Arts :: Arts And Culture
Kiss the librarian by Brian Jewell
contributing writerThursday Aug 21, 2008 Rediscovering a lesbian pioneer
Lillian Faderman, lesbian scholar and author of Gay L.A. and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, recalls her first exposure to the work of Jeannette Howard Foster. It was 1962, and she was a grad student at UCLA. Browsing the library stacks, she came across Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature. "Is this," she thought, "really a euphemism for what I think it is?"
It was. Foster’s full-length bibliography, published in 1956, cited hundreds of examples of female same-sex relationships across thousands of years of literature. In her foreword to Joanne Passet’s fascinating biography of Jeannette Howard Foster, Faderman explains how she compulsively returned to the library to secretly read Foster’s book, to find affirmation that she wasn’t the only lesbian in the world.
Nowadays information about LGBT people is available everywhere, and the woman who practically invented lesbian scholarship is little remembered outside of academic circles. (According to author Marie J. Kuda, Foster was even nearly omitted from the 1994 reference book Gay and Lesbian Literature.) Joanne Passet, a professor of history and women’s studies at Indiana University, schools us on this literary hero with her fascinating biography, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster (Da Capo Press.) Carefully researched and richly detailed, the book nicely balances thoroughness and readability. The occasional lapse into dryness is more than offset by the fascination of Foster’s life.
Foster’s story is not just a tale of one woman’s courage in documenting lesbian life during the repressive 1950s. Living from 1895 to 1981, her life reflects in miniature many of the social changes of the 20th century, particularly the promulgation of the concept of gay and lesbian identity, the growth of the gay rights movement, and the resurgence of feminism. Born to a typical family in Illinois, Foster benefited from changing ideas about education; there was never any doubt that she would go to college, and she eventually attained a Ph.D. in library science.
Foster’s long career in academia, particularly her time as an undergraduate at women’s colleges, exposed her both to the camaraderie of homosocial environments and to homosexual women who were subtly negotiating space for themselves and their relationships. Foster had already been forming "close attachments" to female friends in high school; in 1912, her first year at the University of Chicago, she began to understand and accept her true, lesbian nature. She also began a series of crushes on older women, passionate but usually one-sided affairs that inspired Foster’s poetry but led to little physical heat.
In the 1920s and early ’30s, Foster taught at several women’s colleges. Her romantic bad luck continued. Reading between the lines of Foster’s poetry, Passet speculates that her long passion for her colleagues Clara Louise Thompson and Miriam Tompkins were never consummated, but that she had a sexual relationship with androgynous grad student Jennie Gregory. In any event, she now lived her life with the consciousness of being a lesbian and sought out friendships with women like herself.
Meanwhile, Foster was losing her enthusiasm for teaching. She returned to school for a degree in library science, and went on to a series of jobs as librarian at various Midwestern universities and eventually settled at Philadelphia’s Drexler Institute. But Foster had long been interested in cataloguing lesbian references in literature, and in 1941 she began a correspondence with sexologist Alfred Kinsey. This was the beginning of a long and sometimes fractious relationship. Not surprisingly, Foster was a big supporter of Kinsey’s work, but as a professional librarian she didn’t always agree with his methods, particularly his "unique" organizational system, and what she perceived as his homophobia and sexism.
Nevertheless, Foster helped Kinsey in his sex research by connecting him with members of her circle of lesbian acquaintances. In 1948, Foster moved to Indiana to take a job as the first librarian at Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. It was a position that gave her access to rare erotica, but it was a move that proved to be a catch-22 for her private project. By that time she was thinking of publishing her bibliography of lesbian literary references, a project Kinsey did not support. He wanted no further notoriety attached to his already controversial work.
When Foster left the Institute in 1952, she began in earnest to seek a publisher for Sex Variant Women. She was met with years of rejection. Even university presses found the manuscript, as one rejection letter delicately put it, "not suitable for our lists." Finally Foster was forced to put up the money for publication herself, a total of $4,500, through a small vanity press in New York called Vantage Press.
The book was not a commercial success, but it found its way into libraries across the country, sending out ripples that would be felt for years to come. Now in her 60s, Foster retired from academia and shared a home with two friends.
She turned her attentions to writing fiction and poetry, much of which was published in the early lesbian newsletter The Ladder. A product of her time, Foster was ambivalent about the newly vocal gay rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s, but she lived to see her work recognized and praised by younger generations. She was embedded in the world of lesbian letters, corresponding with writers and historians, until her health declined in the late 1970s. In 1981 her death was mourned by the lesbian community; a community that she had helped to create, by insisting on naming and connecting "sex variant women."
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