Jennins Lesbina Voices, The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive and Postwar British Lesbian History PDF

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Sexualities
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460704047061
2004 7: 430 Sexualities
Rebecca Jennings
British Lesbian History
Lesbian Voices: The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive and Post-war
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Abstract The article examines life history interviews conducted
with lesbians, which form part of the Hall Carpenter Oral
History Archive at the National Sound Archive. This material is
used in order to examine lesbian identities in Britain in the years
19451970. The article also explores the issues with using this
form of oral history material, in particular, it was necessary to
question both how these narratives were constructed to articulate
a specic notion of lesbian identity and how they might be
deconstructed to reveal the more fractured and contingent nature
of post-war lesbian identities. The interviews produced accounts
of lesbian experience and identity in the post-war decades, which
were profoundly shaped by recent understandings of lesbian
identity. It is this impact of contemporary notions of identity on
personal narrative, and its signicance to the lesbian and gay
historian, which forms the focus of this article.
Keywords archives, lesbian identity, lesbian politics, post-war
Britain
Rebecca Jennings
University of Manchester, UK
Lesbian Voices: The Hall Carpenter
Oral History Archive and Post-war
British Lesbian History
Introduction
This article is the product of wider research into lesbian identities in Britain
in the years 19451970, which attempted to map a variety of represen-
tations of lesbian identity in childhood and adolescence; in occupational
choices; in the domestic sphere; in the expanding public sphere of the
lesbian bar culture and in the pioneering lesbian magazines and organiz-
ations of the 1960s. The research drew upon a broad spectrum of sources,
including medical and social accounts such as psychiatric and sociological
Article
Sexualities Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 7(4): 430445 DOI: 10.1177/1363460704047061
www.sagepublications.com
04_jennings_047061 (jk/d) 30/9/04 10:18 am Page 430
works; literary sources like newspaper articles and works of pulp ction;
and visual indicators of cultural attitudes such as environmentally specic
notions of appropriate behaviour. However, the issue of a paucity of
sources, which has plagued all attempts at broadening the focus of
traditional western historiography, has been particularly signicant in
lesbian history and posed some methodological difculties in this work.
While research into gay male communities and oppression has relied
heavily upon evidence provided by court records and police reports on the
activities of homosexual suspects, the absence of any coherent attempt at
legal persecution of lesbians, largely due to a devaluing of female experi-
ence, has denied lesbian historians this source of evidence. With few excep-
tions, historians have been unable to locate rst-hand accounts of lesbian
experiences, with the result that the only evidence relating to female
homosexuality has tended to take the form of mainstream masculine-
dominated discourses. In work on the late 20th century, oral history can
offer one means of confronting this difculty and my research also
examined a series of life history interviews conducted with lesbians, which
form part of the Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive at the National
Sound Archive. However, these sources pose a new set of methodological
problems and, in making use of them, it was necessary to question both
how these narratives were constructed to articulate a specic notion of
lesbian identity and how they might be deconstructed to reveal the more
fractured and contingent nature of post-war lesbian identities. The inter-
views produced accounts of lesbian experience and identity in the post-
war decades which were profoundly shaped by recent understandings of
lesbian identity and it is this impact of contemporary notions of identity
on personal narrative, and its signicance to the lesbian and gay historian,
which will form the focus of this article. I will offer a brief sketch of the
history of the Hall Carpenter Archive, before considering some of the
issues that arise in the construction of lesbian personal narratives. Finally,
a number of themes in post-war lesbian history, which emerge from the
life history accounts, will be explored, questioning how personal narratives
can enhance our understanding of lesbian history in this period.
