I

Biologically, men have only one innate orientation, a sexual one that draws them to women, while women have two innate orientations, one sexual toward men and one reproductive toward their young. ¹

…I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men. Yes, 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, 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, Harlem Studio Museum, May 1978, forthcoming in Black Women’s Studies). I have also drawn on several recent books by Kathleen Barry (Female Sexual Slavery, 1979), Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, 1978), Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, 1978), and the volume edited by Diana Russell and Nicole van de Ven (Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, 1976) as well as Susan Cavin’s doctoral dissertation, “Lesbian Origins: A Historical 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” (Rutgers University, 1978).

I became something like that, an Anna who invited defeat from men without ever being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time, one that can turn them bitter, or lesbian, or solitary. Yes, that Anna during that time was…

The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many texts beyond the two just mentioned. The assumption made by Rossi, that women are “innately sexually oriented” toward men, or by Lessing, that the lesbian choice is simply an acting out of bitterness toward men, is not unique to them; these assumptions are widespread in literature and the social sciences.

I am concerned here with two other matters: first, how and why women’s choice of other women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, or tribe has been crushed, invalidated, and forced into hiding and disguise; and second, the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings including feminist scholarship. There is a connection here. I believe that much feminist theory and criticism is stranded on this shoal.

My organizing impulse is the belief that it is not enough for feminist thought simply to acknowledge the existence of lesbian texts. Any theory or cultural and political creation that treats lesbian existence as marginal or less “natural” as mere “sexual preference” or as the mirror image of heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened, regardless of its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of “lesbianism” as an “alternative lifestyle” or to make a token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue. In this exploratory paper, I shall try to show why.

I will begin by way of examples, briefly discussing four recent books written from different viewpoints and political orientations but all presenting themselves, and being favorably reviewed, as feminist. Each takes as a basic assumption that the social relations of the sexes are disordered and extremely problematic, if not disabling, for women; all seek paths toward change. I have learned more from some of these books than from others; yet I am clear: each one might have been more accurate, more powerful, and a truer force for change had the author dealt with lesbian existence as a reality and as a source of knowledge and power available to women, or had examined the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance. In these works concerned with mothering, sex roles, relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, compulsory heterosexuality is never examined as an institution that powerfully affects all these domains, nor is the idea of “preference” or “innate orientation” even indirectly questioned.

In For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, for example, the authors develop a provocative study suggesting that the advice given to American women by male health professionals in areas such as marital sex, maternity, and child care echoes the dictates of the economic marketplace and the role capitalism has required women to play in production and reproduction. Women have become consumer victims of various cures, therapies, and normative judgments across different periods, reflected in prescriptions for middle-class women to embody and preserve the sacredness of the home, the “scientific” romanticization of the home itself. Yet none of this “expert” advice is particularly scientific or women-oriented; it reflects male needs, male fantasies about women, and a desire to control women, especially in sexuality and motherhood, all fused with the requirements of industrial capitalism. Despite its many strengths and lucid feminist wit, I kept waiting for the basic prescription against lesbianism to be examined. It never was.

This absence is hardly due to a lack of information. Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History tells us that as early as 1656 the New Haven Colony prescribed the death penalty for lesbians. Katz provides many suggestive documents on the treatment (or torture) of lesbians by the medical profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent work by historian Nancy Sahli documents the crackdown on intense female friendships among college women at the turn of the present century. The ironic title, For Her Own Good, might have referred first and foremost to the economic imperative to heterosexuality and marriage and to the sanctions imposed against single women and widows, both of whom have long been viewed as deviant. Yet, in this often enlightening Marxist feminist overview of male prescriptions for female sanity and health, the economics underlying prescriptive heterosexuality are left unexamined.

Among the three psychoanalytically based books I discuss, one, Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women, is written as if lesbians simply do not exist, even as marginal beings. Given Miller’s title, I find this astonishing. However, the favorable reviews in feminist journals such as Signs and Spokeswoman suggest that Miller’s heterocentric assumptions are widely shared. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise, Dorothy Dinnerstein makes an impassioned argument for sharing parenting between women and men and for ending what she perceives as the male/female symbiosis of “gender arrangements” that lead us further into violence and self-extinction. (I have other criticisms of Dinnerstein’s work, including her silence on the institutional and random terrorism men have practiced on women and children throughout history, and her neglect of economic and other material realities that shape psychological life.) Dinnerstein’s view of the relations between women and men as “a collaboration to keep history mad” to perpetuate social relations that are hostile, exploitative, and destructive ignores the long struggle of women to resist oppression and to change their condition.

