presented excerpts of her book-length project on Judith Boyer Reinstein, an upper-middle-class white woman who participated in long-term sexual relationships with women in the 1930s, as did several of her small-town friends. According to Kennedy, these women and many of their family members had not internalized the medical view of lesbianism as pathological by the 1930s. Nor did they view their relationships as asexual friendships. Instead, they understood their relationships within the context of the discretion and privacy that dominated upper-middle-class small-town life in this period. This suggests that multiple discourses about lesbianism were present, changes in sexual consciousness occurred at a slow and uneven pace, and ideas about sexual identities and relationships were influenced by class and location. Significantly, Reinstein later identified as a lesbian, but did not use the language of the closet in describing her earlier life.

Valerie Korinek (University of Saskatchewan) presented “‘We Never Thought of Ourselves as Anything But Ordinary People’: Locating and Assessing Lesbian Oral History in Western Canada, 1950-80,” which is derived from her current book project, which is titled “Prairie Fairies: A History of Gay and Lesbian Communities in Western Canada, 1945-90.” Korinek located her work within North American LGBT history, which has not paid much attention to the Canadian West, and Canadian Western history, which has not paid much attention to LGBT people. Her presentation emphasized that most of her oral history narrators identified as “lesbian,” but some expressed discomfort with labels. Many of these women remained in Western Canada for most or all of their lives, though they also travelled to other regions and knew about lesbian communities elsewhere. Their oral histories describe the hardships they endured, but also the cultures they developed and their distinct “prairie queer sensibilities.”

In “The Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony (A LOT): Building a Digital Archive,” Elise Chenier (Simon Fraser University) introduced an online initiative that will collect, digitize, store, and makes available oral history interviews with lesbians from around the world. Her presentation emphasized the value of lesbian oral histories for LGBT people and encouraged audience members to contribute to and publicize this new resource. Chenier also outlined the reasons for using the term “lesbian” in the name of the archives, which hopes to collect testimonies from diverse types of women who experienced same-sex desire, regardless of whether they called themselves “lesbians.”

Marcia Gallo (University of Nevada – Los Vegas) served as the panel’s commentator and Marc Stein chaired the panel.