A Guide to the Sapphic Regency - The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 342

Saturday, May 16, 2026 - 07:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 342 – A Guide to the Sapphic Regency - transcript

(Originally aired 2026/05/16)

This is a condensed version of an essay I wrote as an offering in a fund-raising auction titled “Materials Toward Writing Women Loving Women in the English Regency.” The full version will also eventually appear in the book version of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. But in view of increased interest in Regency-era sapphic topics due to the Bridgerton announcement that a female couple will feature in the next season, I thought it was a good time to provide something of a taster for that topic.

Historic eras don’t have hard boundaries, and the social conditions that apply at a particular time have earlier roots and later echoes, so this discussion actually covers what might be called the “long Regency” in the first several decades of the 19th century. England is the focus, but research is drawn from the British Isles in general. Although I’ve tried to include a broad range of social and economic circumstances, documentary evidence is most available for the aristocratic and educated middle classes, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

Demographics & Sociology

Marriage dynamics strongly affected, not whether women fell in love with each other, but how they were able to act on that love, whether in terms of personal autonomy or finances. Larger social dynamics around marriage affected how society thought about women being single and about female cohabitation. (Of course, married women could have relationships outside the marriage, but I’ll be focusing on monogamy.)

In the first two decades of the 19th century, the percentage of women who were “surplus,” outnumbering men, was between 5-8%. That’s an overall figure and largely due to military casualties in the Napoleonic wars. Since prime military recruiting age was also prime marriage age, the surplus of women at the typical age of marriage was likely even higher. The average age for women who did marry was in the mid-20s; later for the poor or city-dwellers and earlier for the aristocracy or the rural working class. For the upper classes, social taboos and financial dynamics were a major factor. Almost a quarter of aristocratic women never married, while among the gentry, middle class, and working class, the never-married rate was lower, but might still be 10-20%. Working women might delay marriage while saving up a nest egg. Middle class women, for whom wage labor was taboo, were at the mercy of appropriate suitors and family finances. Families “in trade” that had accumulated wealth were better able to provide either dowries or a source of income for daughters who didn’t marry, whereas fathers in professions (including the clergy, medical professionals, intellectual professionals, or those in government positions) might have little in the way of spare resources to establish their children, and leave nothing at all after death.

Besides an insufficient dowry, women might remain unmarried due to family care responsibilities or being unable to marry a specific chosen partner. But sometimes unmarried women cited viewing marriage as a form of servitude, a fear of constant childbirth, or intellectual pursuits that would be incompatible with marriage. And, conversely, independent financial resources that a woman controlled herself, such as a legacy, could enable her to avoid marriage.

Although there was usually a strong family pressure to marry, women at all levels of society were able to successfully resist the pressure, despite sacrifices. It was not shocking or scandalous for a woman to deliberately choose to remain unmarried, only unusual. Rarely would she mention attachment to a female friend as the primary reason for doing so, but gossip suggests this as a motive in certain cases.

At the same time, there was a peculiarly English streak of antipathy toward never-married women, viewing them as simultaneously sexually frustrated and as undesirable to men. Sound familiar? One thread of this viewed motherhood as a form of patriotism, where women’s purity and fertility reflected the national character. But hostility to “old maids,” especially as expressed in literature, only rarely included accusations of lesbianism.

The situation of widows was different. Widows had “done their duty” and were not automatically expected to remarry (though many did). The financial situation of widows could vary tremendously from abject poverty and ruin to personal control of a significant fortune, depending on the specific family dynamics. For the lucky few, it offered the control over one’s own fortune and living situation that could enable her to share her life with a female partner. She had two major advantages: she was already mistress of her own household, and she didn’t need to protect her sexual reputation.

One of the themes in the Regency era is the importance of socializing with “known quantities” and the hazards of becoming friends with unknown strangers. Just as one doesn’t dance with a man until one has been properly introduced, one generally socializes with and befriends women who are met through existing family and community connections. The key element is that women socialized with women—interactions with men outside the family were formal or professional. Middle and upper class society especially was strongly gender-segregated, with women’s everyday social lives primarily involving other women. Friendships and casual socializing with other women were completely expected and needed no special justification, whether it involved visiting, shopping, intellectual pursuits, or cultural events. The preceding largely describes the lives of middle and upper class women who had some degree of available leisure time, but among the lower classes it was still the case that all women’s emotional lives largely centered around other women.