II

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it is logical from a feminist perspective to ask: Why does the search for love and tenderness originally lead toward women? Why would women ever redirect that search? Why have species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional and erotic relationships become so rigidly identified? And why are such violent strictures necessary to enforce women’s total emotional and erotic loyalty and subservience to men? I doubt that enough feminist scholars and theorists have acknowledged the societal forces that wrench women’s emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and other women.

I do not assume that mothering by women is the sole cause of lesbian existence. Yet the issue of mothering by women has been much discussed lately, usually with the view that increased parenting by men would minimize antagonism between the sexes and equalize the sexual imbalance of power. These discussions rarely reference compulsory heterosexuality as either a phenomenon or an ideology. I do not wish to psychologize here but rather to identify sources of male power. I believe many men could undertake large scale child care without radically altering the balance of power in a male identified society.

In her essay “The Origin of the Family,” Kathleen Gough lists eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary societies. I use these as a framework:

1. To deny women our own sexuality
   Methods include clitoridectomy and infibulation, chastity belts, punishment (including death) for female adultery and lesbian sexuality, psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris, strictures against masturbation, denial of maternal and postmenopausal sensuality, unnecessary hysterectomy, pseudolesbian images in media and literature, and the closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence.
2. Or to force male sexuality upon them
   This is accomplished by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating, incest, the socialization of women to accept male sexual drive as a right, the idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, and advertising, child marriage, arranged marriage, prostitution, the harem, psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm, and pornographic depictions suggesting that sadistic heterosexuality is more normal than mutual sensuality between women.
3. To command or exploit their labor to control their produce
   This occurs through the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production, the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment, tokenism, male control of abortion, contraception, and childbirth, enforced sterilization, pimping, and female infanticide.
4. To control or rob them of their children
   Achieved by means such as father right and legal kidnapping, enforced sterilization, systematized infanticide, the seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts, and the malpractice of male obstetrics.
5. To confine them physically and prevent their movement
   Through rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets, purdah, foot binding, the atrophying of women’s athletic capabilities, restrictive feminine dress codes such as the veil, sexual harassment, horizontal segregation in employment, prescriptions for full time mothering, and enforced economic dependence.
6. To use them as objects in male transactions
   Such as treating women as gifts (bride price), arranged marriage, or as entertainers and symbols for male deals (for example, wife-hostess, cocktail waitress, call girl, bunny, or geisha).
7. To cramp their creativeness
   Through witch persecutions targeting midwives and female healers, defining male pursuits as inherently more valuable than female ones, restricting female self fulfillment to marriage and motherhood, and the sexual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers, all of which disrupt women’s creative aspirations and erase female tradition.
8. To withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments
   Via noneducation (with 60 percent of the world’s illiterates being women), the Great Silence regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture, sex role stereotyping that deflects women from science and technology, male dominated professional bonding, and discrimination against women in the professions.

These methods illustrate that we face not a simple maintenance of inequality or property possession but a pervasive cluster of forces ranging from physical brutality to the control of consciousness that work to ensure women see marriage and sexual orientation toward men as inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive.

Some forms of male power are more easily recognized as enforcing heterosexuality on women than others. Yet each contributes to a climate in which women have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men is inevitable. Examples include the chastity belt, child marriage, the erasure of lesbian existence in art and literature, and the idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage. These forces, whether through physical coercion or control of consciousness, serve to bind women to a life defined by compulsory heterosexuality.

III

I have chosen to use the terms “lesbian existence” and “lesbian continuum” because the word “lesbianism” carries a clinical and limiting tone. “Lesbian existence” suggests both the historical presence of lesbians and our ongoing creation of its meaning. The “lesbian continuum” embraces the wide range of woman identified experiences throughout life and history, not merely the occurrence of genital sexual encounters between women but also the sharing of primary intensity, emotional bonding, resistance to male tyranny, and practical as well as political support among women.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is, in effect, a direct or indirect challenge to male claims of access to women. Yet it has also been characterized by role playing, self hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence. We risk romanticizing at our peril what it means to love and resist against overwhelming pressures. Lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without a supporting tradition, continuity, or social underpinning. The deliberate destruction of records documenting lesbian realities has long served to keep heterosexuality as the default for women, erasing joy, sensuality, courage, and community and replacing them with guilt, self betrayal, and pain.

Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence when they are merely included as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality denies and erases female reality. It is essential to dissociate the complex continuum of female resistance from male homosexual values and allegiances. I perceive the lesbian experience as fundamentally female, a source of empowerment with unique oppressions, meanings, and potentialities that cannot be fully comprehended when simply bracketed with other sexually stigmatized identities. Just as “parenting” can obscure the particular reality of being a mother, the term “gay” can blur the distinct outlines that are crucial for understanding both feminism and women’s freedom. The clinical associations of the term “lesbian” have historically separated female friendship and comradeship from the erotic. Yet as we expand our definition to include the rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, and the political resistance inherent in female relationships, we begin to grasp the full spectrum of the lesbian continuum.

Lesbian existence is not merely a refuge from male abuse; it is an electric and empowering bond between women, a powerful affirmation of life in the face of compulsory heterosexuality. The work of unearthing and describing “lesbian existence” is liberating for all women. This task must move beyond the limits of white, middle class Western women’s studies to examine women’s lives and groupings across every racial, ethnic, and political structure. We must document the myriad forms of the “double life” that women have led, not only those who identify as lesbians but also those who, though identified as heterosexual, have maintained deep, intimate bonds with other women.

IV

Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springboard for female power, that is violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of women’s passion for women, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation, and their subsequent disintegration under intense pressure have deprived women of the collective power to change social relations and liberate one another. The lie of compulsory heterosexuality afflicts not only feminist scholarship but every institution, curriculum, and personal relationship, creating a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue. No matter how we choose to identify, that lie distorts our lives.

It traps countless women, forcing them to conform to a prescribed script even as it drains the energy of “closeted” lesbians. Both the lesbian in the closet and the woman imprisoned by ideas of the “normal” share the pain of blocked choices and lost self definition. One layer of this lie is the assumption that women are inevitably drawn to men, even if that attraction may be suicidal as in Tristan und Isolde or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In the social sciences, primary love between the sexes is portrayed as normal, with women needing men for social, economic, and psychological reasons; the heterosexually constituted family is seen as the fundamental unit. Women who do not channel their primary intensity toward men are thus condemned to an even deeper outsiderhood.

Another layer implies that when women turn to one another it is out of hatred for men. Although a healthy skepticism about men may indeed be part of any woman’s response to a male dominated culture, woman hatred is so deeply embedded and so normalized that many women, including feminists and lesbians, fail to recognize it until it becomes shattering in their own lives.

Lesbian existence is often misrepresented merely as an escape from male abuse rather than as an empowering, electrifying bond between women. One frequently quoted passage, in which Colette’s Renee in The Vagabond describes the “melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other’s arms,” has been read by some as a refuge from male cruelty. Yet even Colette’s account, which is sometimes credited to a lesbian writer, must be contrasted with sources like Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may need each other as allies and mentors, a lover is never the same as a comrade.

For many women, survival has meant maintaining a double life, a necessary compromise in a world where heterosexuality is imposed for economic security and social acceptance. Whether through remaining in marriages that provide economic and social legitimacy or through clandestine relationships with other women, the tension between the normative heterosexual script and inner emotional truth has defined countless lives. This double life, in which a woman may simultaneously conform to and resist male dominance, is both a personal tragedy and a powerful political statement. As Meridel LeSueur’s The Girl and Toni Morrison’s Sula illustrate, the intense, sometimes conflicting bonds between women can provide the sustenance needed to endure an oppressive system.

Woman identification, then, is not only a source of personal strength but a potential basis for collective political action. In choosing a woman lover or life partner in the face of enforced heterosexuality, there is an emerging feminist political content, a conscious, liberatory act that challenges the very foundations of male domination. Yet for this political content to be fully realized, the erotic choice must deepen into a deliberate identification with a lesbian feminist politics.

The work ahead, unearthing and describing what I call “lesbian existence,” is potentially liberating for all women. It requires us to move beyond simplistic dichotomies such as good versus bad marriages or liberated sex versus prostitution and instead examine the institution of heterosexuality in its entirety. We must confront how heterosexuality has been organized and maintained through economic exploitation, cultural propaganda, and the imposition of gendered roles. Only by understanding these dynamics can we undo the power men wield over women, a power that has set the model for many other forms of exploitation.

