Quotes from Lillian Faderman

Some women who married and also had lesbian relationships were genuinely bisexual. Many others married because they could see no other viable choice in the day.

Of course many of us were loaded with self-hate and wanted to change. How could it have been otherwise? All we heard and read about homosexuality was that crap about how we were inverts, perverts, queers — a menace to children, poison to everybody else, doomed never to be happy.

Perhaps rage was an inextricable part of lesbian-feminism, because once these women analyzed the female's position in society they realized they had much to be furious about.

it is in our century that love has come to be perceived as a refinement of the sexual impulse, but in many other centuries romantic love and sexual impulse were often considered unrelated.

Education continued to come under particularly strong fire...: If women learned how to manage in the world as well as men, if they learned about history and politics and studied for a profession, of course they would soon be demanding a voice and a role outside the home. The medical doctors soon discovered that education was dangerous to a female's health.

To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women.

A woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her it know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.

hey'd say that heterosexual women become feminists when they finally understand that society doesn't allow them to be complete and free human beings— but lesbians had always understood that. Feminists are finally realizing that sex roles dehumanize women— but lesbian had always understood that; they'd always refused to a cape the limitations and oppressions opposed by the womanly role.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women's rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

Margaret Fuller, America's first female public intellectual and a contemporary of Beecher, was her antithesis. In 1840, Fuller became editor of the era's premier highbrow magazine, The Dial. She was then thirty years old.

Hale was among the first in a very long line of women who stepped far beyond the home but had phenomenal success in telling other women that the home was where they belonged.