Blog

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.

Some women, such as Butler & Ponsonby, could live together as a married couple, even using the language of marriage and sharing a bed, while being celebrated by society, while others such as sculptor Anne Damer and actress Mademoiselle de Raucourt were openly derided as lesbians. It wasn’t simply a matter of individual critics having a particular attitude, for Hester Thrale, for example, openly reviled “sapphists” both in England and France, while retaining friendships with other women in homoerotic relationships.  In the same era that Scottish courts proclaimed it unthinkable that Pirie & Woods engaged in a sexual relationship, Anne Lister carried on courtships and affairs with a wide circle of women in Yorkshire.

The underlying question, Lanser argues, is whose interests it served to praise some female relationships while disparaging others. To answer this question, she traces the dynamics of female friendship in England from the 17th century through the early 19th following two themes: how female friendships served women struggling for “autonomy and authority” while simultaneously acted as a tool of the establishment of gentry sensibilities as a moral center. A reorganization of social hierarchies used perceptions of female intimacy as a way of drawing boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable in a context where both status and sexuality were being redefined.

The official philosophical literature of friendship up through the 16th century focused entirely on men, rejecting both the viability of male-female friendship and the existence of female-female friendship. Even as authors like Katherine Philips were creating a literature of female friendship in the 17th century, male authors were only grudgingly admitting that a few women might have the qualities to be true friends. But by the mid-17th century, women across Europe were creating and publicly performing intimate friendships as an inherent part of their social networks.

Regardless of gender, in the 17th century friendships were in the process of not only supplementing but supplanting kinship as the primary social “glue”. Several things were happening in parallel: the rise in power of the bourgeoisie, an emphasis on merit, and a de-emphasis on inherited hierarchies of power. Among the elite, male friendships were a public as well as a private act. For women, this destabilization of previous social hierarchies raised the possibility of destabilizing gender hierarchies as well. And women were getting access to social contexts where non-familial bonds could be established, such as boarding schools, salons, and an increasing urban migration. Female-dominated courts in England and Sweden, female-dominated salons in France (and later England), and circles of educated, literary women were a breeding ground for female friendships that could become of central importance in their lives. The importance of such context is clear from the male satire they attracted.

Adopting the models and rhetoric of male friendships ran into the problem of women’s different material and legal status. Male friends could promise to have “one purse” but most women had only tenuous control over their own purses, much less the power to share them. To counter men’s arguments that women weren’t suited to be true friends, women raised the point that marriage was often so oppressive that female friendship was obviously superior to that state. Even if marriage could not be avoided, women’s friendships were a bulwark against its hazards. And a few women openly proposed with varying degrees of seriousness that women would be better off rejecting men entirely.

Herein lay the danger of women’s friendships to the status quo. Men could prioritize their friendships without upending existing social hierarchies, but if women prioritized their female friendships, the world was turned upside down. This was amplified when the physicality of friendship was considered. Emotional bonds were expected to be reflected in physical affection—kisses and embraces that might border on the sensual but were expected and acceptable behavior. For men, focusing their physical affection on friends had little impact on their marriages, but for women to turn to other women for their physical desires risked making men obsolete.

And yet, as Lanser catalogs in extensive detail, the 18th century saw a flood of open, public expressions of embodied female friendship, expressed in terms of passion, caresses, kisses, the treasuring of physical tokens of love, and a celebration of the physical presence of the friend. So how did some women embedded in this culture escape the accusation of sapphism, while others didn’t escape it? There is plenty of evidence that people (in general, though maybe not universally) were aware of the potential for sex between women, especially in medical and legal contexts, and certain versions of it were persecuted and satirized. [Note: I feel like Lanser misses an angle by not noting that legal prosecution was almost always in the context of gender-crossing, not simply same-sex relations.] So if so many of these intimate female friendships seem obviously “lesbian” to us today, how were they viewed by their contemporaries? [Note: Here Lanser notes that she does not require “proof of sex” to consider a historic relationship sapphic.] The answer, she asserts is public relations. “Female intimacies were perceived as chaste or sapphic according to the conventions through which they could be read.” And the women involved in them could actively manipulate these conventions to their benefit.

