Lillian Faderman

In 1810, a Scottish student named Jane Cumming accused her school mistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, of having an affair in the presence of their students. Dame Cumming Gordon, the wealthy and powerful grandmother of the accusing student, advises her friends to remove their daughters from the Drumsheugh boarding school. Within days, the institution is deserted and two women are deprived of their livelihoods. Award-winning author Lillian Faderman...

A unique and "often quite moving" look at gay women's role in US history (The Washington Post). This landmark work of lesbian history focuses on how certain late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century women whose lives can be described as lesbian were in the forefront of the battle to secure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today. Lillian Faderman persuasively argues that their lesbianism may in fact have facilitated...

A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century "Lillian Faderman's is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of 'woman' with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women."-Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Suffrage:...