The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive
The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive represents the largest single
collection of lesbian and gay personal narratives in the UK. Its history, and
that of the larger archive of which it forms a part, is intimately connected
with the development of lesbian and gay historical research in Britain and
the place of oral history within it. In 1980, the political organization, the
Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), established the Gay Moni-
toring and Archive Project (GMAP) to provide a media monitoring service
Jennings Lesbian Voices
431
which would support its campaigns against discrimination. In addition to
its primary role of collating newspaper cuttings from the national press,
the GMAP received and housed the correspondence and les of earlier gay
organizations. Subsequently becoming separated from CHE, the archive
was operated from the at of one of its founders, Julian Meldrum, and in
1982, was reborn as the limited company, Hall-Carpenter Memorial
Archives Ltd (Merrington, 2001). Over the next two years, the archive
added further material to its collection, including the extensive papers of
the early homosexual campaigning organization, the Albany Trust. It was
in this period that the notion of a sound archive was rst discussed. The
archive had been offered a number of tapes of interviews, radio
programmes and meetings relating to homosexuality and homosexual law
reform, and, in August 1982, Julian Meldrum wrote to Jackie Forster, the
director of the lesbian magazine Sappho and a well-known lesbian activist,
saying we are tentatively of the view that the best way we as a group can
increase our usefulness to the lesbian community is through taking an
interest in oral herstory, applying for (public) funds to develop this aspect
of the archives, and to do so by employing one or more (women)
workers.
1
The comment suggests a concern that the recent donations of
papers from predominantly male organizations were weighting the archive
toward a focus on male homosexuality. Julian Meldrums belief that oral
herstory might provide a solution to redress the balance reected a
growing faith in the value of oral history as a means of reclaiming minority
experience. From the 1960s onward, an increasing body of community
publishing houses, oral history groups and womens consciousness-raising
groups demonstrated a belief that marginal groups could articulate and
record their own experience and use this as the basis for political action
(Steedman, 1999; Vernon, 2000).
In 1984, the archive received a grant of 32,000 from the Greater
London Council (GLC), as part of a major GLC strategy of funding
minority groups. The grant enabled the Hall Carpenter Archive to move
to the newly opened London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Cowcross Street,
Farringdon, and to establish both a Media Project and an Oral History
Project (Merrington, 2001). The post of Oral History Project co-ordina-
tor was offered to Margot Farnham, a schoolteacher in Waltham Forest,
who began work in February 1985.
2
The appointment of a woman to the
post was clearly intended to represent the archives commitment to the
Oral History Project as a means of increasing lesbians presence within the
archive, but the project nevertheless set out to collect life history inter-
views from both lesbians and gay men. Assisted by a group of 12 volun-
teers, Margot Farnham collected a total of 64 interviews, of which 26 were
with women. All were located within the London area.
3
In the spring of
1986, the demise of the GLC resulted in the loss of most of the Hall
Sexualities 7(4)
432
Carpenter Archives funding. Some interim money was found, but, in
March 1987, no further funding was available, and the group ceased its
work. The demise of the GLC with the subsequent loss of funding was
the culmination of a long-term power struggle between a Conservative
central government and Labour local authority. However, 1988 legislation
prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family
relationship, enshrined in Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988,
is testament to the role played by anti-homosexual ideas in this debate.
Anna Marie Smith has argued that the climate of fear developed by the
AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, and its link in the popular imagination
with homosexuality, provided a pool of anti-homosexual feeling on which
central government could draw in its conict with the GLC (Smith, 1994).
In response to the loss of GLC funding, the archive decided to nd a safe
home for the collection, and deposited copies of the tapes with the British
Library Sound Recording Department who commissioned a further 64
recordings, with the assistance of Margot Farnham, in 19901991.
At the commencement of the project, the Oral History Group had
identied their aims in a yer as follows:
to address the limitations, distortions and omissions of conventionally produced
history. We aim to record as many different experiences as possible and invite
the contributions of all lesbians and gay men.
4
This statement suggests that the organizers understood the project largely
as an attempt to add empirical evidence to the historical record through
the recording of lesbian and gay experiences. The yer added:
We especially welcome working-class women, older people, people with dis-
abilities and black or third world people who may like to use the equipment and
resources to work on projects of their own choice. We want a collection
and eventually publications and exhibitions that acknowledge our diversity and
differences as well as strengthening the communities by making sure our
achievements and histories are properly recorded.
This concern with difference demonstrates the extent to which feminist
critiques of white, middle-class centred research techniques and theories
had inuenced such projects by the mid-1980s, as well as reecting a GLC
commitment to equal opportunities (Green, 1997).
Despite some success in creating a collection that was representative of
a range of class, ethnic and age backgrounds, these differences are less
apparent within the older age range on which my research was focused and
this group is dominated by middle- and upper-class educated professional
women.