In the long 18th century, Lanser asserts, class was the key factor in how potentially sapphic relationships were judged, but class itself was decidedly unstable in this era, meaning that all such relations and judgments were in flux. The “Ladies of Llangollen” are a case in point. The label “lady” was no longer a fixed category of inherited rank, but could be “earned” through behavior and accomplishment. A new class consciousness was emerging from the “gentry” who distinguished themselves not only from the unlettered and uncultured working classes, but also from an aristocracy increasingly framed as degenerate, debauched, and decadent. Membership in the gentry could be derived from birth, but that was not necessarily guaranteed, and it could be acquired in other ways as long as one achieved the symbolic necessities.

Female friendship came to function as one of those symbolic necessities. Not only did the ability to create and maintain female friendships serve as a marker of being “well-connected and well-bred” but it served as a context in which the class status of potential friends could be evaluated and either judged sufficient or found wanting. This was established even in 17th century female friendship discourse in aristocratic circles, and served the emerging gentry class by creating a definition of worthiness that aligned with class sensibilities. Thus “female friendship…served contradictory feminist and patriarchal purposes” establishing gender-based bonds while drawing class-based boundaries.

One attribute of “virtuous female intimacy” was a clear distinction from the images of aberrant sexuality associated with “tribades” and inheriting suspicions of abnormal anatomy. Even as older anatomy-based theories of lesbianism were increasingly displaced and segregated to “foreign” (and especially, non-Christian) women, more local models of lesbianism were treated as a moral failing, associated with the both the lower classes and with decadent aristocrats. Advice literature warned of servants “corrupting” well-born children by “teaching” them sexual practices. 18th century literature introduces the motif of the predatory working-class woman who sexually preys on or threatens to corrupt the virtuous heroine. Certain religious sects were also suspect, especially Methodists and Catholics. (Remember this is from an English point of view.) Travel literature locates lesbian practices in the Ottoman Empire. Even in the Pirie-Woods legal case, the blame for imagining the possibility of f/f sex is assigned to a biracial Anglo-Indian girl.

Within this context, the promotion of (chaste) female friendship as restricted to the gentry is not simply a byproduct of the context in which it emerged, but an ongoing deliberate strategy to maintain it as a class marker. In Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, only the “ladies” who establish the hall are allowed to be “friends” while the unfortunate and working class women who are benefitted by their charity are depicted as incapable of establishing such friendships. (While primary evidence taken from working women’s lives clearly contradicts this attitude.) By the 1740s, Lanser observes, the program of using female friendship as a marker and mechanism for gentry class membership was practiced by both men and women. Rather than attacking women’s friendships, patriarchal forces took on the task of helping write the rules for how they must be enacted, shaping those rules to benefit the hetero-patriarchy. Women’s friendships could be framed as bleeding off frustration and unhappiness with the lot of woman, without challenging the causes of that situation.

Within this context, Lanser identifies three strategies used to resolve the instability of the class-sexuality intersection: re-centering sapphic relationships within a heterosexual context; deliberate “compensatory conservatism” practiced by women at risk of scrutiny; and idealization of such relationships in a way that removed them from everyday life.

Narratives of the 18th century embedded potentially sapphic relationships within heterosexual plots, as in Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse when two women, wronged by the same man, share their stories and join their lives together. Other similar stories don’t even allow them women a resolution together, but allow their friendship to mitigate what is otherwise a tragic story. In other cases, a passionate declaration of love unto death between the women is yet set aside for a marriage plot. Such devices “domesticated” intimate female friendships as a supplement to (not a displacement of) heterosexual relations, directly parallel to the way that Cleland’s Fanny Hill offers up pornographic sapphic encounters as long as the protagonist rejects the idea that they could be as satisfying as heterosexuality. The heterosexual resolution is required in order to acknowledge, then defuse, the danger of same-sex intimacy. This diversion practice is reflected in the real-life memoirs of women lamenting that marriage resulted in the death of friendship as the friend’s attention and energy was claimed and redirected by a husband.

