Awfully Devoted Women

The lives of many lesbians who grew up before 1965 remain cloaked in mystery. Historians have turned the spotlight on upper-middle-class “romantic friendships” and on working-class lesbian bars, but the lives of the lower-middle-class majority remain in the shadows.

Drawing on a rich collection of archival sources and interviews, Awfully Devoted Women offers a nuanced portrait of middle-class lesbianism in English Canada in the decades before the gay rights movement. Accounts and explorations of these women’s sexual practices, thoughts on same-sex desire, and relations with friends and family unveil a world of private relationships, house parties, and discreet social networks. This intimate study of the lives of women forced to love in secret not only challenges the idea that lesbian relationships in the past were asexual, it also reveals the courage it took for women to explore desire in an era when they were supposed to know little about sexuality.