“Many Have Loved You with Lips and Fingers”

Sapphistries covers forty-two thousand years of world history with the panache of a swashbuckling, feminist lothario. Leila J. Rupp packs her ambitious project into 233 pages, augmented by footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Sapphistries is a worldwide tour of love between women in locations as disparate as India, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Sudan. From these global travels and an expansive time frame emerges a well-written and engaging synthetic history. Throughout Sapphistries, Rupp delights in historical attention to detail while savoring the literary; each page is punctuated with beautiful language, imagery, and flights of intellectual fancy.

Imagining a past that includes love between women is a persistent theme in writing by lesbians. From the Sapphic poems of Michael Field to Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue, from Jeannette Howard Foster’s work in the literary archive to identify lesbian characters and lesbian themes to articles in small press publications like the Furies’s celebration of Sweden’s Queen Christina as a lesbian foremother, lesbians have researched, written, and imagined history.¹ Rupp eschews a universalizing impulse that characterizes some of the prior lesbian forays into history and instead transforms the desire for a long history and for a history not tied to geography into a trenchant and rigorous historical narrative. She mobilizes contemporary theory and historical scholarship to narrate her history. At the center of Sapphistries is the synthesis of historical scholarship from disparate sources. When the historical record is oblique on the subject of love between women, Rupp uses contemporary literary texts such as Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, Ellen Galford’s Moll Cutpurse: Her True History and Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap to explore how women imagine love between women historically and how these literary renderings can open questions that denaturalize conventional assessments and offer new possibilities for understanding the history of love between women.² Carefully delineating imaginative histories from histories written from archival sources, Rupp produces a narrative that is both readable and engaging.

The book’s nine chapters, each framed by time periods, begin at 40,000 BCE and continue to the present. Chapters proceed chronologically; though by overlapping time periods, the book’s structure resists false periodization. Rupp also writes consciously and self-reflexively against the impulse of triumphalism and a narrative of Western progress. One way she does this is by juxtaposing scholarship about love between women across different locations and in broad historical periods. For instance, Rupp examines women who worked as prostitutes in Paris from an 1836 study by Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâlet, women who resisted marriage during the nineteenth century in the Guangdong province of China, and “romantic friendships” during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. These juxtapositions provoke thoughtful dialogue within the book that expands the idea of love between women without fixing particular identity formations, sets of behavioral practices, or ideologies as defining love between women. On the whole, Rupp’s balance between her desire to construct an “accessible, synthetic global history of love between women” (ix) and her desire to resist Western narratives is successful, although her immersion in the texts of the women’s liberation movement in the United States is evident and central to shaping the project.

At the end of Sapphistries, Rupp posits seven conclusions:

• • “from the earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been acknowledged” (227)

• • “women’s subordination to men shapes same-sex love and desire” (227)

• • “economic development and urbanization” as well as access to education and employment “facilitates public worlds for women” (228)

• • the creation of the category of “lesbian” facilitates identities and communities in some locations and “taints” it in others (228)

• • there is “persistence of the transgender impulse over time” (229)

• • scholars “need to think about different patterns of male and female erotic attraction” (230)

• • a global view of sexuality “recognize[s] that acceptance can take many forms” and that women creatively make “space for their love and desire” (231...