Economics

It is one thing to not be married, and another thing entirely to establish an independent household, though a separate household isn’t essential for enjoying a romantic partnership with another woman. Long-term visiting or semi-permanent residence with another family could arise for any number of reasons: as charity, companionship, or family ties. Unmarried women in the same household typically shared a bedroom and even a bed without comment.

But how typical was it for an unmarried woman to set up her own household? In the 18th century about 5% of unmarried women under age 45 (including widows) headed a household, while for those over 45 as many as 40% had their own household. 40% isn’t simply “possible,” it’s ordinary. But it was only ordinary for certain demographics.

Class comes into this, as in all things, and many of these heads of households may have been working women. Poor and working-class women had the most options for supporting themselves, however precariously. Domestic service was a major employer of unmarried women, though the personal lives of servants were closely supervised and free time was quite limited. Women might carry on an independent business in some fields, either alone or in partnership.

For middle class women, professions such as education or writing were acceptable, if one had the aptitude, though they paid badly. Such professions were only really possible if one remained unmarried. Family money was another route, given the right circumstances, and some women were able to turn a nest egg into a solid living through wise and lucky investments. Luck might also provide a bequest from a wealthy relative or family friend. Two or more middle class women might pool their resources to establish a household, though the circumstances would likely be tighter than what they were raised in.

For upper class women to live independently, they generally needed a large enough “nest egg” that they could live off interest income. This might come from a share in the family wealth, or bequests from a relative. They certainly couldn’t work for a living! Alternately, a comfortable if precarious life might be managed by living in someone else’s household as a companion, with one’s personal expenses covered by a small income—that didn’t count as “working.”

Legal Considerations

Unlike much of the rest of Europe, England never had any civil laws addressing sex between women. This is significant as it means that women engaged in a sexual relationship might be at risk of social condemnation and loss of employment, but they were not at risk of imprisonment or execution specifically because of their love life. This contrasts very strongly with the legal position of homosexual men in England, and it means that the position of homosexual men is not a predictor for women’s experiences. Although people might refer to sex between women as “criminal conversation”—in parallel with references to adultery—this must not be confused with actual criminality.

In fact, there was an active disinterest within the English legal system for taking notice of sex between women. This doesn’t mean that female couples might not run afoul of the law for other reasons. If a woman (generally working class) used gender disguise to gain the benefits of a marriage to another woman, she might be accused of fraud, but usually even the case of a “female husband” would not be prosecuted unless there were some other offence involved. The heyday of “female husbands” in popular culture had faded by the Regency era, but examples can still be found.

For those able to travel abroad, there seems to have been little concern that laws against lesbianism in other countries might be used against female foreign visitors. To some extent, travel could be liberating for an English lesbian simply by escaping the scrutiny and conventional expectations of home. Travel to France or Italy in particular was a context for enjoying a same-sex relationship more openly.

Religious Considerations

The Anglican church didn’t really focus on the topic of same-sex relations much. Intense same-sex friendships were often framed in positive spiritual terms and, although the church certainly didn’t approve of same-sex erotics, it wasn’t usually a topic of religious condemnation. Women who wrote about their same-sex relations in the context of religious beliefs sometimes depicted their desires as a “weakness” or saw sensual enjoyment as an attachment to worldliness. This applied to any expression of carnal desire (whether for a man or woman), though marriage could excuse the indulgence.

But this attitude was not universal, and some women didn’t view their expressions of love and affection for other women as having anything to do with sin, either because they believed only sex with men constituted sin, or because they viewed love as a positive good in whatever form. And devoted female couples might use the forms and rituals of the church to celebrate and solemnize their partnerships, as Anne Lister did, using the language of marriage and using the act of taking sacrament together as a formalization of the relationship. It was common to use marriage-like rituals to formalize close friendships whether sexual or not, such as an exchange of rings and a vow of fidelity.

Women’s Emotional/Romantic Relationships

Women’s close emotional relationships in the Regency era took many different forms. In a pre-Freud era, when hyper-awareness of sex had not yet permeated all social interactions, women were not intensely self-conscious about the erotic or sexual potential of their love for one another. This neither means that all romantic friendships involved sex nor that none of them did. It means that passionate expressions of love between women didn’t automatically evoke the possibility of sex in people’s minds. Or perhaps more precisely, that there was an understanding that the erotic potential of women’s love would not be a matter for open discussion.

