Linda Heidenreich: University of California, San Diego. This review is reprinted with permission from The Newsletter of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, Vol. 12 No. 3 (Fall 1999)
Sex and Sensibility sets out to do just what its subtitle suggests: to analyze the stories of a generation of lesbian women. As such, it is not a traditional history text; instead it is a historically grounded work of sociology that maps out identity formation for a group of women who identified as lesbian-feminists during the decade of the 1970s. In the context of mapping out a lesbian trajectory for the baby boom generation, Stein argues that the lesbian-feminist identity of the 1970s was made possible by the historical circumstances of the time. Women who were born between 1945 and 1961 came of age in a social environment where they were forced to be more aware of their gender and sexuality than previous generations. At the same time, Civil Rights movements and the protests against the U. S. War in Vietnam demonstrated the possibilities for challenging the oppressive structures within which they were living. For Stein, the lesbian trajectory of the 1970s does not end with a stable lesbian-feminist identity, but instead with the diversification of lesbian identities and the fall of lesbian-feminism as a dominant paradigm. She argues that while lesbian-feminists successfully challenged essentialist and pathologized models of lesbianism, their own model was challenged not only by changing historical circumstances, but by its own internal weaknesses — specifically its failure to account for differences among lesbians.
According to Sex and Sensibility, lesbian-feminist identity formation of the 1970s was as much a product of the Cold War as it was a product of Civil Rights and other liberation movements. Women of the baby-boom generation came of age at a time when contradictory discourses of sexuality dominated middle class Euro-American culture, where compulsory heterosexuality pushed young women toward reproductive roles while explicit sexual discourses provided them with heightened awareness of their own sexuality. The upheavals of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and the U. S. War in Vietnam were the last critical ingredients for creating an environment where young women were able to question the compulsory heterosexuality of the 1950s. In this context, when gay and lesbian liberation burst onto the scene in the late 1960s, the stress was on breaking down the sexual binaries of Cold War America to “free the homosexual in everyone.”
According to Stein, the initial move to “free the homosexual in everyone” was never problem free. In the 1960s and 1970s competing definitions of lesbianism existed: one was rooted in desire and could find its roots, in part, in pre-Stonewall working class cultures; the other Stein argues, was rooted in the (white) feminist model that became dominant in the 1970s. Within lesbian communities, these competing identities continued to co-exist, even while lesbian-feminism moved to discredit the earlier model. Further challenges to group cohesiveness came from ideologies such as the “lesbian continuum.” This, for some lesbian-feminists led to the question that “If every woman was really a lesbian waiting to be awakened, how could lesbians tell who was in the in group, and who was out?” According to Stein, lesbian-feminists moved to solve this last dilemma through two means. Some women embraced a cultural feminism that essentialized women as nurturing and caring. Other women—lesbian separatists—attempted to create separate organic communities within the dominant society. Both models, according to Stein, collapsed politics and identity and “embodied an ethnic model of sexuality that made the boundaries between the homosexual and heterosexual worlds more rigid (121).” Challenges within these communities and from diverse communities of women excluded by lesbian-feminists ultimately challenged the viability of both strategies as they existed in the 1970s.
The legacy that lesbian-feminism left behind, according to Stein, was the idea that women could choose to be lesbians and that lesbianism was a good thing. Using the closing of Amelia's in 1991 as a symbol for the end of an era, Stein asserts that both lesbian-feminism and the bar served a similar function: they brought lesbians together in such a way that they were able to build community. At the same time, both lesbian-feminism and lesbian bars fell from their prominent position in lesbian life because lesbian lives diversified. Just as early lesbian-feminism had challenged the boundaries of heterosexual/homosexual binaries, so its own binaries and boundaries were disrupted by the next wave.
Because Stein's work is a historically grounded work of sociology, rather than a history book about the 1970s, some historians may feel a little uncomfortable with its sources and structure. Most of Stein's arguments are based in interviews with a relatively small group of women and in her interpretations of those interviews. And, like other leading lesbian sociologists such as Barbara Ponse, Stein is more interested in the process of development experienced by a generation of women than in specific historical events. Yet for some, especially those historians who are interested in interdisciplinary work, Sex and Sensibility will prove a useful tool, especially in the classroom. By using periodicals and secondary sources to ground her work historically, Stein is able to demonstrate some of the specific ways that lesbian-feminism paved the way for later generations. Using those same sources, she is able to identify specific weaknesses within the movement that proved destructive to women both inside and outside of its boundaries. As such, it is a step towards understanding lesbian-feminism as a complex phenomenon which was neither utopia, nor a haven for anti-sex reactionaries, but instead a specific historical movement constructed by diverse individuals and communities of women.
commenting closed for this article