Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, by Joanne Passet, c. 2008

Below is an e-mail note I sent my wife regarding this book:

May,

Re: Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster, by Joanne Passet, c. 2008.

You have occasionally remarked you would like to see what I’ve written in my diaries. Here is something that will go in my diary:

I typed out the introduction to a biography published in 2008 (see below; remember, I also typed the entire Mrs Dalloway in free verse when I realized Mrs Dalloway was a prose poem – it took about six months, typing a bit every couple of days; this note was done in about five hours; first draft). I stumbled across this book while looking for something new, something interesting at the Harvard Book Store. This was on the remaindered table, for $5.99.

It seems like an unusual book to attract me, but really, not. It can all be explained; it all makes sense. In addition to these notes, I will add additional thoughts that flashed across my mind as I read this introduction [in red].

I don’t know why or what first attracted me to good reading, but I do recall a superb article on the Big Sur in The New Yorker that I read during my first year of medical school.

I started an aggressive reading program in 2002 when I was sent to Yorkshire to stave off a severe depression aggravated by having to travel once again when I least wanted to travel. It is impossible to articulate how aggressive that reading program began. In the past couple of years, reading has taken a back seat to my blogging but I still read more than most of my non-academic contemporaries, I suppose. And I am always looking for new, good stuff.

One would have to look at my journals to trace my reading program but, like so much else in life, chaos is self-organizing.

I moved chronologically from the 17^th and 18^th century to the 19^th century and early 20^th century of literature where I stopped. Much of the best literature in those centuries (after Shakespeare) was written by women, and my reading program culminated in reading and, actually, enjoying Virginia Woolf.

It was through Virginia Woolf, I assume, that I became most interested and perhaps learned the most about the human dilemma, as I call it; the human dilemma being human relationships: how and why they begin, how they evolve, how they end, for those relationships that do end.

It appears that the women authors in the 18^th to the early 20^th century were best as writing about the human dilemma, and their novels and biographies of them are most enjoyable and most rewarding.

One could spend years on one anthology of these works, The Madwoman in the Attic, by two women professors in Indiana in the mid- to late-20^th century, Gubar and Gilbert. It is a challenging book and in some cases, perhaps, a bit “over the top.” But it’s a nice culmination to four or five years of reading the literature that I had read between 2002 and 2008.

A huge component of this literature involved relationships among women, but for various reasons, some obvious, I am sure, I did not come across an anthology or a study of a significant piece of these relationships, i.e. lesbian literature. Perhaps it was there all the time, and the term was simply not used.

So, I was quite excited when I stumbled across this book, which appears to be an anthology of sorts on this aspect of all those books I read. I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet, except for the introduction. I hope it meets my expectations. I feel strongly that to understand better some of the literature I’ve read there is much more to be explored (if that makes sense).

So, here’s the entire introduction to Joanne Passet’s biography of Jeannette Howard Foster, with thoughts that flashed across my mind in red while reading the introduction: copied completely [with my thoughts in red].

Introduction

In the early 1950s, Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research received an enormous donation of anonymous erotic manuscripts. Working on the campus of Indiana University, Kinsey’s librarian Jeannette Howard Foster sorted them into piles on two long library tables in the basement of Wylie Hall. Since such works could not be organized by author, she decided to catalog them by subject matter –were they heterosexual or homosexual? Was the theme sadistic or was it about a particular type of fetish? Fortunately for her, these anonymous authors got down to business in the first page or two. [In the last few years, Kinsey has come under criticism; I haven’t followed the whole story. Be that as it may, Kinsey was important. I have never read anything about him or his institute, except in passing. This book might be an opportunity to learn more about him and his institute.

It is interesting to think that he had a librarian. It only makes sense, but I never thought about that. That alone should make this a very interesting book.]