5
Most had clearly played a signicant role in the feminist and
lesbian political communities of the 1970s and their participation in this
culture undoubtedly prompted their contribution to the Hall Carpenter
433
Collection. Of the 19 interviewees on which this research focused, three
women, Cynthia Reid, Julie Switsur and Diana Chapman were founding
members of the lesbian organization Minorities Research Group and its
magazine Arena Three; Jackie Forster was a founding editor of the lesbian
magazine Sappho and a notable gure in Gay Liberation and lesbian
politics; Angela Chilton was involved in Sappho; Sandy Martin in Womens
Liberation politics; and Myrtle Soloman, Mary Wilkins and Pat Arrow-
smith were inuential gures in peace politics. Not only would they have
been visible and accessible gures whom the interviewing team could
approach, but their political commitments and experiences tied them to a
culture which valued and enabled the articulation and sharing of personal
testimonies. Their selection as interviewees reects the emphasis in the
construction of lesbian history, on politicized, community-based lesbian
experience.
Personal testimonies
I would like to turn now to a consideration of some of the issues that arise
in using personal narratives as a historical source. Since the revival of
interest in oral history in the 1970s, a proliferation of literature from across
disciplinary boundaries, has explored the relationship between individual
subjectivity and oral accounts in the interviewing process. Social historians
have questioned the objectivity of these sources, warning of the bias
imposed on the oral history interview by the assumptions and preoccupa-
tions of the interviewer, as well as the problems posed by the imperfect
recall of many interviewees (Tosh, 1991; Yow, 1994). In response, cultural
historians have emphasized the value of such interventions, arguing that
oral history offers both access to the unwritten histories of marginalized
groups, and insights into individuals subjectivities (Perks and Thomson,
1998; Mouton and Pohlandt-McCormick, 1999). The inuence of post-
structuralist theories on history has taken the debate further, questioning
the claims to objectivity of any source material, written or otherwise and,
indeed, of the historical project itself (Attridge et al, 1987; Jenkins, 1996).
Ken Plummer confronts this tension between the objective and the
subjective in personal narratives in his comprehensive analysis of sexual
stories, arguing that people construct historically and geographically
specic tales of the intimate self, which may or may not bear a relation-
ship to the truth (Plummer, 1995: 34). Plummer points to four processes,
which are brought to bear in the construction of a personal narrative. The
rst is personal an individuals motivation in telling their own story; the
second is situational the cultural and social materials and ideas that
narrators draw on to build an identity; the third is organizational the
structure within which the story is told, such as that provided by an
Sexualities 7(4)
434
interview; and the fourth is cultural and historical the moment at which
the story enters public discourse. It is the second of these the cultural
and social materials and ideas that narrators draw on to build an identity
that I want briey to consider here, in relation to lesbian accounts. Graham
Dawson has considered the relationship between personal narratives and
wider culture in formulating his concept of composure. He has suggested
that the attempt to achieve composure both in terms of composing the
narrative and of nding a sense of composure by constituting oneself as
the subject of ones own account is at the heart of personal narratives.
For interviewees, the composition of an account that draws on existing
cultural models and hence ts established notions of identity and behav-
iour, is essential in achieving composure (Dawson, 1994).
Elizabeth Kennedys research suggests that this process may be particu-
larly signicant in lesbian accounts. She argues that, in the absence of
prescribed patterns or narratives for living and describing their lives,
lesbians create their own stories, based on personal experience and shared
myths, as a means of interpreting their experiences. In her research with
Madeline Davis into the post-war Buffalo lesbian community, she found
that interviewees accounts were not being told for the rst time, but had
been repeatedly narrated to other lesbians in bars and at parties as part of
a process of shaping and building lesbian identity and community (Davis
and Kennedy, 1993; Kennedy, 1995). This would seem to be equally true
in the British narratives produced by the Hall Carpenter project. Narra-
tors, many of whom had been inuential in forging lesbian social networks,
told clearly well-rehearsed stories of lesbian communities. Jackie Forster,
whose interview for the Hall Carpenter project included an account of her
role in setting up Sappho and subsequent lesbian politics, was also present
on another tape in the collection lecturing on the history of the British
lesbian community to an unnamed lesbian organization.
