LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

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.