Women’s intense friendships often used the language and symbolism of family relationships: mother-daughter, sisters, and even husband-wife. Sisterhood was a particularly important model for many romantic friends—and consider that this was an era when husbands and wives might call each other “brother” and “sister” so it didn’t have implications of incest! It was common for female friends of all types to refer to each other as sisters. Sisterhood represented a close, supportive bond between equals in age and status. Sororal relationships were expected to include a component of physical affection and emotional closeness, as well as an expectation of mutual financial support within a larger family network. Sisterhood was a natural model for intimate friends to use with each other for a lifelong bond. Women’s intimate relationships might be established at any age from girlhood on. At younger ages they might develop at school, or between women with familial connections. At older ages, they might arise within an existing social circle or via introductions by a mutual friend. Among the working and mercantile classes, either family relations or occupational contexts might provide the connection.

The simple fact of intimate female friendships was a given during the Regency era (and in the centuries to either side of it). Romantic friendships were, to some extent, a cultural pattern that all middle and upper class women were expected to participate in. As sentimentality was an expected part of these friendships, they were a context in which passionate and erotic relationships could easily develop and flourish, and a context in which the dividing line between platonic and erotic relationships was not easily traced—either for observers or for the participants themselves.

Women's friendships in the 19th century were never just one thing. They operated on several continuums. It is neither accurate to say that friendship never had an erotic component or that it always did. The one doesn't negate the other. Even when considering the effusive language of romantic love that was "just the way women addressed each other" it is not accurate to claim it was always purely conventional, nor always reflecting what we would understand as a romantic bond, nor always something between those poles where genuine emotional bonds are envisioned with the symbols of heterosexual romantic love.

Just as women’s emotional bonds covered a wide range of expressions, social attitudes towards those bonds combined a conflicting mix of support and suspicion, acceptance and anxiety, normalization and nuanced critique.

Attitudes Toward Women’s Intimate Friendships

Early 19th century society recognized the importance of women’s intimate friendships and considered them a bond with the potential to be deeper and stronger than a marriage bond. A woman’s family might have a wide range of reactions to her intimate friendships, from discouraging them to supporting them. Even an initially negative reaction might turn into acceptance and support if the relationship appeared stable and sincere. In some cases, the birth family might “adopt” the partner and encourage the intimate friendship as a positive force in a woman’s life.

Passionate feelings and the desire for a life together were often expressed in letters—and letters were always at risk of being “public”. The existence of such passionate expressions is evidence that the sentiments were considered socially acceptable. But letters also offer examples of family members objecting to the intensity of the women’s feelings. A woman’s family and community might have differing attitudes toward an intimate friendship depending on whether the relationship was perceived to support her moral and social development, or whether the friend was perceived to be a “bad influence.” The latter reactions often focused on “unfeminine” behavior, but could also focus on encouragement to vices such as gambling, extravagance, or male-coded pursuits.

Romantic friendship was strongly associated with the rising gentry class, and the women who engaged in them viewed the relationships and the sensibility expressed within them as a class marker, believing that true friendship and devotion was only possible among the well-born. Many of the writings left by women in romantic friendships show a significant degree of class snobbery.

Attitudes Toward the Erotic Potential of Women’s Intimate Friendships

Around the turn of the 19th century, shifts in the social and political landscape affected attitudes towards women’s sexuality in general, and same-sex sexuality in particular. A specific vision of idealized womanhood became associated with concepts of national virtue, such that female immorality was perceived as a danger to the nation itself. Anxieties about increasing the population focused attention on childbearing as a “service to the state” and made marriage resistance suspect on a political level. And the rise of “middle class morality” as the dominant driver of public culture led to a projection of libertine attitudes onto both the aristocracy and the demimonde of performers and sex workers.

By the late 18th century, a rising anxiety about erotic possibilities had begun to make women somewhat more self-conscious about how they depicted and enacted their intimate friendships. This self-consciousness served to widen a conceptual gap between the popular image of the lesbian as deviant and immoral, and the experiences of “respectable” women, even when those experiences included same-sex erotics. The increasing divide between the disparaged image of erotic sapphic relations and the praiseworthy image of female domesticity, epitomized by non-erotic female friendships, played out in attitudes toward famous couples such as the “Ladies of Llangollen” who were firmly established in the popular imagination as the model of non-sexual romantic friendship. Strangely enough, this desexualization of female couples made it more possible to blend sapphic desire with the increasingly important realm of domesticity, rather than the two being seen in opposition.

