This article looks at the culture of public masquerade entertainments in 18th century England (primarily London), especially in how they promoted and supported an atmosphere of sexual liberty. This reputation of masquerades is solidly documented in social commentary and fiction of the time, such as the works of Pope, Hogarth, Fielding, and others.
18th c
LHMP entry
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
This book as a whole looks at connections between medical theories and political culture, in 18-19th century Britain and France. Only one chapter has any relevance to the Project and this summary will be confined to that material.
Chapter 1: The Case of Marie Antoinette: Revolutionary Politics and the Biologically Suspect Woman
Like a number of other publications, this focuses on the political propaganda that depicted Marie Antoinette as an extreme sexual deviant along several axes, with a special interest in tying those themes to deviant anatomy.
In this article, Lanser examines the intersection of changing conceptions of sexual difference (i.e., the difference between male and female) and changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 18th century, specifically with regard to how female homosexuality plays a part in these processes.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.
This article examines the question “were the Bluestockings queer?” Also the converse “were Bluestocking and ‘lesbian’ mutually contradictory?” On the Bluestocking side, Lanser places 5 women generally considered the movers and shakers: Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, Hester Mulso Chapone, and Sarah Robinson Scott. The Bluestockings weren’t a clearly defined group and membership was sometimes assigned from outside, rather than being a self-identification—a process in which historians have participated.
This is a high-level overview of the English Bluestocking movement(?), as part of a special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly on “Reconsidering the Bluestockings.” As such, it doesn’t touch much on specifically sapphic topics, but provides a useful context for various individual Bluestockings.
In this article, Ingrassia challenges scholarship that views 18th century novelist Eliza Haywood’s work as depicting only heterosexual relationships and instead points out and discusses many aspects of her fiction that represent a wide spectrum of relations between women that range from the homosocial to the homoerotic. [Note: This article has a lot of literary theory jargon, which I tend to find of less interest, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the discussions of the content of Haywood’s work.]
This article looks at contrasting concepts of “woman writer” and “professional author” in the 18th century, using the lens of Eliza Haywood’s writing, and specifically the discussions around writing and authorship contained in her work The Tea-Table. In the early 18th century, resistance to the idea of women as “writers” (which had influenced many women to circulate their work only in manuscript among private social circles) was shifting to resistance specifically to women as professional writers, i.e., ones who aspired to make a living at it.
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