6
Bonnie Zimmerman draws attention to a political dimension to this
process, in her review of lesbian personal narratives published in the late
1970s and early 1980s. She argues that collections of personal narratives
compiled in this period were an extension of the original feminist struc-
ture of the consciousness-raising or rap group. Both, in her view, reect a
feminist commitment to speech and self-expression as a powerful tool in
resisting oppression:
In a sense, then, contemporary lesbian feminists postulate lesbian oppression as
a mutilation of consciousness curable by language. Lesbians do share the insti-
tutional oppression of all women and the denial of civil rights with gay men.
But what lesbian feminists identify as the particular, unique oppression of
lesbians rightly or wrongly is speechlessness, invisibility, and inauthenticity.
Lesbian resistance lies in correct naming; thus our power ows from language,
vision and culture. (Zimmerman, 1984: 672)
435
Zimmerman points to the large numbers of personal narrative and oral
history collections published during the 1970s and early 1980s in the USA
and the UK as being a key expression of this lesbian resistance.
7
Motivated
by an ideological commitment to the notion that the personal is political,
published personal accounts were political statements of the existence and
visibility of lesbians. As such, they served a further purpose of reaching out
to a wider community of women, representing both expressions of the
lesbian community and an attempt to forge a collective identity.
The collective nature of this narrative process therefore inevitably facili-
tated the development of common themes in lesbian narratives. Biddy
Martin has argued that lesbian autobiography as a genre constructs a
monolithic account of lesbian identity in which lesbianism becomes the
central moment around which womens lives are reconstructed (Martin,
1988: 83). This approach constructs a specic understanding of lesbian-
ism as the central dening aspect of an individuals subjectivity and erases
differences between women. This has been an issue of methodological
concern to feminist researchers conducting oral history interviews in
recent decades. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai have commented:
Our assumptions had the effect of foregrounding gender while obscur-
ing the possible centrality of other factors race and class, in particular
in the identity of our narrators (Gluck and Patai, 1991: 2). Women who
recount their life stories as part of a collection of lesbian personal narra-
tives are similarly encouraged to construct an account which emphasizes
and makes sense of their lives in terms of their lesbian identity, and which
minimizes those experiences that do not t this metanarrative.
As I have suggested, the type of lesbian identity projected by such
accounts is profoundly shaped by the political and cultural meanings
attributed to lesbianism at any specic historical moment. Elizabeth
Kennedy has claimed that the Stonewall riot of 1969 has become a key
moment in lesbian and gay history, marking a turning point in the grand
narrative of lesbian and gay oppression:
In the mythology of gay and lesbian history, before Stonewall gays lived furtive,
closeted, miserable lives, while after Stonewall gays could be free and open.
Stonewall is quintessentially about being out of the closet, ghting back, about
refusing to be mistreated anymore. (Kennedy, 1995: 66)
The importance accorded to openness in post-Stonewall or Gay Liberation
politics has resulted in a denition of lesbian identity as a publicly declared,
visible identity. This has been traced back into the pre-Stonewall era
through oral histories, prompting lesbian interviewees to construct a
personal narrative based around a visible, explicit lesbian identity. As Biddy
Martin has claimed in her examination of anthologies of lesbian personal
narratives, this is evident in a foregrounding of the coming out process,
Sexualities 7(4)
436
or the development of a visible identity, as the central theme in such
narratives.
Many of the coming-out stories were tautological insofar as they describe a
process of coming to know something that has always been true, a truth to
which the author has returned. They also describe a linear progression from a
past shrouded in confusion or lies to a present or future that represents a liber-
ation from the past. Coming out is conceived, then, as both a return to ones
true self and desire and a movement beyond distortion and constraint, ground-
ing identity and political unity in moral right and truth. (Martin, 1988: 89)
As Biddy Martin suggests, the ideological emphasis upon coming out
plays a fundamental role in the construction of the lesbian personal narra-
tive, both providing a climactic moment toward which the story builds,
and creating a sub-text of a naturalized, essential identity which is present
throughout the entire narrative.
However, while the search for composure has meant that certain
common themes have emerged from lesbian personal narratives in the
post-Stonewall era, the individuality of each account is equally apparent.