Around 1800, there was a shift in emphasis in the public performance of women’s intimate relationships away from a celebration of physicality and more toward expressions of sentiment. This made those relationships “safer” from the suspicion of eroticism, but also tended to trivialize them in society’s eyes. They might be seen as “practice” for marriage, rather than a substitute for it, but there was also an anxiety about making sure you had the “right sort” of friendship, not the dangerous sort.

Underlying the official public image of women’s intimate friendships as being non-erotic, there is a clear awareness of that erotic potential. A theme in popular literature warns off women from “unsuitable friendships”, especially those that suggest erotic relations or cross-class relations. Rather than supporting the theory that people believed that “women don’t do that sort of thing,” this theme indicates that people were quite aware that women did do “that sort of thing” and were working frantically to try to suppress awareness and knowledge of it. And the women in those relationships took positive action to manage their own public images, regardless of their private behavior.

The image of “platonic romantic friendship”—rather than being either an accurate description of women’s same-sex emotional relationships, or even an unquestioned fiction—was actively used as a shield against the specter of female homosexuality. In order to maintain and protect the illusion of white middle-class heterosexual domestic purity, the ideal of romantic friendship was defined in opposition to “dangerous female friendships” or racialized models of sexually deviant women. And yet, in order to stigmatize and negate those alternative homosexual possibilities, they had to be recognized and described, thus creating an awareness of the very phenomenon society was trying to erase.

Social Signaling and Courtship

While platonic romantic friendships were an ordinary part of the landscape and needed no special communication to initiate or reciprocate, it was a different matter to negotiate shifting to an erotic relationship. A technique used by some women was to drop classical references to female homosexuality to “sound out” another woman’s awareness of erotic possibilities and to signal potential interest. References to Sappho were one approach, but more typical were references to certain epigrams of the poet Martial, or to Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans. Women might sound out each other’s sexual adventurousness by referencing libertine poetry of their own era as well. A woman who was looking for a female life partner might bring the conversation around to any of the various philosophical texts on the topic of women’s friendships that advocated for female partnerships as more desirable than marriage. Or she might turn the subject to well-known female couples such as Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the “Ladies of Llangollen.” Somewhat more daringly, she might make reference to specific women reputed to have homoerotic desires. In the later 18th century, sculptor Anne Damer had enough of a reputation in that regard that gossip used “a friend of Mrs. Damer” or “visiting Mrs. Damer” to make suggestions about a woman’s sexuality.

Another method of making connections was through mutual friends. Those women who we know to have had marriage-like same-sex partnerships, or who had sexual relations with women, typically had a carefully selected circle of friends who were “in the know”. This circle might provide potential sexual partners, or could be a source of introductions to women with similar interests. We know less about how working class women might communicate their interests, but there’s at least one intriguing suggestion that certain locations were known as meeting places for “Tommys” (i.e., lesbians).

Displays of Affection

What sorts of expressions of love and affection were common and ordinary between women in public view, without generating any suspicion? Women who had any level of personal relationship might be expected to kiss, embrace, and sit or walk with their arms entwined around each other. If they engaged in these activities with more intensity that usual, they might raise comment, but the actions themselves were considered ordinary. Women kissed each other all the time to express any level of affection and it was not viewed as inherently erotic, though open-mouthed kissing was an invitation to further intimacies.

When women friends were visiting each other or traveling together, it was normal for them to sleep in the same bed. There would have been nothing unusual or suspicious about a woman openly talking about sharing a pillow with her female friend. Women were also free to praise the beauty of other women, even of strangers, without it raising suspicions.

Women wrote poetry to each other and exchanged personal tokens such as jewelry containing a lock of hair or a portrait. Letters expressed a desire for physical closeness or for sharing a life together and used endearments and the language of courtship and marriage. When women were known to be an established couple, their friends might also refer to them in terms of marriage.

When an intimate friendship that had been considered to be primary, special, and exclusive was disrupted either by a loss of interest on one part, by marriage of one partner, or by the transfer of primary affection to a different woman, poems and letters expressed a sense of hurt or betrayal in language very much like what would be used for a heterosexual breakup.

The latitude for women’s behavior toward each other in public, was paralleled by private behavior. Keep in mind that being private in a bedroom together was not automatically considered to imply erotic activity. Or rather, that it was in the interests of society to suppress the idea that two women being private together in a bedroom or in bed could imply an erotic relationship. Privacy provided many contexts for same-sex affection, flirtation, and erotic teasing, sometimes with a role-playing approach, with one woman saying to another, “If I were a man, here’s how I would feel about you and what I might like to do with you.”