Jeannette looked like a typical grandmother of the time in her prim Nelly Don dresses and sensible ground-gripper shoes and seemed on the surface the caricature of an old-fashioned librarian. She did not appear to be the type of woman who would deign to touch pornography, let alone read it, nor did she look like someone who would comb seedy bookstores searching out lesbian paperbacks. But looks belied her identity. Beneath the prim and proper demeanor, Jeannette was a woman driven by her passion to root out examples of lesbians, bisexuals, and crossdressers in literature and to document their present in a book so countless others could find validation for their sexual identity in print. In 1948 this lifelong quest led her to the Institute for Sex Research (ISR), with its extensive library of erotic fiction and works on sexuality. She had to know if she had overlooked any elusive yet critical works, and the ISR – the largest collection of its kind in the United States – was the place to do this.

For Jeannette Foster, organizing pornographic works was boring, and sorting it hour after hour was as tedious and tiring as the yard she had done as a young girl with her father. During her four years at the Institute, she strong-minded and opinionated woman grew weary of Kinsey’s dictatorial ways. [This reminded me of Rosalind Franklin and how she was marginalized by DNA researchers Watson and Crick.] She also became convinced that he would prevent her from publishing a book about sex variants because he did not want her work on homosexuality linked to the Institute. Breaking away from Kinsey, she boldly self-published Sex Variant Women in Literature in 1956 [I was too young to remember the 1950s; I started elementary school in 1956, I suppose, and by the time I was an adolescent, my teachers had been exposed to much of the “interesting” 1950s; how much did they know?], a time when many viewed being gay as sinful, sick, and criminal. Indeed, homosexuals were routinely institutionalized, fired from their jobs, and imprisoned, simply for being gay. Jeannette’s pioneering book [it’s hard to believe we’ve come not so far along after all these years; a “pioneering” book in 1956 and still the entire issue of homosexuality conflicts Americans] played a pivotal role in raising awareness for the first time of the lesbian presence in literature and history, provided subsequent scholars of lesbian literature with the cornerstone for their research, and served as a source of validation and inspiration for generations of women who went on to become activists, publishers and scholars. Its republication in1976 and 1985 kept her work alive and ensured that new generations of readers would be influenced by her scholarship. [I am surprised, that with all of the reading I have done, I have not come across Jeanette Foster’s name before.]

The life of the lesbian author, educator, librarian, poet, and scholar Jeannette Howard Foster spans from late-nineteenth century, an era that historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has labeled “the female world of love and ritual,” to the rise of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s; from an era of alienation and isolation to one of collective consciousness. [Late-nineteenth century to early 20^th century literature is my favorite.] As the oldest of three children in an upwardly mobile middle-class family, Jeannette acquired important tools during her childhood that ensured her success in the coming decades. Her father, lacking a son, had high expectations for his first-born child’s academic performance. Raising her with the expectation that she would attend college [incredible that this was even an issue; now it is taken for granted by middle class America that daughters will attend college], he pointed with great pride to educated women in the family’s past, among them Ada Howard, who had served as the first president of Wellesley College [I am always struck/amazed when I find these historical connecting dots. I think it is not just coincidence]. A controlling man, Jeannette’s father admonished his daughters to keep detailed journals and to write letters to their parents weekly. It was this letter-writing habit that empowered Jeannette to cultivate the web of lesbian friendships that sustained her throughout a life that was indelibly conditioned and shaped by her social class. Jeannette’s mother, who regretted her inability to pursue a musical career, broke with convention by encouraging their daughters to aspire to college. It was important to her that they had a choice between marriage and self-sufficiency. Her mother also endowed her with impeccable manners and social skills, which she later used to her advantage. Both parents personified the Puritan work ethic and instilled this trait in Jeannette, along with a love of reading and an appreciation for the fine arts, history, and nature.

