Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Abstract

In its first issue (Autumn 1975), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society published Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's now classic article, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America." The following summer appeared Joan Kelly's "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History (Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 4 [Summer 1976]). Among scholarly articles, these two provided, in different ways, a point of departure for my thinking in this essay. I am deeply indebted also to the growing body of lesbian research in other journals, including Blanche W. Cook's "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," Chrysalis 3 (1977): 43-61; and Lorraine Bethel's "'This Infinity of Conscious Pain': Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition," lecture given at the Harlem Studio Museum, May 1978, forthcoming in Black Women's Studies, ed. Gloria Hull, Elaine Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980); by several books published in the last few years: Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979): Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The RoaringInside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Diana Russell and Nicole van de Ven, eds., Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes, 1976); and by Susan Cavin's dissertation in sociology, "Lesbian Origins: An Hystorical and Cross-cultural Analysis of Sex Ratios, Female Sexuality and Homo-sexual Segregation versus Hetero-sexual Integration Patterns in Relation to the Liberation of Women" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1978). 1. Alice Rossi, "Children and Work in the Lives of Women" (paper delivered at the University of Arizona, Tucson, February 1976).