Sexual Practices

It’s tempting to think that “sex is sex and people do what comes naturally” but aside from certain mechanics necessary for procreation (which is definitely outside the scope of this discussion!), sex is a very social activity. Specific sexual practices and their meanings are anything but universal. We must ask not only “What erotic practices were Regency-era women known (or thought) to engage in?” but also “What did people think about those practices? What meanings were placed on them?” And one of the biggest parts of that question is “What practices did people categorize as ‘sexual acts’?” In this section, I may use the shorthand “lesbian sex” as a reference to such practices, not an assumption of sexual identity.

About Sources

Researching this question is hampered by the question of who was writing about lesbian sex. The social constraints on what was felt appropriate for women to write about, combined with what we may assume was a significant amount of self-censorship—either during the writing, or via destruction of letters and papers by the author or the author’s family—means that the vast majority of surviving documentation of lesbian erotic practices was created by men and may reflect men’s fantasies and anxieties more than it reflects women’s practices.

That said, we do have one outstanding record of a woman self-reporting her sexual desires, practices, and strategies in candid detail: Anne Lister’s diaries. Lister wrote the most explicit parts of her diaries in a cypher, using code words and phrases for certain acts. A “kiss” was an orgasm—not as a euphemism, but as a rote substitution. She had an idiosyncratic vocabulary for certain things. It was either her own invention or was so far outside “polite usage” that we haven’t encountered it in other texts. “To grubble” meant something like “manual stimulation of a partner’s genitals (often while clothed).” She once refers to “sapphic” practices, in a context implying dildo use, as something she disdains.

We also see the ways in which Lister concealed her sexual knowledge while sounding women out about their own knowledge. She would deny awareness that women could engage in sex and claim ignorance about how one would go about it. This type of denial from someone who also documented her own lesbian sexual activities should be kept in mind when reading denials from other women reputed to have same-sex relationships. We can’t assume that just because a woman publicly denies knowledge of, or participation in, lesbian erotic activity that she is being truthful or candid. At the same time, while Lister’s diaries are uniquely useful, we shouldn’t mistake them for universal attitudes or experiences.

What Counts as Sex?

It is possible (indeed, likely) that many female intimate friends engaged in erotic activities that they did not classify in their own minds as “sex”. When you examine discussions of erotic activities (e.g., in legal or medical texts), there is a continuum from “yes, definitely sex” through “sort-of sex-like” to “enjoyable, but not sex.” For female couples, the act furthest at the “definitely sex” end of the scale was the largely fictional image of a woman with an unusually large clitoris engaging in penetration. Next along the continuum would be the use of a dildo. While this was recognized as being an erotic practice, it wasn’t as clear-cut that it could be defined as “having sex” as opposed to being a form of masturbation. Somewhere in the middle of the scale is “tribadism”— one woman lying on top of the other while they rub vulvas together—viewed as visually similar to a male-female sex act.

But once we get into the realm of stimulation by rubbing the genitals, either with the hand or with another part of the body, there is less agreement that it counts as sex. Anne Lister doesn’t seem to have considered manual stimulation to be a sex act, and lying together with her leg between her lover’s thighs was a step further but still, evidently, not “going all the way.” In this context, penetration with a finger may or may not change the classification to definitely being in the category of sex acts.

On the far end of the scale of “not a sex act” we have actions such as general caresses, including fondling or kissing the breasts, and open-mouthed kissing. While these activities are often included in pornographic descriptions of sex between women, it appears that in isolation they can be considered ordinary acts of affection, though perhaps ones that only very intimate friends would exchange.

Within this context, it should be noted that the phrase “make love to” in Regency-era texts does not mean “have sex with” but is more in line with “to woo, flirt with, engage in suggestive conversation.” Phrases that did refer to sex acts include “intriguing with” or “having connection with,” both of which were also used in heterosexual contexts.

Pornographic texts give us the most varied and specific picture of what people believed women got up to. These tend to focus on the clitoris including manual and oral stimulation, as well as digital penetration.

Naming Lesbians

Given the problems of the source material, it’s hard to put together a complete picture of how people talked about women who engaged in sex with women. Vocabulary depended on social class and the degree of politeness being used, with the most polite references being vague allusions. We have relatively little solid evidence for how women who loved women would have labeled or described themselves.