Penny Summereld, in her work on womens wartime lives, noted that
her interviewees produced two types of account, presenting themselves as
either heroically overcoming adversity or as making do with difculties
(Summereld, 1998). A similar distinction emerged from the Hall
Carpenter accounts, in which women appropriated the dominant narrative
of self-discovery culminating in coming out in different ways. While
some women represented themselves as actively engaging in a heroic quest
for liberation, others constituted themselves within a more stoic narrative
of struggle against oppression. However, as Summereld points out, these
categories were not discrete: women frequently moved between the two
models at different stages in their account and, at others, failed to achieve
composure at all. In individual interviews, these moments of discom-
posure are expressed in a variety of ways: through emotion, contradiction
and, frequently, silence. It is these moments of slippage or dislocation in
a narrative that I suggest are of particular value to the lesbian historian.
Contradictory passages, or moments of silence in an account, can point
the historian to those aspects of womens experience which have not tted
easily into a coherent post-Stonewall emphasis on visibility and thus
provide evidence of the more fractured and less explicit meanings of
lesbianism in the pre-Stonewall era.
Themes in lesbian narratives
Finally, I would like to consider a few examples of how this might
work, using the Hall Carpenter narratives and focusing on three themes
437
in post-war lesbian history: those of childhood, work and domesticity. The
rst group of questions posed by the Hall Carpenter interviewers asked
respondents to describe their family background, childhood and school-
ing, and their rst sexual or emotional experience. Interviewees offered a
range of responses to these questions, many of which reected medico-
scientic notions of lesbianism in the post-war period and their inuence
on attitudes toward the development of sexual identities and childhood
sexuality. The work of sexologists in cataloguing and analysing sexual iden-
tities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had placed psychiatry and
other medico-scientic disciplines at the centre of the attempt to dene
sexuality. This inuence continued into the 1950s and 1960s, when the
majority of the literature seeking to explain the aetiology and character-
istic features of lesbianism still originated from the elds of science and
medicine. Early notions of homosexuality as an innate or congenital
condition had given way to the belief that homosexuality was an acquired
condition, but the sexologists characterization of lesbian identity types in
terms of a binary opposition between a conrmed active lesbian and a
passive pseudohomosexual remained enduring.
8
Freudian conceptions of
homosexuality as the result of arrested development in the progression
from universal infant bisexuality to normative heterosexuality had gained
considerable standing by the post-war period and inuenced the writings
of medical educators such as Eustace Chesser and Frank Caprio.
9
These
writings characterized the lesbian as immature and trapped in a quasi-
adolescence and thus foregrounded childhood and adolescence as key
formative years in the development of sexual deviance. Case studies of
lesbianism, such as those published by Dr George Henry in 1941,
continued to point to masculine traits in childhood such as tomboyish-
ness, as early indications of lesbianism.
10
While access to such specialized works was largely limited to those with
a professional interest and a few isolated lesbians who sought out any
literature touching upon their own experiences, these notions were
reected in wider cultural discourses concerning education and childhood
sexuality.
11
Post-war literature was ambiguous. Lesbian relationships in
schools and other single-sex environments were commonly represented in
terms of a seduction by an older, conrmed lesbian of a younger woman
and some educational establishments considered such behaviour to be a
potential threat. Simultaneously, Rosemary Auchmuty has pointed to the
increasing stigmatization of intense friendships between girls in girls
school stories after 1928, although educational institutions rarely appear
to have associated the schoolgirl crush with sexual deviance (Auchmuty,
1992, 1999). However, despite the range of conicting understandings of
childhood sexuality and lesbianism which emerged from the medical
and educational literature of the 1950s and 1960s, many of the Hall
Sexualities 7(4)
438
Carpenter interviews demonstrate a clear attempt to present a coherent
narrative of lesbian identity development. Assuming that the origins of an
explicit lesbian identity could be retrospectively traced back into child-
hood, the interviews encouraged narrators to interpret their childhood
experiences as potentially lesbian. In an attempt to construct a coherent
life story centred on a stable lesbian identity, many interviewees therefore
emphasized in themselves characteristics that were ascribed to lesbians in
wider culture. Narrators overwhelmingly constructed their childhood
selves as physically active and tomboyish. Angela Chilton identied sport
as her favourite subject in senior school, where she played hockey,
rounders and tennis, as well as boxing in a local club after school.
12
She
recalled being in trouble at school for not being sufciently ladylike in
the way in which she played sport, reinforcing the suggestion that an
interest in sport was considered an indication of masculine and poten-
tially lesbian tendencies. This theme recurs in many of the narratives, with
half of the interviewees emphasizing an interest in sports such as hockey,
swimming and lacrosse.