The story of Jeannette’s life is a study of lesbian struggle, empowerment, and triumph amid the persistent hostilities of twentieth-century America. [It will be interesting to get a feel for Jeanette’s personality/mood during her early adult years.] From an early age, Jeannette knew that she was attracted to women and felt comfortable with her identity, in part because her father was often absent from home, and she grew up in a homosocial environment populated by her sisters, mother, aunt, and female schoolmates. [I think of the Brontes; a very difficult father; three daughters; one son; mother died early.] Even though her friends sometimes felt uncomfortable with her intense fondness for them, no one explicitly told her there was anything wrong with her feelings or behavior – but she soon began to intuit this from the society at large. Her study of science at the University of Chicago provided her with an objective, matter-of-fact approach to life and led her to become a freethinker, minimizing any struggle with the Judeo-Christian concept of homosexuality as an abomination. In her lifetime, Jeannette had many loves – some of them characterized by deep emotional bonds, others by physical intimacy. The seemingly unrequited love that inspired her best poetry in the 1920s trumped them all and set the standard for all of her subsequent relationships. [Poetry is still difficult for me, and I generally do not care for poetry. Poetry is too personal; I don’t think it translates to others well. But I am always intrigued by female poets even if I don’t care for poetry. Poetry is hard. It needs to read out loud; it needs to be re-read; and it needs to be studied. It is not like prose. At all.]

The printed work played a critical role in the positive construction of sexual identify for many twentieth-century women. Jeannette’s discovery of same-sex romantic friendship in books sparked a burning desire to find other examples in literature and history, and for the remainder of her reading life she would take delight in detecting them despite the difficulties inherent in the task. [One of the reasons I have enjoyed some of the books I have read, is the same reason I enjoy Sudoku, if that makes sense.] In the 1920s and 1930s, some gays and lesbians internalized the condemnation of their sexual orientation by the church, the courts, and the medical community’s pronouncement of homosexuality as a disease. Social purity advocates pushed the censorship of books and plays with gay and lesbian content and the Catholic Church’s National Office for Decent Literature added homosexual literature to its list of condemned books; as a result, mainstream publishers often engaged in self-censorship in order to avoid prosecution, and some librarians restricted access to books on homosexuality. Undaunted by the social forces that collaborated to render the gay world invisible, Jeannette learned to decode the references to lesbianism that in spite of prohibitions continued to appear in stories, novels, and poems and fed her insatiable desire to find validation of her identity.

Living in relative isolation, lesbians of the pre-World War II era search for one another in homosocial environments, for instance, women’s colleges, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later called the Women’s Army Corps) [I never thought about this aspect, until now – but only because I never thought about it], or in female-intensive occupations. In Jeannette’s case, the protective cover of women’s college campuses and library schools provided her with space in which she could court women intensely without attracting undue attention. A passionate romantic, she showered the objects of her affection with candy, flowers, and poems, and on at least one occasion was willing to change employment and move across several states in order to be near her beloved. With few exceptions, however, Jeannette’s lvoes were unrequited or short-term relationships, governed by passion, pragmatism, and unfulfilled expectations, and her search for the girlfriend of her dreams contributed to her persistent restlessness. While working for sex research Alfred C. Kinsey, Jeannette met Hazel Toliver, the woman who would become her companion for the final three decades of her life. Theirs was a caring yet unconventional relationship that defied definition even among lesbians, one that provided each of them with emotional and intellectual sustenance. [“… a caring yet unconventional relationship that defied definition even among lesbians….” could easily be ascribed to Alice B Tolklas and Gertrude Stein; and, yes, I’ve read the biography.]

During her lifetime Jeannette, like many other gays and lesbians, used a variety of terms to describe her sexual identify. In 1915, [born in 1895; my grandmother Reka was born in 1899] after first reading the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis, she began to think of herself as a homosexual. Having felt same-sex attraction as a young girl, she therefore considered her homosexuality to be innate and  -- like literary critic F. O. Mattheiessen, who encountered Ellis’ Sexual Iversion nine years later – attributed her identify to nature, not immorality. In poetry written as early as 1916, she used the word gay, but it clearly referred to people who were full of joy or mirth. A little later in life, when reflecting on her relationships, she described them as homosexual, but during her years at Kinsey’s ISR, she came to associate that term with male behavior and began referring to herself as a lesbian [it might be interesting to see if the author posits a theory on when the word was first used/thought of], a women who loved women. Under ideal circumstances, she believed, that type of love was expressed emotionally and physically. When searching for a title for her book, however, she chose the label sex variant because she believed it to be less stigmatized than gay, homosexual, or lesbian. Only late in her life did she use the labels gay or queer when speaking about her sexuality.