The word “lesbian” used as a noun (i.e., referring to people) had been in use in English for at least a century by the Regency era. While it clearly referred to women who had sex with women, it didn’t necessarily imply an exclusive orientation. As an adjective it had been in use even longer. Due to the use of “lesbian” in reference to Sappho, it was a word that could be used in literary contexts and so might be considered a “polite” term, as well as being one with plausible deniability.

The noun “sapphist” used similarly is recorded in the late 18th century (while the adjective “sapphic” was in use earlier). Later in the 19th century it seems to have become a somewhat upscale term, used by intellectual women. It isn’t entirely clear what nuances of meaning it may have had in the Regency era. Anne Lister uses “sapphist” but doesn’t apply it to herself. One homophobic gossip-monger refers to the Ladies of Llangollen as “damned sapphists” but one can’t necessarily take this as proof that the term itself was inherently derogatory.

The word “tribade” had been in use regularly for centuries but was falling out of use by the early 19th century except in medical literature. It carries a somewhat derogatory and low-class air. Another term deriving from classical sources is “fricatrix” or “fricatrice,” which was in use in English in the 17th and 18th century but seems to have largely fallen out of use by the 19th. There are a few clear citations of the word “Tommy” in the late 18th and early 19th century for women who have sex with women. Earlier it had a more general meaning of an immodest or sexually assertive woman.

But there were many ways to indicate lesbian desire without using specific vocabulary. The most famous quote on that subject from Anne Lister uses ordinary language: “I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.” A woman might be described as “(too) fond of women” or “too fond of her own sex” or having “too great a regard for (her) own sex”; a couple might enjoy “something more tender still than friendship,” and many other similarly oblique expressions. A woman might refer to her beloved as her “particular friend” although this was also used for non-sexual relationships.

Attitudes toward Sex between Women

When we separate out the concept of intimate friendship from sexual relationships, the public attitude toward the latter was generally negative. In the 18th century, sex between women fell within the general category of libertinism and wasn’t necessarily considered different in kind from heterosexual fornication. But the 19th century saw a shift toward valorizing a middle-class conservative morality that emphasized marriage and motherhood and promoted the image of women as sexually passive.

Because lesbian sexuality fell entirely outside the realm of “wife and mother,” it was no longer considered simply an aberrant libertine experience, but was viewed in active opposition to the goals of society and the state. At the middle and upper levels of society, lesbian relations now had the potential to destroy a woman’s reputation such that she was treated as a non-person. Among the lower classes, lesbianism tended to be viewed not as a specific category of misbehavior, but as part of a general pattern of anti-social behavior, mixed in with drunkenness and prostitution. It was also considered to be associated with foreignness and with non-white cultures.

Part of the 19th century cult of female domesticity was the idea that (white, middle- and upper-class) female sexual purity was an essential component of the general morality of society. Women couldn’t be trusted to protect their own purity, therefore it was necessary to protect them from corrupting ideas.

One strategy was to censor sexual topics in literature that was aimed at (or accessible to) women, such as reference works, health manuals, news reports, and fiction. Even condemning or discouraging a behavior was done obliquely, lest women be exposed to ideas they might then explore. So, for example, references to sex between women were hidden behind phrases like “topics not fit to be mentioned.”

Another strategy was to describe situations on the edges of possible lesbian behavior and condemn them in ways that didn’t refer directly to sex. Both conduct literature and popular novels warned against inappropriate friendships or masculine behavior.

A more positive approach was to create an idealized image of what female intimate friendships ought to be like that specifically excluded sensuality and sexuality. Real-life examples of such “safe” intimate friendships carried the hazard of breaking the illusion, so novels were a surer vehicle to teach the differences between the acceptable and unacceptable. In the 18th century, a new genre of “domestic fiction” had emerged, reflecting a shift from stories about adventurous, morally suspect figures to stories centered around women’s personal moral development and place in society, helping to create the myth of middle-class virtue and respectability. They were also stories about romantic sensibility and the experiences of women struggling to fulfil their emotional and personal needs in morally acceptable ways. This meant that novels were constantly straddling the line between embracing “sensibility”, and provoking dangerously extreme emotional responses that caused women to long for unattainable romantic experiences.

Within this context, romantic friendship becomes an ambiguous concept that expresses social anxieties while trying to contain them. The official approval given to romantic friendships becomes more tenuous in texts that police the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable friendships between women. While depictions of female intimate friends in these novels include idealized romantic friendships, and often support the premise that female friends are more reliable and faithful than male suitors, they also offer cautionary tales about unsuitable friendships and types of women who pose a moral danger.

