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Great Lives from History: American Women

Lillian Faderman

by Joan S. Friedman, Micah L. Issitt

Scholar and feminist

Faderman is internationally recognized as a pioneering scholar in lesbian history and literature.

Born: July 18, 1940

Area of achievement: Scholarship

Early Life

The childhood of Lillian Faderman (LIHL-ee-uhn FAY-dur-muhn) was dysfunctional and haunted. Her grandparents sent her mother, Mary, and her aunt, Rae, to the United States in 1923 in the hope that they would work and find husbands who could afford to bring the family from Latvia. The sisters became garment workers, but Mary fell in love with a man who refused to marry her. She had two abortions at his insistence; she carried her third pregnancy to term, lost her paternity suit, and then took up with the man again—who refused to meet or acknowledge his daughter—when Faderman was five.

The annihilation of her family in the Holocaust caused Mary years of mental instability, and Faderman grew up determined to take care of her mother by becoming a successful actor. The three moved to East Los Angeles in 1948, living among poor Jews, Latinos, and blacks. Both sisters eventually married—Rae, happily—and young Faderman bartered office work for acting classes, displaying considerable talent and developing a passionate crush on her female teacher. At fourteen, Faderman posed for nude photo shoots, and at fifteen she had her nose fixed in the hope of furthering her chances in Hollywood. When she was sixteen, a gay male friend took Faderman to a lesbian bar. She later wrote, “It was as if I was looking through a brilliant prism that reflected all the parts of my life with absolute clarity and brought them together, wondrously, into one intelligible whole.”

A passionate first affair, a difficult second one, a narrow brush with gay-baiting police, even narrower brushes with sexually abusive men, and the realization that she was not going to be a film star led Faderman to reexamine her wild life. She was fortunate to encounter a volunteer therapist who accepted her lesbian identity and advised her that she would need a job if she intended to be an independent woman, and that a job required education. Turning away from truancy and failing grades, Faderman became an honor student. In her senior year of high school she entered into a marriage of convenience with a thirty-four-year-old gay acquaintance. Her mother and aunt were thrilled; after their years of struggling and poverty, their beloved child had a prosperous and cultured Jewish doctor (of psychology) for a husband. The doctor, however, was an alcoholic, and the marriage ended after six months.

Life's Work

Faderman attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and at Berkeley, supporting herself as a stripper while earning a B.A. in English. She returned to UCLA for a Ph.D. in English. Though a top student, she was steered, as a woman, to a job at Fresno State College while male classmates went to Ivy League positions. At Fresno State she was a popular teacher and won her male colleagues' esteem. When feminism gained legitimacy in the 1970's, she took the lead in creating a women's studies program on campus.

Her academic career grew out of her life. Though her dissertation was on Victorian literature, her first book was an anthology of writing by minorities, and her second was an anthology of Chicano writing. As the child of immigrants, she developed an interest in the Hmong community in Fresno; out of this came I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience (1998).

However, the bulk of her writing has focused on lesbian (and gay) history and literature, beginning with Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981), written because she wanted to contextualize her own relationships with women. It made Faderman's reputation as the pioneering scholar of lesbian studies. The book also drew criticism. In the scholarly debate between essentialists, who argue that sexual orientation is primarily biological in origin, and social constructionists, who argue that it is flexible and shaped by environment, Faderman's book came down squarely in the latter camp. Her view is that essentialism does not adequately explain the complexity of sexuality, and that in an ideal world everyone would be bisexual, which reflected her own youthful experience, as revealed in her 2003 memoir, Naked in the Promised Land. Her next book, Scotch Verdict (1983), was a study of the 1810 trial on which Lillian Hellman based her play The Children's Hour (1934), from which Faderman had performed a dramatic monologue as a child. This was followed by Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America (1991), To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History (1998), and Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (2006).