13
For many, this active side to their childhood
personality was explored further outside school, where the girls climbed
trees and participated in street ghts.
14
However, a close reading of the early part of the Hall Carpenter inter-
views, which focused on sexual identity, reveals a signicant disjunction
between the underlying assumptions of the interview structure and the
respondents understandings of their childhood in a number of the inter-
views. Many womens memories of childhood appeared to resist an inter-
pretative model that sought to construct their childhood selves as
knowingly lesbian. While all the narrators identied as lesbian when they
recorded the life history interview, these identities could not be easily
mapped onto their childhood selves. Youthful experiences of same-sex
desire were rarely, if ever, interpreted as lesbian at the time, so that a
process of self-identication separated adult and childhood notions of
selfhood. This discomposure in some of the interviews is clearly apparent
in accounts of the most common form of early sexual experience described
by lesbian narrators: the schoolgirl crush. The crush occupies an ambigu-
ous position in most narratives, being simultaneously represented as an
early indicator of lesbianism and as a common and normal aspect of child-
hood culture. Diana Chapmans description of her experiences at
Colstons Girls School in Bristol is indicative of the juxtaposing of indi-
vidual emotions with wider sexual cultures:
And it was quite the thing there in some weird way, for all the girls to be in love
with each other, at least in love with the senior girls and the staff. It wasnt
thought peculiar, and when I was 12 I think I was standing on the edge of a
or walking along the edge of a swimming pool and there was a tall dark and
handsome girl called Eleanor Ackroyd and she smiled at me. I fell in love
439
passionately. And that was sort of the age of about 12. My passionate adoration
of Eleanor Ackroyd was the beginning of my emotional life.
15
Diana Chapmans comment that crushes were quite the thing establishes
her experience within a broader narrative of normative sexual culture in
post-war girls schools. All the girls were in love, if not with each other,
then with older girls or teachers and thus the account she provides of
falling in love with Eleanor Ackroyd can be interpreted as one example of
a wider culture. It is only with her closing statement, that this crush was
the beginning of my emotional life, that Diana Chapman offers an
alternative interpretation of the encounter, seeking to establish the episode
as the rst stage in the development of an inevitable lesbian identity. Her
use of language in describing the schools sexual culture reects the
conicting interpretations she offers: the widespread practice of crushes
was weird, in retrospect, but at the time was not thought peculiar.
Same-sex emotional attachments might therefore be simultaneously inter-
preted as deviant and normative. Tensions in the personal narratives
suggest that womens memories of childhood as a period of confusion or
normalcy in their sexual identity, rather than a latent lesbian identity, were
resistant to the retrospective mapping of a coherent model of identity.
The second part of the Hall Carpenter interviews questioned the career
paths followed by lesbian interviewees and their wider experiences of the
workplace. Responses to these questions suggested that women inter-
preted their experience of work differently, depending on their occupation
and whether or not it enabled the performance of a lesbian identity. The
idea of careers for women was beginning to emerge after the Second
World War, and a proliferation of career guides advised girls on what
factors to take into consideration in the choice of a career. Nevertheless,
career options remained limited for all but the few, mainly middle-class,
women whose secondary and higher education enabled them to qualify
for access to the professions. Long-standing notions of appropriate
gendered employment for women meant that most working-women in the
post-war decades were conned to clerical or nurturing occupations such
as nursing or teaching. The designation of these occupations as womens
work encouraged an expectation of heterosexual femininity and most
respondents who worked in these arenas dismissed their experiences of
work as insignicant in the development of a lesbian identity, or simply
failed to discuss work at all. However, the expansion of the womens police
and womens services during and after the war offered women an alterna-
tive to conventionally feminine occupations. These traditionally male
spheres of employment embodied more active, public roles which were
more sympathetic to modern notions of lesbian identity. Women who
worked in these occupations offered detailed accounts of their experiences,
Sexualities 7(4)
440
making links between active work, uniforms and women-only environ-
ments and lesbianism in their explanations for entering into the police
force and services. Nina Jenkins claimed:
I felt that I wanted to do something exciting, and the services were really the
only exciting careers for women . . . The Royal Air Force is actually one entity
women join the Royal Air Force same as the men and they can be posted to
all the same places as the men and they can do the same jobs so it seemed to
me that that was going to offer me the most adventure.
