Following is the introduction to the forthcoming book, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster (Da Capo Press). Reprinted with permission.
IN THE EARLY 1950’s, Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research received an enormous donation of anonymous erotic manuscripts. Working on the campus of Indiana University, Kinsey’s librarian Jeannette Howard Foster sorted them into piles on two long library tables in the basement of Wylie Hall. Since such works could not be organized by author, she decided to catalog them by subject matter—were they heterosexual or homosexual? Was the theme sadistic or was it about a particular type of fetish? Fortunately for her, these anonymous authors got down to business in the first page or two.
Jeannette looked like a typical grandmother of the time in her prim Nelly Don dresses and sensible ground-gripper shoes and seemed on the surface a caricature of the old-fashioned librarian. She did not appear to be the type of woman who would deign to touch pornography, let alone read it, nor did she look like someone who would comb seedy bookstores searching out lesbian paperbacks. But looks belied her true identity. Beneath the proper demeanor, Jeannette was a woman driven by her passion to root out examples of lesbians, bisexuals, and cross dressers in literature and to document their presence in a book, so countless others could find validation of their sexual identity in print. In 1948, this lifelong quest led her to the Institute for Sex Research (ISR), with its extensive library of erotic fiction and works on sexuality. She had to know if she had overlooked any elusive yet critical works, and the ISR—the largest collection of its kind in the United States—was the place to do this.
For Jeannette Foster, organizing pornographic works was boring, and sorting it hour after hour was as tedious and tiring as the yard work she had done as a young girl with her father. During her four years at the Institute, the strong-minded and opinionated woman grew weary of Kinsey’s dictatorial ways. She also became convinced that he would prevent her from publishing a book about sex variants because he didn’t want her work on homosexuality linked to the Institute. Breaking away from Kinsey, she boldly self-published Sex Variant Women in Literature in 1956, a time when many viewed being gay as sinful, sick, and criminal. Indeed, homosexuals were routinely institutionalized, fired from their jobs, and imprisoned simply for being gay. Jeannette’s pioneering book played a pivotal role in raising awareness for the first time of the lesbian presence in literature and history, provided subsequent scholars of lesbian literature with the cornerstone for their research, and served as a source of validation and inspiration for generations of women who went on to become activists, publishers, and scholars. Its republication in 1976 and 1985 kept her work alive and ensured that new generations of readers would be influenced by her scholarship.
The life of the lesbian author, educator, librarian, poet, and scholar Jeannette Howard Foster spans from the late 19th century, an era that historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has labeled “the female world of love and ritual,” to the rise of the gay liberation movement of the 1970’s, from an era of alienation and isolation to one of collective consciousness. As the oldest of three children in an upwardly mobile middle-class family, Jeannette acquired important tools during her childhood that ensured her success in the coming decades. Her father, lacking a son, had high expectations for his first-born child’s academic performance. Raising her with the expectation that she would attend college, he pointed with great pride to educated women in the family’s past, among them Ada Howard, who had served as the first president of Wellesley College. A controlling man, Jeannette’s father admonished his daughters to keep detailed journals and to write letters to their parents weekly. It was this letter-writing habit that empowered Jeannette to cultivate the web of lesbian friendships that sustained her throughout a life that was indelibly conditioned and shaped by her social class. Jeannette’s mother, who regretted her inability to pursue a musical career, broke with convention by encouraging her daughters to aspire to college. It was important to her that they had a choice between marriage and self-sufficiency. Her mother also imbued her with impeccable manners and social skills, which she later used to her advantage. Both parents personified the Puritan work ethic and instilled this trait in Jeannette, along with a love of reading and an appreciation for the fine arts, history, and nature.
The story of Jeannette’s life is a study of lesbian struggle, empowerment, and triumph amid the persistent hostilities of 20th-century America. From an early age, she knew that she was attracted to women and felt comfortable with her identity, in part because her father was often absent from home, and she grew up in a homosocial environment populated by her sisters, mother, aunt, and female schoolmates. Even though her friends sometimes felt uncomfortable with her intense fondness for them, no one explicitly told her there was anything wrong with her feelings or behavior—but she soon began to intuit this from the society at large. Her study of science at the University of Chicago provided her with an objective, matter-of-fact approach to life and led her to become a freethinker, minimizing any struggle with the Judeo-Christian concept of homosexuality as an abomination. In her lifetime, Jeannette had many loves—some of them characterized by deep emotional bonds, others by physical intimacy. The seemingly unrequited love that inspired her best poetry in the 1920’s trumped them all and set the standard for all of her subsequent relationships.