Creating a Paradigm of Lesbian History

In Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), Lillian Faderman created a paradigm within which to study lesbian history. Finding that romantic relationships between women were common prior to the twentieth century and were, in fact, condoned by society, she asked how it was that such relationships were regarded so negatively in the twentieth century. She concluded that the late-Victorian sexologists were to blame. Prior to their time, she argued, there was no assumption that romantic love and genital sex were necessarily linked. In an era when it was generally accepted that women lacked sexual passion, it was easy for women to enter into passionate relationships with each other that were romantic in every way except genital contact but that did not challenge or threaten their relationships with men or their subordinate status. In the nineteenth century, however, an increasing number of women desired to live independently, obtain education, have careers—in other words, to claim “male” prerogatives. The sexologists, argued Faderman, reinforced social controls on women by offering a new explanation of sexuality in which assertive, independent women were seen as “inverts,” an unnatural third sex. The result was that relationships between women became suspect, and any independent woman was suspected of being a lesbian. While other scholars have taken issue with aspects of Faderman's thesis, especially her assertion of the nonsexual nature of most premodern relationships between women, the paradigm endures.

In Faderman's memoir Jewishness is clearly an important element of her identity, but she never addresses its meaning for her. Her mother and aunt's Jewishness was typical of many immigrants: Yiddish spoken at home, kosher meat eaten at home, Shabbat candles and dinners, Orthodox shul on the High Holy Days. Rae appears to have been pious in her own way—keeping a kosher home at least after her marriage, insisting that her niece obtain a Jewish divorce from her husband (though the supposedly Orthodox rabbi who issued it did not act in accordance with Jewish law), and sending her niece off with a Hebrew blessing. Jewishness for Faderman appears to be, above all, about family—specifically, about the need to produce a new generation to ease her mother's and her aunt's grief and guilt over their murdered family. In 1975, tenured and secure in a relationship with Phyllis Irwin, a (non-Jewish) music professor, she took the then-radical step of conceiving through artificial insemination. In keeping with tradition and her mother's and aunt's deep desire, she named the baby Avrom, after her grandfather. The memoir includes side-by-side photos of her with young Avrom—lighting Hanukkah candles and sitting by a Christmas tree.

Faderman published a book about her mother, My Mother's Wars, detailing her mother's efforts to save their family from the holocaust. Faderman's most recent publication was the 2015 book The Gay Revolution: The Story of a Struggle, which was a New York Times and a Washington Post notable book for the year. Some reviews called Faderman's history the first comprehensive historical examination of the LGBT movement.

Significance

Faderman's contribution to the fields of lesbian history and literature is monumental. She said that she began writing lesbian history in order to give younger women the “usable past” she never had. Indeed, all of her books are meticulously researched, but written in an accessible style for the nonspecialist reader. In giving lesbians a past, she has also laid out the proof that romantic relationships between women are not new, and that famous and respected historical figures had such relationships, despite the desire of some people to deny that fact.

Further Reading

1 

Faderman, Lillian. Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. This frank and sometimes shocking memoir covers the period up to her mother's death in 1979.

2 

_______, ed. Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Viking, 1994. An anthology of stories, essays, and poems by men and women on lesbians from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. One half of the book is writing by men about women who love women; the other half shows how women viewed themselves, both in fantasy and in reality.

3 

Tyrkus, Michael J., and Jewelle Gomez, eds. “Lillian Faderman.” In Gay and Lesbian Biography. New York: St. James Press, 1997. Longer reference article includes more discussion of Faderman's scholarship.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Friedman, Joan S., and Micah L. Issitt. "Lillian Faderman." Great Lives from History: American Women, edited by Mary K. Trigg, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLHW_0162.
APA 7th
Friedman, J. S., & Issitt, M. L. (2016). Lillian Faderman. In M. K. Trigg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Women. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Friedman, Joan S. and Issitt, Micah L. "Lillian Faderman." Edited by Mary K. Trigg. Great Lives from History: American Women. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.