Positive depictions of sapphic characters in domestic novels tend to be restricted to the female confidante who is an emotional rival to the male character (but who rarely gets the girl), and the female companion who saves the “damsel in distress” in a gothic adventure. More overtly sapphic characters tempt the protagonist to transgressive behavior (which is inevitably punished or mocked) or exist to contrast with approved behaviors and characters. The rise of the seductive lesbians of decadent French literature was just beginning at the end of our “long Regency” but had not yet significantly infiltrated English works.

Censorship had its limits, though, and could only succeed if women’s access were restricted to approved genres. Pornographic literature (which assumed a male readership) included explicit depictions of sex between women, typically framing the experience as “practice” for heterosexual relations, or as part of a generally uncontrolled sexuality.

Visual works are another category where same-sex erotic interactions may be depicted. Certain mythic motifs, such as Diana and Callisto (or Diana and her nymphs generally) were used as a context for showing fictionalized women in suggestive or explicit poses. But more middle-brow art, such as satirical political cartoons, made use of depictions of rather tame eroticism between women, as in a cartoon depicting the wives of two prominent politicians embracing and kissing on a park bench as their husbands watch helplessly from behind the shrubbery.

Cultural Understandings of Gender and Sexuality

What was the overall framework of how people in Regency England understood gender and sexuality? Models of gender and sexuality have always been inextricably entwined with each other in history. The ways in which cultures categorized both gender and theories of sexual desire have varied considerably. To vastly oversimplify a complex subject, the Regency era inherited two general models of same-sex attraction, which can be short-handed as the “difference model” and “similarity model.”

The “difference model” focuses on erotic desire and holds that attraction is driven by contrasting and complementary roles, assigned as masculine and feminine. If a woman finds herself attracted to a woman, it’s due to some sort of inherent masculinity, either of body or personality. This model assumes that in any female couple there will be one “masculine” partner and one who is simply an ordinary feminine woman responding to that female masculinity. It wasn’t so much a concept of “same-sex” desire as heterosexual desire within a transgender framework (although without accepting transgender identity as valid). In earlier centuries, theories about sex difference included the idea that sex was a continuum with male at one end and female at the other. Under this theory, it was understood that individual people might fall more to the middle of that continuum and thus have ambiguous or unexpected experiences of erotic desire. But with the 19th century shift toward a theory that the sexes were functionally different species, with completely different abilities, experiences, and personalities, it was no longer the case that a woman might have “masculine” attributes due to her position on the gender continuum. Rather, the model presumed that masculine and feminine attributes were inherent in one’s physiology and to act against one’s assigned gender role was to rebel against one’s essential nature.

The “similarity model” focuses on emotional attachment and holds that attraction is driven by similarity: similarity of personality, of class, of values, of experience, and of gender. We see this model reflected in the idea of platonic friendship, and by extension in the romantic friendship model, where it is thought that true friendship can only exist between equals. When applied to heterosexual romantic attraction, the similarity model requires that married partners be of the same social class and background, the same religion, and most definitely the same ethnicity. When applied to same-sex couples, the similarity model expects women’s strongest bonds of friendship to be with other women, again, of similar background. Similarity licenses Romantic Friendship and treats it as both normal and inevitable, while also providing a bridge between same-sex bonds and the relatively new concept of “companionate marriage” in which husband and wife are expected to be friends as well as spouses. This model understood that the intense love and devotion of intimate friends would naturally be expressed through physical affection as well as intellectually. (It stopped short of actively licensing same-sex erotic expressions, but generally understood erotics to be on a continuum with licit expressions of love.)

Through much of Western history, both models have coexisted for women’s same-sex relationships, but they haven’t always been viewed as faces of the same phenomenon. The difference model has always intersected to varying degrees with transgender concepts (however society understood them at the time), while the similarity model has marched more closely with images of friendship. One consequence is that, in recent centuries, society has been more likely to attribute sexual desire to the difference model than to the similarity model. Women in difference-based relationships have also tended to be more visible (unless a completely successful gender masquerade was involved) and more stigmatized. (“Mannish” women were stigmatized whether or not they engaged in same-sex relationships.) Even the participants in female homoerotic relationships did not necessarily see the two models as representing the same concept.