The printed word played a critical role in the positive construction of sexual identity for many 20th-century women. Jeannette’s discovery of same-sex romantic friendship in books sparked a burning desire to find other examples in literature and history, and for the remainder of her reading life she would take delight in detecting them despite the difficulties inherent in the task. In the 1920’s and 30’s, some gays and lesbians internalized the condemnation of their sexual orientation by the church, the courts, and the medical community’s pronouncement of homosexuality as a disease. Social purity advocates pushed the censorship of books and plays with gay and lesbian content, and the Catholic Church’s National Office for Decent Literature added homosexual literature to its list of condemned books. As a result, mainstream publishers often engaged in self-censorship in order to avoid prosecution, and some librarians restricted access to books on homosexuality. Undaunted by the social forces that conspired to render the gay world invisible, Jeannette learned to decode the references to lesbianism that in spite of prohibitions continued to appear in stories, novels, and poems and fed her insatiable desire to find validation of her identity.
Living in relative isolation, lesbians of the pre–World War II era searched for one another in homosocial environments such as women’s colleges, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later called the Women’s Army Corps), or in female-intensive occupations. In Jeannette’s case, the protective cover of women’s college campuses and library schools provided her with space in which she could court women intensely without attracting undue attention. A passionate romantic, she showered the objects of her affection with candy, flowers, and poems, and on at least one occasion was willing to change employment and move across several states in order to be near her beloved. With few exceptions, however, Jeannette’s loves were unrequited or short-term relationships, governed by passion, pragmatism, and unfulfilled expectations, and her search for the girlfriend of her dreams contributed to her persistent restlessness. While working for sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, Jeannette met Hazel Toliver, the woman who would become her companion for the final three decades of her life. Theirs was a caring yet unconventional relationship that defied definition even among lesbians, one that provided each of them with emotional and intellectual sustenance.
During her lifetime Jeannette, like many other gays and lesbians, used a variety of terms to describe her sexual identity. In 1915, after first reading the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis, she began to think of herself as a homosexual. Having felt same-sex attraction as a young girl, she therefore considered her homosexuality to be innate and—like literary critic F. O. Matthiessen, who encountered Ellis’s Sexual Inversion nine years later—attributed her identity to nature, not immorality. In poetry written as early as 1916, she used the word “gay,” but it clearly referred to people who were full of joy or mirth. A little later in life, when reflecting on her relationships she described them as homosexual, but during her years at Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, she came to associate that term with male behavior and began referring to herself as a lesbian, a woman who loved women. Under ideal circumstances, she believed, that type of love was expressed emotionally and physically. When searching for a title for her book, however, she chose the label “sex variant” because she believed it to be less stigmatized than “gay,” “homosexual,” or “lesbian.” Only late in her life did she use the labels “gay” or “queer” when speaking about her sexuality.
At a time when most gays and lesbians felt compelled to conceal their sexual identity, Jeannette systematically located, confidently requested, and defiantly examined volumes of variant literature at libraries from Chicago to Boston to Atlanta. Under the mantle of scholarship and armed with her doctorate in library science, she unabashedly pursued her passion for lesbian literature because she recognized the writing of fiction as an essential vehicle for lesbian self-expression, identification, and resistance. As a librarian, she insisted on her right to examine books, no matter what the subject matter. She even cultivated personal friendships in order to gain access to many obscure and difficult-to-access materials, though it took her years. Proud of her scholarship, she published Sex Variant Women in Literature under her given name, at a time when many gays and lesbians felt compelled to hide their identities behind pseudonyms. When her lesbian short fiction appeared in The Ladder in the late 1950’s and throughout the 1960’s, she began using not one but several pseudonyms, mainly because she wanted her real name to be associated with her scholarly work. Near the end of her life, however, as she contemplated the possible publication of one of her novels, she debated which pseudonym to use and then wrote her editor, “Oh, go on & use ‘Jeannette Foster’ if you think it has any sales value! I’ll be buried soon enough to make no matter.”