At a time when most gays and lesbians felt compelled to conceal their sexual identify, Jeannette systematically located, confidently requested, and defiantly examined volumes of variant literature at libraries form Chicago to Boston [it will be interesting to see where she visited in Boston] to Atlanta [interesting; I wonder what brought her there?]. Under the mantle of scholarship and armed with her doctorate in library science, she unabashedly pursued her passion for lesbian literature because she recognized the writing of fiction as an essential vehicle for lesbian self-expression, identification, and resistance. As a librarian, she insisted on her right to examine books, no matter what the subject matter. Jeannette even cultivated personal friendships in order to gain access to many obscure and difficult-to-access materials, though it took her years. Proud of her scholarship, she published Sex Variant Women in Literature under her given name, at a time when many gays and lesbians felt compelled to hide their identities behind pseudonyms, mainly because she wanted her real name associated with her scholarly work. Near the end of her life, however, as she contemplated the possible publication of one of her novels, she debated which pseudonym to use and then wrote her editor, “Oh, go on and use ‘Jeannette Foster’ if you think it has any sales value! I’ll be buried soon enough to make no matter.”

As she pursued life, love, and lesbian literature, Jeannette lived and worked in seventeen states. Driven by her desire to ferret out works of lesbian literature, she changed locations and positions frequently in order to gain greater access to public and private library collections. Like many other middle-class lesbians of her generation, Jeannette gravitated toward New York City, a city she dearly loved, and she frequently summered there. As with many middle-class professional women, she did not seek out the bar culture, but instead socialized with other professional women in private settings as did Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf]. She had a knack for making friends wherever she lived, and they became part of a lifelong support network sustained by correspondence. Her family tacitly acknowledged her sexual identify, but because she felt they did not approve of sexual expression, let alone her preference, she was not comfortable sharing some of the most important aspects of her life with them. As a result, they could never fully appreciate her accomplishments, warmth, and wit, and she therefore turned to her lesbian friends for the validation she would have received from her family.

During her four years as the librarian of the ISR, Jeannette became desensitized to the discussion of sexual topics. As someone who had been out to herself since the 1910s, out to other gays and lesbians, and out to sympathetic employers and coworkers, she was generally more comfortable with her sexuality than many of her friends. It was this openness that enabled an aging Jeannette to share freely about her sexuality and personality with younger gays and lesbians, among them Barbara Brier, Karla Jay, and Jonathan Katz [have never heard of them; eager to read more]. The correspondence and conversations she had with them in the 1970s [wow, the entire 20^th century – born in 1895] provide rare and intimate glimpses into her life story.

Living much of her life during a time when it was unwise, even risky, to have incriminating evidence like letters and homosexual literature in one’s possession, Jeannette nevertheless amasses a large collection of lesbian fiction and medical works about homosexuality. Some of her books – the lesbian pulp fiction in particular – survive today in the Christine Pattee Lesbian collection at Central Connecticut State University. She also maintained an extensive correspondence with lesbians around the globe. Their letters to her evidently have not survived, in part because of her desire to protect their identities, but her correspondence with such activists and writers as Margaret Anderson, Elsa Gidlow, Marie Kuda, and May Sarton exists in archival and manuscript repositories across the nation [fortunately saved and archived; much in our digital age is going to be lost]. Many of Jeannette’s poems, lovingly typed her friend the author Valerie Taylor, survive in the Valerie Taylor Papers at Cornell University, and her unpublished novels, Home is the Hunter and Death Under Duress, are housed along with typed copies of short stories and novellas in the Barbara Grier and Donna McBride Collection at the San Francisco Public Library. 

