LHMP #472 VanHaitsma 2019 Stories of Straightening Up

The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.

The specific project the author was pursuing involved archival materials related to two white women from 19th century Virginia (Irene Leache and Anna Wood) who shared lives and careers and described their relationship as an “opulent friendship.”

The larger part of the article concerns the author’s interactions with archives: the ways that indexing practices and selective creation of metadata shape the types of research that are enabled, the types of assumptions (warranted or not) that both sides may make about the other’s motives and prejudices, and the pressures on queer researchers to self-censor the nature of their projects when applying for funding, proposing projects, and strategizing for career success. Even when there is no animosity involved, the pressure to avoid anachronistic identity labels in the indexing process works to erase evidence of queer lives.

Just as the coming-out process can involve reading subtle signs of potential reception, the author was concerned about approaching archival material when the existing expert on the subject had described the two woman as “celibate lovers” and rejected the possibility that they had anything but “the purist alliance”—framings that the author read as indicating hostility to a potential lesbian framing of their relationship. At the same time, the author notes that stereotypes of archivists as hostile gatekeepers are just as dangerous to good relations with historians of all types.

Skipping past the author’s biographical musings, this process of reflexively “straightening” one’s presentation can be a confounding factor in researching the lives of romantic friends. Early historians of romantic friendship tended to emphasize that the romantic aspects were conventional, sentimental, and devoid of any erotic aspect. Whereas more recent scholarship has complicated the subject by identifying a wide range of relationships with more variable reception from their contemporaries. As a gross oversimplification, historians see what they’ve been trained to see in the data, just as contemporary people have been led to believe that “you can always tell” a lesbian by her gender performance.

Returning to the evidence for Leache and Wood’s sexuality, the author notes that—contrary to some assertions that 19th century women would be ignorant of lesbian possibility and therefore would not recognize it in themselves—these women discuss an artistic depiction of Sappho, identifying a “blending of the intellectual and the passionate,” discuss woman-woman love in Greek myth (as well as man-man love), and compare their own relationship to that of Ponsonby and Butler.

While none of this is proof of any specific reading of their sexuality, it offers a context in which they could have had models for a more erotic understanding of romantic friendship, even if they never recorded specific evidence for posterity. The author discusses the potential for 19th century women who did have erotic relationships to use the commonly accepted understanding of romantic friendships as non-sexual as cover for relationships that didn’t fit the non-sexual model. Such a strategy need not have been purely pragmatic, but could partake of its own pleasure in having a secret that the world didn’t share.

In the end, other that some tantalizing details of Leache and Wood’s lives, this article is more about the process of research than about history itself, but it speaks to shifting fashions in historic interpretation and the dangers of taking surface presentations for granted.