I know Chosen Sisters colloquially as my ‘dead lesbians’ project, which is a neat way of summing it up, and worth it for its ability to shock or amuse, depending on the audience. But both of those words need unpacking if I’m to outline the parameters of the project.
What do I mean by ‘dead’?
First and foremost, I mean the obvious – I’m not writing about anyone who’s still alive. But also, I mean that the subjects of my poems must be safely dead enough that I feel I can write about them without their close relatives or friends tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that I’ve got them all wrong. There’s a poetic licence that comes with having clear water between the life of a subject and the present day that I highly value and would not want to lose. I’m writing poetry, not history, and that’s an important distinction. It means that, although my poems are rooted in historical evidence, I have a creative space around that evidence in which I can imagine, embellish, and be playful. That creative space is easier to dwell in if there’s a gap of time between my subjects and me.
How much clear water feels safe enough? When I embarked on this project, I decided to set a notional-cut-off point before which my subjects must have died, and I chose 1972 – the year in which I was born. That leaves a clear half century and more between us, and helpfully, 1972 was also the year of the first Gay Pride march in London. The following decades, much as they were scarred by AIDS and Section 28, brought so much significant social and legal change that this also allows for an interesting historical perspective on the lives of the women I’m writing about, who could never have married each other, or been legally recognised as co-parents, or counted on the protection of the law if they faced discrimination at work.
Like all poetry rules, I have to allow the possibility for this one to be broken for a good reason, and that good reason was the legendary footballer Lily Parr, who died in 1978. I hope readers will understand why I simply couldn’t have left her out of the collection.
What do I mean by ‘lesbian’?
From the outset, I knew that this was a word that hardly any of my subjects would ever have used to describe themselves. For that reason, it doesn’t appear in the working title of my collection, and is hardly used in any of the poems. I use it colloquially only as a shorthand to explain who it is that I’m researching and writing about, and I mean, in short, women who lived in intimate relationships with other women, or expressed a desire to do so.
I knew, early on, that I didn’t want to stray into the prurient territory of exactly what these women got up to in bed. It’s impossible to find out, for most of them, anyway. In one case of a couple I’ve written about, what we do know from their diaries about what happened in their shared bed was that one of them nursed the other through terrible migraines, while their cat purred beside them on the coverlet. I would argue that there’s a far greater intimacy there than anything we might find out about their sex life.
And what about the intimacy in perpetuity of a shared memorial stone?
Early on in my research, an essay by Judith M. Bennett on the shared memorial brass to Elizabeth Etchinham and Agnes Oxenbridge introduced me to the hugely helpful notion of ‘lesbian-like’, a term Bennett coined in the 1990s when, she says, “I was tired of pausing at the lesbian threshold, agonizing over “Was she or wasn’t she?” fretting about applying a modern standard to women long dead, and hesitating over the difference between sexual identities and sexual acts. ‘Lesbian-like’ got me over that threshold, out of the master’s house, and into possible worlds that I had not before seen. There will always be only a few women in the distant past for whom we can be confident about lesbian sexual activity… But these need not be the only women whose stories are relevant to lesbian history, and relevant, as well, to a women’s and gender history that needs to be more open to lesbian possibilities.”
Using the term ‘lesbian-like’, Bennett argues, opens the possibility of applying a “loose, workaday meaning of ‘lesbian’, even if acknowledging its limitations and instabilities”. She goes on to say that, “Rather than seeking identity, lesbian-like allows us to imagine in plausible ways the opportunities for same-sex love that actual women once encountered, and to do so without asserting a crude correlation between our varied experiences today and the varied lives of those long dead.”
Bennett identifies three features of ‘lesbian-like’ lives:
- women whose lives offered opportunities for same-sex love
- women who resisted conventions of feminine behaviour based on heterosexual marriage
- women who lived in circumstances that especially encouraged the nurture and support of women
I am allowing these three features to guide my choices of subject for these poems, and am grateful also for the phrase ‘productive instability’ which Bennett associates with the term ‘lesbian-like’, which I find lends me the sort of creative, playful space in which poems can grow from small pieces of historical evidence.
It’s also worth saying that in in these poems I am choosing to write about women who understood themselves to be female, in a time before cross-sex hormones and gender surgery were available. I’m aware that this extends the pool of my subjects to women who lived, sometimes for many years, as men, and who might be perceived today to be non-binary or transgender. There is ample scope for a different poetry project exploring the lives of these people through a transgender lens, rather than through my ‘dead lesbian’ one. I would be fascinated to read those poems, but that is not my project, and I am not the best person to write it.
Through a lesbian feminist lens, it strikes me how, for most of the cross-dressing women I have researched, decisions to dress and live as men offered financial reward, independence and freedom from sexual exploitation which were simply not available to them as women. The more I read about them, the more I feel that it is crucial to acknowledge the influence of patriarchy, misogyny and sexual violence in understanding how they found ways to survive and thrive.
Cross-dressing women are vital to an understanding of social class, too. When we consider the two main lesbian archetypes in the 18th and 19th century, cross-dressing and romantic friendship, the former tends to be the preserve of working class women, and the latter that of middle and upper class women. This distinction is well illustrated by the examples of ‘Mr and Mrs How’, who ran the White Horse pub in Poplar for 26 years as landlord and landlady; and of Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, who are the most celebrated example of a romantic friendship.
Ponsonby and Butler, both from aristocratic families and well-connected, could afford, financially and socially, to live openly together. For James/Mary How and her partner, this veneer of respectability as a couple, and the financial means to live and work together, were only achieved by the cross-dressing of one of them – decided, so they said, on the toss of a coin.
If I were to leave cross-dressing women out of my poetry project because of a modern sensitivity around the possibility of misgendering them, then that would significantly skew the collection towards the lives of the more affluent, and would also leave out a rich seam of lesbian history, which can be traced right through to the butch lesbian culture of more recent times.
It also matters that my subjects are women because so much of what happened to them is related to their sex. For some, like the pirate couple Anne Bonny and Mary Read, this meant pregnancy, which ended up sparing them both from being hanged. For several others, it meant sexual exploitation at the hands of men. And for some, it meant being pioneers in the fields of medicine, gardening or sport, which had previously been closed to women. The more I’ve been working on this project, the more I’ve become aware of its potential value in honouring not only lesbian history, but also women’s history.
Why focus on British subjects?
When I embarked on this project, my knowledge of lesbian history was so scanty that I thought I would only find enough subjects for a poetry collection if I looked for them across world history. As I became engrossed in my research, however, and uncovered more and more women to write about, I realised that a focus on British women made sense for this collection. It provides a sense of cohesion in that the women I am writing about were all bound by similar laws and subject to similar social and geographical influences, which evolved over time in the same country.
However, my work on this project has generated some wonderful conversations with people, and these have provided me with an ever-expanding list of subjects for a potential future collection, which would have a much broader geographical scope. I hope to have the opportunity to work on this in due course.