Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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CHRONOLOGY • xxi 1924 Radclyffe Hall wins the French Prix Femina, étranger for her novel The Unlit Lamp. 1925 Helene Deutsch publishes The Psychology of Women’s Sexual Functions, the first psychoanalytic work devoted entirely to women. 1928 Ma Rainey records “Prove It On Me,” the most famous of many lesbian Blues songs of the 1920s and 1930s. Publication of Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The publishers of The Well of Loneliness are prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom. This results in the novel being banned there. 1929 Publishers of The Well of Loneliness are prosecuted in the United States. Here the prosecution is unsuccessful and the book remains in print for decades. 1933 A group of Nazi youth destroy virtually all of the contents of the archives of the Insitute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Photos of this event are frequently reproduced generically as “Nazi’s burning books.” Countless historical and literary documents relating to lesbian sexuality are destroyed. Christa Winsloe publishes The Child Manuela, a novel based on the script of the earlier all-female film production Mädchen in Uniform, a lesbian school romance. The journalist Lorena Hickok resigns her position as a White House correspondent with the Associated Press because she feels that her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt impairs her objectivity. 1934 Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour is first performed on Broadway. 1936 Djuna Barnes first publishes the novel Nightwood. 1939 Publication of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. The tremendous success of this novel, with its specter of lesbian desire, initiates a formula for the mass market romance. Diana: A Strange Autobiography, the first of the classic “lesbian pulp” paperbacks is published in the United States. 1939–1942 The American feminist Betty Friedan studies at Smith College with the Marxist-feminist lesbian, Dorothy Wolff-Douglas, who is a clear but unacknowledged influence on the development of her political consciousness.
xxii • CHRONOLOGY 1942 Ismat Chugtai publishes her short story “Lihaaf” (“The Quilt”), which details both lesbian and gay male relationships. She is prosecuted for obscenity by the British Raj. 1947 “Lisa Ben” (Edythe Ede) self publishes the first issue of the lesbian paper Vice Versa. Nine issues in all are published in 1947 and 1948. 1948 The ban on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the United Kingdom is lifted and the novel enters lending libraries for the first time, making it available to a wide range of readers. 1950 Mattachine Society and the antiracist homophile organization, Knights of the Clock are founded in California. 1952 December: The Committee for the Investigation of Current Pornographic Materials holds hearings in Washington, D.C. Lesbian pulp fiction, among other literature, is held up to public scrutiny and defended by publishers. 1953 Patricia Highsmith publishes the lesbian novel The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. 1955 The American lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis is founded and begins establishing a number of lesbian lending libraries at its branches throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 1956 Jeannette Foster publishes the groundbreaking study Sex Variant Women in Literature. The Daughters of Bilitis begin publishing The Ladder. Publication continues, under changing editorial styles until the 1970s. 1957 Ann Bannon publishes her first novel, Odd Girl Out, with Fawcett Publications. Fawcett quickly becomes a center for “lesbian pulp” publishing. Under the editorship of Fiona Nevler in the early 1960s Bannon and Valerie Taylor are able to publish lesbian novels without being held to formulaic unhappy endings. 1959 Lorainne Hansberry becomes the first black American to win the Drama Critics Circle Award for A Raisin in the Sun. 1963 Adrienne Rich publishes Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. c. 1964 Mattachine Society organizes a regular lesbian and gay picket of the White House in Washington, D.C. Jane Rule publishes Desert of
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Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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