One of her challenges in telling Jeannette’s story stems from the need to reconcile contradictory information found in letters, diaries, oral histories, published accounts, and memories of friends into a coherent whole. Jeannette was unabashedly lesbian when it came to her wide circle of friends, but she led a pragmatically closeted life with employers and coworkers until she came to trust them. On occasion, she self-censored or erected smokescreens in an attempt to protect the privacy and wishes of some of her more closeted friends. She occasionally was prone to exaggeration, and as age began to affect her memory, some errors crept into the accounts of her life that she shared with others. In such instances, the historian and biographer must become a detective, seeking to confirm, deny, and correct the story, based on surviving historical evidence.

Jeannette Foster’s lesbianism was central to her identity. It governed her course of study, where she chose to live and work, the focus of her research and writing, and who she wanted to be near. It shaped her creative output: her poetry and prose were expressions of her emotional desire, and Sex Variant Women in Literature was the product of her intellectually curious and daring mind. Jeannette Foster’s journey from childhood in Oak Park, Illinois, to a retirement in Pocahontas, Arkansas, [and I wonder what brought her there] is punctuated by such flashpoints as encounters with the journalist Janet Flanner, the novelist Glenway Wescott, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and psychiatrist George Henry. Consequently, her life illuminates lesbian history at several critical junctures: the waning of romantic friendship, the sexually-charged 1920s [the ‘sexually-charged 1920s – this will be most interesting; I’m thinking of F. Scott and Hemingway], the pre-World War II era of invisibility, the repressive 1950s, and the 1970s movement culture that emerged in the wake of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. Hers is the story of an isolated individual who, in looking for positive validation of her identify, opened the closet door for lesbian literature. It is the narrative of a fearless and passionate trailblazer who claimed life for herself and on her own terms. Finally, it is the account of a brilliant scholar who lived long enough to see her pioneering work embraced by her intellectual heirs who, in turn, smashed stereotypes that had plagued and suppressed lesbians and gays for generations. [And most of all, I am always interested in reading about trailblazers in “big ideas” and especially when it is written well.]

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Miscellaneous Notes

Starting on page 69, in graduate school now, at the University of Chicago after a couple of years teaching.

Literature mentioned:

She might have noted lesbian characters or themes in Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White (1920), James Huneker’s Painted Veils (1920), or Henry Gribble’s play March Hares (1921). Later in the decade she may well have seen her former Oak Park neighbor’s treatment of lesbianism in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). 

In the winter quarter of 1920 – 1921 she earned an uncharacteristic B minus in a course on contemporary literature taken with the novelist Robert Herrick. As part of a new generation of American realists who saw the world through critical eyes, he required the class to read authors who depicted contemporary life and American society as it really was, rather than the romanticized portrayals that it superceded. Steeped in romanticism, Jeannette had a difficult time relating to those grittier and more realistic works. Herrick also lectured to his students about the uproar surrounding the serialized publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review (from March 1918 to December 1920).

[Earlier it was mentioned that in 1960, the founder of The Little Review, who had earned a literary reputation for her memoir, My Thirty Years War (1930) had sought Jeannette’s advice in 1960 about publishing her manuscript of her lesbian novel entitled Forbidden Fires.]

John Gunther, who later would be known for his classic memoir Death Be Not Proud, loaned his copy of [a controversial book] to Jeannette and her friends, who devoured it because of the mild eroticism, time travel, and urbane vocabulary it contained (referring to James Branch Cabell’s fantasy novel, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919) which the New York Society for Suppression of Vice had failed to suppress).

Her best poetry was written during her two years in graduate school at U of Chicago.

Wow, she decides to write her these on 19^th century transcendentalist, feminist, and journalistic Margaret Fuller, best known for her Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845). [May, as you might recall, Margaret Fuller was part of the Concord group – supported Emerson or vice versa; he hired her to edit The Dial – so many surprises in these books that I find; very enjoyable.]

Like Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller had a literary salon.

[It’s funny: there’s a photo of Clara Louise Thompson in this section – one of Jeannette’s first loves, maybe her first love, first or second, I forget – drop-dead gorgeous. Clara Louise was one of her instructors when Jeannette had bee in college. She kept in contact with Clara after college; later, Clara found Jeannette a position at the same university she was teaching at in Rome, Georgia.]

