Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900-65 by Cameron Duder (review)

Awfully Devoted Women is a much-needed contribution to the history of lesbian lives in Canada. Cameron Duder focuses on two often forgotten demographics: white upper-middle-class professional women in the first half of the twentieth century and white lower-middle-class women in the postwar period who were uninvolved in lesbian bar culture. Readers will likely be familiar with the now seminal British and American works on lesbian history, but, as Duder contends, lesbian history in Canada is only beginning to be written.¹ Her contribution sheds light on the material and discursive formation of modern lesbian identities and communities.

The book is based on an impressive assemblage of archival sources, including the personal papers and correspondences of Charlotte Whitton, one of Canada's foremost female politicians in the 1950s and 1960s, and Margaret Grier, whom Duder refers to as Whitton's grande passion (57), along with other notable couples in the Canadian educational and professional landscape; twenty-two original interviews in British Columbia and Ontario (where lesbian communities were relatively well established during the period under study); eight interviews from the Lesbians Making History Project conducted by Elise Chenier in Ontario; popular articles about "lesbianism" published in Canada's Chatelaine and Maclean's magazines; newspaper articles; popular fiction; educational publications; criminal records; and reports authored by sexologists, medical doctors, psychiatrists, and others.

Duder makes three interrelated class-based arguments: first, that "romantic friendships" between upper-middle-class women were often "erotic and outside the bounds of heteronormativity" (2); second, that many lower-middle-class women disdained the lesbian bar culture in part because of the working-class lesbians who frequented the bars; and third, that the modern scholarly rhetoric of the "lesbian closet" obfuscates the complicated ways lower-middle-class lesbians forged community in public spaces. Duder's periodization enables her to pinpoint a shift in popular discourse about lesbianism in Canada from the romantic friendship narrative to the medicosexological construction of deviancy and pathology. She considers the impact of key sexological texts in producing pathological discourses about the "lesbian." While I question the positioning of these texts as uniformly unsympathetic to homosexuality and as politically regressive (certainly Freud espoused the idea of an innate, universal human bisexuality), I fully agree that the move from congenital to environmental theories of sexuality shaped lesbian identity and subcultural formations. The archival and interview materials enable Duder to explore the centrality of economic independence, higher education, and the capacity to travel for so many of the middle-class women under study. Space for lesbian subcultures to flourish in classrooms, sporting and recreational arenas, house parties, the Canadian military and armed forces, nursing, and teaching all enabled new ways of living, desiring, and being with other women. Along the way, Duder also reveals troubling stories of domestic violence, alcoholism, and infidelities, together with fascinating stories about bisexual and intergenerational desire. She speculates that as the discourse of sexology gained momentum in the Canadian popular cultural landscape it was increasingly harder for women loving and desiring other women to maintain family ties (whereas in earlier decades they were rendered invisible or infantilized as innocent).

Duder historicizes the emergence of the category "lesbian" and in so doing makes room for those in her sample who did not use, identify, or even, in some cases, have knowledge of the term. I applaud her move toward inclusion but worry about the exclusions it engenders insofar as those in her study who identified themselves as "masculine," "butch," and "guys" may, in retrospect, be better understood to be part of transgender as opposed to exclusively lesbian history. More than a few of Duder's sample (Barb, for example) "lived fully as a man, even holding a male job" (235). I was enchanted by the passionate and heartfelt overseas correspondence between Frieda Fraser and Edith "Bud" Bickerton Williams. Frieda, a full professor of medicine at the University of Toronto by 1949...