16
For Nina Jenkins it was the association of mens jobs with adventure and
excitement that prompted her to join the RAF.
While careers in such occupations were broadly compatible with the
interviews emphasis on lesbian identity development and an explicit
sexual identity, contemporary perceptions of lesbianism as a pervasive
threat in the womens services emerged in some accounts as part of a narra-
tive theme of stoic resistance to oppression. Despite accounts suggesting
a widespread culture of lesbian sexual activity in the services, these inter-
viewees replicated the ofcial account of a highly vigilant military auth-
ority eager to eradicate lesbianism. Margaret Cranch, who joined the
WRAC in the late 1950s, painted a picture of the constant threat of detec-
tion under which lesbian servicewomen lived. She claimed:
What happens is, they might get caught with their lover, I mean they might only
be holding hands and gave someone a little kiss perhaps, but someone was seen
doing it and they were immediately brought up before the commanding ofcer
and discharged.
17
She went on to describe in some detail the implications of such of a
discharge, emphasizing that it was a dishonourable discharge and that
the bad reference it carried made it extremely difcult for women to obtain
employment afterwards. The account echoed political arguments centred
on homosexual experiences of oppression, suggesting that this was a
second factor in interviewees emphasis on experiences of work in the
services. This was in sharp contrast with the extremely limited accounts of
employment offered by women in more conventionally feminine occu-
pations. In contrast to the feminine, heterosexual identity constituted in
conventionally female occupations, these relatively new roles enabled the
expression of an unconventional and potentially lesbian identity.
Finally, I would like to consider the theme of domesticity in lesbian
personal narratives. The post-war period, and the 1950s in particular, has
conventionally been portrayed by historians as an era of stiing domestic-
ity in which rigid gender roles conned women to the domestic sphere.
Womens magazines represented the nding and retaining of a husband
and a family home as their readers primary goal, while commercial
441
advertising identied women as a growing market for domestic
consumerism (Steedman, 1986; Partington, 1995). Feminist literature on
the Welfare State has emphasized the underlying assumptions regarding
womens primary roles as wives and mothers which directed the new
welfare provisions (Jenson, 1987; Koven and Michel, 1989; Pedersen,
1989, 1993). However, domesticity as a theme is largely absent from the
Hall Carpenter interviews. Interviewees often had little to say on the
subject of their domestic experiences and received scant encouragement
from interviewers who replicated feminist ideology in seeking to downplay
womens domestic roles. The reluctance of interviewees to discuss this
aspect of their post-war lives must be understood in the context of their
understandings of home in this period. While married women were
encouraged to nd and maintain a family home, assisted by government
sponsored post-war building programmes, single women had few housing
options. Some remained living with parents or family long into adulthood,
while many existed in temporary hostel or bedsit accommodation obtained
from housing associations, charitable organizations or on the private rental
market. Cultural representations supported this interpretation of lesbians
as the antithesis of the feminine domestic ideal, portraying them as
marginal gures inhabiting the public spaces of the city streets. This
marginalization of single women and lesbians within post-war accounts of
domesticity, coupled with a feminist critique of the domestic, meant that
lesbian interviewees had no discourse of lesbian domesticity on which to
draw in discussing their home lives. As a result, they largely erased their
experiences of home from the lesbian narratives.
In conclusion, I have tried to demonstrate that oral history can offer
lesbian historians a means of confronting the difficulties which have been
posed by a paucity of sources, even in the modern period. While inter-
viewees attempts to achieve composure in their accounts prompt them
to construct narratives based on current models of personal self-
discovery and liberation, moments of discomposure in the interview
offer historians a more complex view of the past. The tensions in lesbian
narratives point to a variety of different models of lesbian identity in this
period, which women engaged with in the attempt to give meaning to
their experiences and same-sex desires. Although the actual experience
of lesbians in the post-war period emerges neither from the narratives
subsequently imposed on it, nor from the mainstream sources which
sought to describe it, by examining the two side by side, it is possible to
gain an insight into the fractured and contingent nature of post-war
lesbian experience and get at the meanings which women ascribed to
different aspects of their lives.