The 18th century had included an additional model for erotic relations between women: the libertine model, which was more of a pan-sexual appetite that made no particular distinction in the gender of the object of desire. This model had largely faded away by the early 19th century, in favor of the beginnings of the idea of same-sex desire as a distinct “sexual orientation.” (These models were not always clearly distinct. The libertine model might be blended with either the difference or similarity model. Think of them as tropes that could be combined or used in isolation.) During the Regency era, there would be plenty of older women who had grown up during times when the libertine model was still active, resulting in different generational attitudes.

Both Regency-era models of desire could be viewed as “natural”. The difference model, due to the inherent masculinity of the active partner, and the similarity model due to the expectation that love naturally grew out of devoted friendship that relied on a similarity of tastes and interests. They were not equally accepted by society, but that was more due to reaction against gender transgression rather than to the emotional bonds involved. There are scattered examples of women of the Regency era expressing the opinion that love between women should be considered equivalent to, and as acceptable as, love between a man and a woman, though this view was not widely embraced.

General Historical Trends

It can help to situate Regency-era attitudes within the context of what came before and what came after. 18th century phenomena that were changing by the early 19th century include:

The creation of the image of “bourgeoise female domesticity” with its suppression of female sexual desire
A shift in the public expression of women’s intimate friendships from more physical to more sentimental
The disappearance of the motif of an enlarged (penetrating) clitoris as a cause of lesbian desire
The beginnings of the concept of women’s same-sex desire as a specific “orientation” rather than being part of a non-specific excess of erotic desire
Less interest in news stories of passing women and female husbands, but a greater association of them with same-sex desire

Later 19th century phenomena that had not yet impacted Regency-era culture include:

The French fascination for “decadent” lesbianism and the resulting explosion of this literary genre
Sexological theory and generally psychological theories of gender identity and sexuality (which were still more than half a century in the future)
Non-normative sexuality was still viewed as a moral issue rather than a medical one
It was still possible for two women to have an overtly romantic relationship in the public eye, to aspire to form a marriage-like life partnership, and to not be viewed as “sexual outlaws”

Select Bibliography

A select bibliography can be found in the show notes. This is not a full list of sources used for this episode, but provides some key publications and ones of the most general usefulness.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Demographics and economics affecting f/f couples
Legal and religious considerations
Friendship and romance
Affection and sex
The language of lesbianism
Models of gender and sexuality
Bibliography
- 18th Century Precursors
  - Bennett, Judith M. & Amy M. Froide eds. 1999. Singlewomen in the European Past 1250-1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 0-8122-1668-7
  - Bennett, Betty T. 1991. Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-4984-5
  - Beynon, John C. & Caroline Gonda eds. 2010. Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ashgate, Farnham. ISBN 978-0-7546-7335-4
  - Bodek, Evelyn Gordon. 1976. "Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism" in Feminist Studies vol 3 no. 3/4 185-199.
  - Clark, Anna. 1996. "Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7(1), pp. 23-50.
  - Donoghue, Emma. 1995. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 0-06-017261-4
  - Dugaw, Dianne. 1989. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650-1850. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-16916-2
  - Merrick, Jeffrey & Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. 2001. Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-510257-6
  - Norton, Rictor (ed.), Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Updated 7 September 2014 http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/. (Accessed 2014/09/13)
  - Hitchcock, Tim. 1997. English Sexualities, 1700-1800. St. Martin’s Press, New York. ISBN 0-312-16573-0
  - Rizzo, Betty. 1994. Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3218-5
- 19th Century Sources
  - Binhammer, Katherine. 1996. “The Sex Panic of the 1790s” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 3: 409-34.
  - Jennings, Rebecca. 2007. A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500. Greenwood World Publishing, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-84645-007-5
  - Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0
  - Lasser, Carol. 1988. "'Let Us Be Sisters Forever': The Sororal Model of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship" in Signs vol. 14, no. 1 158-181.
  - Moore, Lisa. 1992. "'Something More Tender Still than Friendship': Romantic Friendship in Early-Nineteenth-Century England" in Feminist Studies vol. 18, no. 3 499-520.
  - Norton, Rictor (ed.), Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Updated 7 September 2014 http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/nineteen.htm (Accessed 2014/09/13)
  - Vicinus, Martha. 2004. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-85564-3
  - Whitbread, Helena ed. 1992. I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791-1840. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-9249-9
  - Whitbread, Helena ed. 1992. No Priest But Love. NY Univ Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-5077-X