So, first true love, I guess, was Clara Louise Thompson; then Mary Shirley; both instructors at private co-ed college in St Paul, Minnesota. Jeannette did not care for Mary; though the latter really like Jeannette. “Mary lacked the classic feminine beauty that Jeannette preferred. Jeannette was still in love with Clara, but Mary and Jeannette remained close friends and in contact for years.

Her respiratory problems worsened in cold winters of St Paul – she made decision to spend rest of her life “in the south” for health reasons. Clara, see above, found her a position at Shorter College, in Rome, Georgia.

“During a decade known for sexual experimentation, however, Jeannette’s students would have been far less sheltered than her own generation had been. Freudian psychology and the fiction of the era, including works by Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and a host of less-publicized novelists, increasingly referred to the sexualized nature of love between women.”

While there (at Shorter College), she heard the following speak: Tolstoy, Carl Sandburg, Nellie Taylor Ross (who in 1925 became the first woman governor in the United States when she assumed office in Wyoming), and lecturers from many countries around the world.

She arrived at Shorter in 1924 (so about 29 years old). Her love, Clara Louise, also at Shorter College would have been 40 years old. Jeannette always preferred older women.

And here the description, as I noted earlier in the photograph: “Thompson, a feminine beauty whose image could draw ‘strangers hypnotically across a room.’”

Jeannette, madly in love, but Clara would not get romantically involved with Jeannette. But she loved her company. Jeannette was very, very frustrated; writing poetry and getting it published.

Clara Louise suffered from internalized homophobia. She boasted of many overt affairs with girls and women of all ages, but would not allow the words ‘homosexual’ or ‘lesbian’ be uttered in her presence. She associated those words with general “understanding” of homosexuality.

In later life, Jeannette spoke freely about every decade of her life except for the years she spent at Shorter College.

In 1927, after giving up on Clara Louise, she travels to Europe with a female student eleven years younger; mentions time in Paris, and although Passet mentions Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, who lived there at the time, and the Shakespeare and Company bookstore operated by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monneir, Jeannette herself does not mention any of this. She might have thought all of them unapproachable, at a higher social level than she.

First sexual intimacy in her life was with that student, Lenore, and some time between 1925 and 1930).  Although it might have occurred after Lenore graduated and moved to Atlanta to enroll in a business course while Jeannette was teaching for the fourth year at Shorter College.

Now content, wrote fiction, “Lucky Star” which was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1927. A story of heterosexual love, but based on her own experiences.

Interestingly, due to bad economy in the 30’s, higher education began to restrict women’s entry and advancement despite the more socially liberal atmosphere of the 1920s. Clara Louise wanted desperately to advance, but was never able to leave Shorter College, where she stayed until she retired in 1935.

Six years at Shorter College; her reflections of her time there on page 95.

Volumes of lesbian poetry but no market for lesbian poetry, it would remain unpublished for another three decades. And emotional and passionate dreamer, she remained realistic when it came to her career and by the late 1930s had begun to recognize the limitations of her gender and her MA degree in English.

Chapter 4: moves to all-female Hollins College, Roanake, VA, to teach English

This is as far as I've gotten with notes for the book. I finished the biography on January 25, 2013. I could feel a mild tearing up in my eyes as I read the last few chapters. I find it incredible that one could read such an intimate and touching book about an individual. I felt sad that a woman with such joy for life, so bright, so intellectually capable, had to live a life less than full because of society's homophobic repercussions. 

I don't know what "rights" the homosexual community is looking for beyond legal unions. At a minimum that should be a non-issue, a no-brainer. But more than that, I think. "they" are simply looking for acceptance. It's just so hard for me to believe that in 21st century American we haven't moved beyond this.  

One of the interesting takeaways from the book was that Jeannette remained a sexual being well into her seventies. A very interesting story. I'm glad I happened to come across this book. It's one that needs to be re-read when studying the history of lesbian literature in this country.