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Introduction

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Lesbianism and the Criminal Law

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Abstract

This book is the first sustained consideration of an overlooked area of legal history and policy: the regulation of lesbianism by the criminal justice system of England and Wales. The introduction begins by challenging the myth that lesbians have been tolerated by the criminal law. Rather, there has been an overarching policy of deliberately silencing lesbian possibility which reflected acute anxieties about the threat it posed to the patriarchal family. The definitions of two key terms, lesbianism and silencing, are explored. The book centres around case studies of court cases and policy discussions ranging from 1746 to 2013: these are introduced, and the feminist, lesbian-centred methodology used to explore them is explained and located within the wider literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A complete account of the myth’s appearances could probably fill the rest of this book. For a few recent examples, see Hodgson (2017), Venning (2017), and Professor Kate Williams in Dowd (2019).

  2. 2.

    For example, the 1921 debates on criminalising sex between women (Chap. 4) and section 28’s prohibition of its ‘promotion’ (Chap. 7).

  3. 3.

    Indeed, the question remains difficult to answer in the present (Richardson 1992).

  4. 4.

    For lawyers’ discomfort with silence see Bassett (2015, pp. 519–26).

  5. 5.

    For example, Walker (1998) discusses the extent to which in early modern England rape was culturally defined by the law, so that even rape stories told outside legal contexts drew upon the common law definition.

  6. 6.

    For example, Atkins and Hoggett suggested it was viewed as ‘an unthreatening curiosity’ (1984, p. 67); Lynn Friedli claimed a lack of both legal attention and public disapproval (1987, p. 235).

  7. 7.

    This example was taken from Althusser; later she would point out two problems with Althusser’s example. First, it is ‘constrained by a notion of a centralized state apparatus’; second (and crucially), there is no explanation of why the person so hailed turns round, a shortcoming Foucault’s notion of discourse aimed to address (Butler 1997, pp. 5–6).

  8. 8.

    See for example the Maud Allan libel case discussed in Chap. 5. Inappropriate sexual knowledge has been used against women and girls in other ways: Pamela Cox (2013, p. 41) describes how in the early twentieth century, children with the vocabulary to describe their sexual abuse were not ‘innocent’, so were assumed both to have encouraged it and to be a contamination risk to other children.

  9. 9.

    For explicit discussions, see the Woods and Pirie case in Chap. 3 and the parliamentary debates in Chap. 5.

  10. 10.

    Moran notes that this wording was not a statutory requirement (1996, p. 33).

  11. 11.

    Anthony Fletcher notes that even those girls’ schools which taught classics nonetheless aimed to educate their students ‘for the marriage market’ (1995, p. 374).

  12. 12.

    Anne Lister, who recorded sexual relationships with women in her diaries, privately studied the Classics herself but publicly declared them unsuitable for women for the material they revealed (Clark 1996, p. 32).

  13. 13.

    Its consequences are apparent in popular as well as academic culture: ‘Lesbianism wasn’t illegal. There was absolutely no British law … for the entire nineteenth century’ (Naomi Wolf in Smith 21 May 2019, 14 minutes; emphasis added).

  14. 14.

    For example, Moore (1997) is a direct engagement with and rejection of the notion that ‘romantic friendship’ received universal social approbation. For a review of the evolving questions addressed by lesbian history see Binhammer (2010, pp. 1–7).

  15. 15.

    This can bring limitations as well as different emphases: Doan (2007, pp. 29–30) criticised some of the lesbian history produced within cultural studies for its reliance upon secondary sources rather than archival research, as well as lack of national specificity or attention to changing cultural meanings of ‘lesbian’.

  16. 16.

    I primarily consider them as historical sources rather than literary texts; for a contrasting approach see Oram (2007). Similarly, fiction including pornography is little used: those literatures employed very different discourses to the law and require detailed and careful treatment in their own right which can be found in, for example, Moore (1997) and Traub (2002).

  17. 17.

    For example, both the National Archives and London Metropolitan Archives have guides to finding LGBT materials (The National Archives n.d.-b; London Metropolitan Archives 2016). The National Archives also adds, and allows users to add, tags including ‘lesbian’ and ‘lgbt’ to records (The National Archives n.d.-a).

  18. 18.

    There is a significant literature exploring, from a range of perspectives, queer theory’s debt to and areas of common ground with feminism (e.g. L. Garber 2001; Jagose 2009; Doan 2007; Richardson et al. 2006; Marinucci 2016; Barker 2012, pp. 7–12).

  19. 19.

    Queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism for its focus upon discourse at the expense of lived experience and the need to talk of a lesbian subject: for a summary, see Beresford (2014, pp. 766–67).

  20. 20.

    See Chaps. 2, 7 and 8.

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    Caroline Derry

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Derry, C. (2020). Introduction. In: Lesbianism and the Criminal Law . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_1

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