Montague, Massachusetts

Citation List

1. Alice Rossi, “Children and Work in the Lives of Women” (paper delivered at the University of Arizona, Tucson, February 1976).
2. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Bantam Books [1962] 1977), p. 480.
3. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Press, 1978); Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976).
4. (A note indicating that many other influential recent books and anthologies—such as Our Bodies, Ourselves and others—would illustrate the same point.)
5. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976).
6. Nancy Sahli, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships before the Fall,” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 8 (1979): 17–27.
7. (A note regarding public endorsement of a particular book; details as given in the text.)
8. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
9. (Dorothy Dinnerstein, p. 272.)
10. Mary Daly, pp. 184–85; 114–33.
11. Chodorow, pp. 197–98.
12. Ibid., pp. 198–99.
13. Ibid., p. 200.
14. Kathleen Gough, “The Origin of the Family,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna [Rapp] Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 69–70.
15. Kathleen Barry, pp. 216–19.
16. Anna Demeter, Legal Kidnapping (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), pp. xx, 126–28.
17. Mary Daly, pp. 132, 139–41, 163–65.
18. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973); Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 118–54; Mary Daly, pp. 178–222.
19. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929) and Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., [1938] 1966); Tillie Olsen, Silences (Boston: Delacorte Press, 1978); Michelle Cliff, “The Resonance of Interruption,” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 8 (1979): 29–37.
20. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 347–51; Tillie Olsen, pp. 22–46.
21. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 93.
22. Fran P. Hosken, “The Violence of Power: Genital Mutilation of Females,” Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics 6 (1979): 28–35; Russell and van de Ven, pp. 194–95.
23. Kathleen Barry, pp. 163–64.
24. (A note on the issue of “lesbian sadomasochism” and its cultural analysis.)
25. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 15–16.
26. Ibid., p. 174.
27. Susan Brownmiller (see note 8 above).
28. Catharine A. MacKinnon, p. 219.
29. MacKinnon, p. 298.
30. Ibid., p. 220.
31. Ibid., p. 221.
32. Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (details as cited in the text).
33. Ibid., p. 33.
34. Ibid., p. 103.
35. Ibid., p. 5.
36. Ibid., p. 100.
37. Ibid., p. 218.
38. Ibid., p. 140.
39. Ibid., p. 172.
40. (A note on male identification as a source of white women’s racism, with details in the text.)
41. Kathleen Barry, p. 220.
42. Susan Cavin’s dissertation (referenced in the text).
43. (For the perception of heterosexuality as an economic institution, see Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, “Towards a Feminist Economics: A Global View,” Second Wave 5, no. 3 [1979]: 23–30.)
44. Russell and van de Ven, p. 40: “… few heterosexual women realize their lack of free choice about their sexuality, and few realize how and why compulsory heterosexuality is also a crime against them.”
45. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 15.
46. Blanche W. Cook, “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979]: 719–20.
47. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Out & Out Books Pamphlet no. 3 (New York: Out & Out Books, 1979).
48. Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence (p. 209); H. D., Tribute to Freud (Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971), pp. 50–54.
49. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 126.
50. Gracia Clark, “The Beguines: A Medieval Women’s Community,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1975): 73–80.
51. Denise Paulme, ed., Women of Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 7, 266–67.
52. Rosalind Petchesky, “Dissolving the Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist Groups 1–5,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 387.
53. Andrea Dworkin, Chains of Iran, Chains of Grief (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., in press).
54. Russell and van de Ven, pp. 42–43, 56–57.
55. (References to Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History, Lorraine Hansberry’s letters to Ladder, and copies supplied by Barbara Grier.)
56. Meridel LeSueur, The Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: West End Press, 1978), pp. 10–11.
57. LeSueur, The Girl, p. 20.
58. LeSueur, The Girl, pp. 53–54.
59. LeSueur, The Girl, p. 55.
60. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), pp. 103–104, 149.
61. Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, “Lesbians in the Mainstream: The Image of Lesbians in Recent Commercial Fiction,” Conditions 6 (1979).
62. Russell and van de Ven, p. 40 (as cited above).
63. Lorraine Bethel, “This Infinity of Conscious Pain” (referenced in the text).
64. Dorothy Dinnerstein, p. 103.
65. Conversation with Blanche W. Cook, New York City, March 1979.