Image credit to Joan E. Biren, ‘From Eye To Eye’, 1979.
As I work towards the final draft of my research paper, I have been reflecting on the changing perception and portrayal of butch/femme relationships through the newsletters and blogs of the past 60 years.
In the early days of the first public lesbian organizations, a community was often defined by the exclusion of others. The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) were exclusionary of butch women because they wanted to assimilate into straight society. In one of the earliest issues of DOB publication The Ladder, an anonymous member wrote the following in a letter to the editor: “The kids in fly front pants and with butch haircuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity that we can get.” The majority of the organization was seeking integration rather than special separate status as a minority. In fact, the organization was primarily created in order to provide women with a space to meet other than the gay bars, which were often the safest spaces for butch women to dress and perform their identity in the way that felt the most comfortable.
Historian Lilian Faderman wrote, “To many young and working class lesbians the bars were a principal stage where they could act out the roles and relationships that elsewhere they had to pretend did not exist.” (Faderman, Lilian. Odd Girls and Twilight lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America. Columbia University Press, 1991. ) Upper class women simply traveled to more lesbian friendly countries, like France, if they felt they could not be themselves in U.S.
In the 1970s the lesbian feminist separatist movement, who were the primary group of visible lesbians at the time, felt that butch and femme roles were a sexist imitation of the heterosexual parent culture, and shamed women who presented that way. But in the 80s there was a rise in butch/femme relationships in reaction to the militant politics of the previous decade, and this continued into the 1990s and beyond.
Blog headers from ButchOnTap.com.
Blog previews from FitForAFemme.com.
The Butch/Femme Club Newsletter, June 1996.