Sexualities 7(4)
442
Notes
1. Correspondence between Julian Meldrum of the Hall Carpenter Archives
and Jackie Forster of Sappho, 5 August 1982. London School of Economics
(LSE): Hall Carpenter Archive 2/4. The term herstory was widely used in
the 1970s and 1980s to indicate an attempt to add womens experience to
the historical record.
2. Letter to Margaret Lally, GLC, from Julian Meldrum, 19 December 1984.
LSE: Hall Carpenter Archive 3/25.
3. Hall-Carpenter News Winter 19851986. LSE: Hall Carpenter Archive 7/3.
4. Hall Carpenter Oral History Group yer, undated. LSE: Hall Carpenter
Archive 7/3.
5. In total, the collection comprises 60 interviews with women, born between
1905 and 1965. I have focused, in this research, on 19 interviews conducted
with women born before 1950. Approximately seven women described
themselves as from ethnic minorities and ten from working-class
backgrounds; however, in the older age range, which was the focus of my
research, there were no women from ethnic minorities and only four who
described themselves as working class.
6. Jackie Forster, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive (C456),
F1607-F1612; Jackie Forster, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound
Archive (C456), F2590.
7. Zimmerman examined seven US and UK anthologies: L. Galana and G.
Covina (eds), The New Lesbians (Berkeley: Moon Books, 1977); A.
Stewart-Park and J. Cassidy, Were Here: Conversations With Lesbians Women
(London: Quartet Books, 1977); J. P. Stanley and S. J. Wolfe (eds) The
Coming Out Stories (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980); M.
Cruikshank (ed.) The Lesbian Path (Monterey, CA: Angel Press, 1980); R.
Baetz, Lesbian Crossroads (New York: William Morrow, 1980); C. Moraga
and G. Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); E. Torton Beck
(ed.) Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Watertown, MA: Persephone
Press, 1982).
8. See, for example, Albertine Winner, Homosexuality in Women, Medical
Press and Circular, 3 September 1947, p. 219.
9. Eustace Chesser, Sexual Behaviour: Normal and Abnormal (London:
Medical Publications, 1949); Live and Let Live: The Moral of the Wolfenden
Report (London: Heinemann, 1958); Women: A Popular Edition of the
Chesser Report (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1958); Odd Man Out: Homo-
sexuality in Men and Women (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959); The Human
Aspects of Sexual Deviation (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1971); Frank
Caprio, MD, Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism
(London: Peter Owen, 1957).
10. Dr George W. Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns
(London: Cassell, 1950 [1941]).
11. The lesbian magazine, Arena Three, published between 1964 and 1971 by
the lesbian organization, Minorities Research Group, reected an awareness
of, and interest in medico-scientic literature on lesbianism. However,
443
despite the name Minorities Research Group, interviews with two of
MRGs founders, Cynthia Reid and Julie Switsur, suggest that this interest
was largely conned to the organizations founders and a small percentage of
the magazines total readership of between 400 and 600. See Cynthia Reid,
Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive (C456), F2109; Julie
Switsur, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive (C456), F2108.
12. Angela Chilton, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive
(C456), F1622-F1624.
F1607-F1612; Cynthia Reid, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound
Archive (C456), F2109; Margaret Cranch, Hall Carpenter Collection,
National Sound Archive (C456), F1359-F1360.
F1607-F1612; Rene Sawyer, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound
Archive (C456), F1328-F1330; Nina Jenkins, Hall Carpenter Collection,
National Sound Archive (C456), F2499-F2501; Sandy Martin, Hall
Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive (C456) F2483-F2487.
15. Diana Chapman, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive
(C456), F2088.
16. Nina Jenkins, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive (C456),
F2499-F2501.
17. Margaret Cranch, Hall Carpenter Collection, National Sound Archive
(C456), F1359-F1360.
References
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Biographical Note
Rebecca Jennings is currently a lecturer in womens history at the University of
Manchester. Her primary research interest is in 20th century British lesbian
history and she has recently completed her PhD, entitled Personal Testimonies
and the Construction of Post-War Lesbian History: 19451970 at the University
of Manchester, under the supervision of James Vernon and Harry Cocks.
Address: Department of History, University of Manchester, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL. [email: rebecca.jennings@man.ac.uk]
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