As she pursued life, love, and lesbian literature, Jeannette lived and worked in seventeen states. Driven by a desire to ferret out works of lesbian literature, she changed locations and positions frequently in order to gain greater access to public and private library collections. Like many other middle-class lesbians of her generation, she gravitated to New York, a city she dearly loved, and she frequently summered there. As with many middle-class professional women, she did not seek out the bar culture, but instead socialized with other professional women in private settings. She had a knack for making friends wherever she lived, and they became part of a lifelong support network sustained by correspondence. Her family tacitly acknowledged her sexual identity, but because she felt they didn’t approve of sexual expression, let alone her preference, she was not comfortable sharing with them some of the most important aspects of her life. As a result, they could never fully appreciate her accomplishments, warmth, and wit, and she turned instead to her lesbian friends for the validation.
During her four years as the librarian of the Institute for Sex Research, Jeannette became desensitized to the discussion of sexual topics. As someone who had been out to herself since the 1910’s, out to other gays and lesbians, and out to sympathetic employers and co-workers, she was generally more comfortable with her sexuality than many of her friends. It was this openness that enabled an aging Jeannette to speak freely about her sexuality and personality with younger gays and lesbians, among them Barbara Grier, Karla Jay, and Jonathan Katz. The correspondence and conversations she had with them in the 1970’s provide rare and intimate glimpses into her life story.
Living much of her life during a time when it was unwise, even risky, to have incriminating evidence like letters and homosexual literature in one’s possession, Jeannette nevertheless amassed a large collection of lesbian fiction and medical works about homosexuality. Some of her books—the lesbian pulp fiction in particular—survive today in the Christine Pattee Lesbiana collection at Central Connecticut State University. She also maintained an extensive correspondence with lesbians around the globe. Their letters to her evidently have not survived, in part because of her desire to protect their identities, but her correspondence with such activists and writers as Margaret Anderson, Elsa Gidlow, Marie Kuda, and May Sarton exists in archival and manuscript repositories across the nation. Many of Jeannette’s poems—lovingly typed by her friend, author Valerie Taylor—survive in the Valerie Taylor Papers at Cornell University, and her unpublished novels, Home is the Hunter and Death Under Duress, are housed along with typed copies of short stories and novellas in the Barbara Grier and Donna McBride Collection at the San Francisco Public Library.
One of the challenges one faces in telling Jeannette’s story stems from the need to reconcile contradictory information found in letters, diaries, oral histories, published accounts, and memories of friends to create a coherent whole. Jeannette was unabashedly lesbian when it came to her wide circle of friends, but she led a pragmatically closeted life with employers and co-workers until she came to trust them. On occasion, she self-censored or erected smokescreens in an attempt to protect the privacy and wishes of some of her more closeted friends. She occasionally was prone to exaggeration, and as age began to affect her memory, some errors crept into the accounts of her life that she shared with others. In such instances, the historian and biographer must become a detective, seeking to confirm, deny, and correct the story based on surviving historical evidence.
Jeannette Foster’s lesbianism was central to her identity. It governed her course of study, her choice of where to live and work, the focus of her research and writing, and the people she wanted to be near. It shaped her creative output: her poetry and prose were expressions of her emotional desire, and Sex Variant Women in Literature was the product of her intellectually curious and daring mind. Jeannette Foster’s journey from childhood in Oak Park, Illinois, to a retirement home in Pocahontas, Arkansas, is punctuated by such flashpoints as encounters with the journalist Janet Flanner, the novelist Glenway Wescott, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and psychiatrist George Henry. Consequently, her life illuminates lesbian history at several critical junctures: the waning of romantic friendship, the sexually charged 1920’s, the pre–World War II era of invisibility, the repressive 1950’s, and the 1970’s movement culture that emerged in the wake of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. Hers is the story of an isolated individual who, in looking for positive validation of her identity, opened the closet door for lesbian literature. It is the narrative of a fearless and passionate trailblazer who claimed life for herself and on her own terms. Finally, it is the account of a brilliant scholar who lived long enough to see her pioneering work embraced by her intellectual heirs who, in turn, smashed stereotypes that had plagued and suppressed lesbians and gays for generations.
Joanne Passet, professor of history at Indiana University East, is the author of Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality and Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900–17.