As this heterosexual redirection became an established motif, women who continued to resist and avoid marriage for whatever reason became more visibly “odd,” especially if co-habiting with a female friend. Here Lanser invokes the concept of “compensatory conservatism”—the idea that sapphic women (or in some cases, simply those at risk of being thought sapphic) deliberately invoked the symbols of respectability and carefully policed their public performance to deflect suspicion. Both Butler & Ponsonby and Anne Lister are excellent examples as some of the traditional signs of class status were precarious (finances for Butler & Ponsonby, ancestry for Lister) and they left copious documentation of how they managed social interactions that can be read for strategies. Butler & Ponsonby were strict about controlling social access to them, rejecting overtures from people they considered would not add to their consequence (a frequent occurrence as they were something of a “tourist destination”). Lister’s private diaries document her thoughts on the acceptability of various women as potential partners, rejecting some as “vulgar.” We also have documentation that all of them had their respectable status challenged on occasion—the Ladies when depicted in a newspaper article as something of a butch-femme couple, and Lister in regular encounters with working class men and women who commented on her “mannish” tailoring and affect. It is unlikely to be coincidental that both households expressed politically conservative views and worked to maintain a conceptual divide from the “lower classes” or even simply from those who they felt were on equally shaky social ground. In some cases, sapphically suspect women dissociated themselves not only from politically liberal principles but from feminist principles, presenting themselves as uniquely distinct from the run of femininity.

The argument that this conservative turn is specifically associated with suspect status is bolstered by comparing the behavior and writings of women in more ordinary female friendships, who are more likely to be open to social mobility and inclusiveness. It’s also bolstered by examples of how association with suspected sapphists explicitly threatens the status of their associates, as in the “sapphic epistle” threatening those who associated with Anne Damer. Avoidance behavior not only affects personal relationships but the content of women’s writing about female friendship. Lanser notes that after about 1760, the depiction of physical affection within women’s friendships is more prevalent from male authors and married female authors, but less present in the writings of unmarried women, whereas the latter are more likely to focus on the female gaze, with women admiring each other’s beauty but no longer enacting that admiration in physical terms.

The third strategy, used by writers in all categories, was to defuse the danger implied by female friendships by framing them in idealized terms: as sisterhood, as set within an imagined pastoral landscape, or as being spiritual rather than bodily (including the emerging theme of union in death rather than in life). Pastoral imagery was a prominent motif from the 17th century and continues not only in the use of classical nicknames, but in fantasizing about setting up household in a rural retreat (something the Ladies of Llangollen achieved in reality). Increasingly as the 18th century came to a close, relations framed in terms of a marriage-like arrangement were seen as suspect, to be replaced by kinship metaphors. Relationships that were performed or perceived as competing with heterosexual marriage were more likely to attract criticism, as in the case of Anne Lister’s overtly marriage-like partnership with Ann Walker. Even the much lesser degree of criticism directed at Ponsonby & Butler focused on the marriage-like symbolism of their partnership. A century earlier Queen Anne’s simultaneously intimate and political relationships with her favorites were a focus of sapphic satires. Much of the animosity against Queen Marie Antoinette took the form of criticizing relationships that were perceived as displacing the king from both her bed and government. Indeed, the increased anxiety and animosity toward sapphism (real or alleged) at the end of the 18th century was related to concerns about the influence of intimate friendships on public power. In the 1790s we see many different signs of suspicion and concern about relationships that seem to have been protected by class status previously. This is when the suggestive newspaper article about Ponsonby & Butler appears, when Hester Thrale turns her poison pen on “ladies [who] live too much together” and when St.-Méry criticizes American women for seeking pleasures with their own sex, and also when there is a wave of lesbian prosecutions in the Dutch Republic. [Note: See Van der Meer 1991 { https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5384}] It is also the era when Mary Wollstonecraft, who had experienced female romance and featured it in her fiction, is found to be criticizing too great intimacies of that type.

Lanser notes that issues of class continued to impact the images of, and attitudes to, lesbians into the 20th century with working-class butch-femme culture considering itself distinct from the experiences of middle and upper class lesbians, as exemplified by Parisian salon culture of the 1920s.