#lgblesbian

[lgbhistory]

Lina Poletti (1885-1971)

Was an Italian writer, poet and feminist. Considered one of the first italian woman to openly declare her lesbianism.

She used to wear masculine clothes and was a quite rebellious woman for her epoch.

In 1908 she attended the First National Congress of Women. This is where she met met the well-known writer Sibilla Aleramo, who shared her commitment to social change.

Both quickly got involved in a love affair, though Aleramo was living with a well-known poet Giovanni Cena at the time. Poletti and Cena didn’t like it and the two of them eventually left Aleramo.

The following year, Poletti married Santi Muratori, the director of the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna, though they did not live together.

Shortly after their marriage, she met Eleonora Duse, at the time a popular stage actress, and became involved with her. The two moved in together in a house located in Florence, Italy, where Poletti started working on plays for Duse.

From 1918 to 1958 Poletti was in a relationship with the Countess Eugenia Rasponi, a noblewoman and ardent fellow feminist.

They later moved to Rome where they attended theosophical and philosophical meetings and traveled throughout Europe and Asia seeking answers for existence.

Poletti was unable to write during the twenty years of fascism in Italy, as she and Rasponi were constantly under the scrutiny of authorities and their home was often raided.

Poletti died on 12 December 1971 in Sanremo, in the northern coastal region of Liguria.

[lgbhistory]

Empar Pineda i Erdozia

• Empar is a Spanish feminist activist born in Hernani, Gipuzkoa in 1944.

• She was enrolled in a German nun's school, where she was required to learn English.

• As there was no public university in the Basque Country, she moved to Madrid, where her sister lived.

• She participated in the anti-Francoist student movement and was banned from enrolling at the Universities of Madrid and Barcelona. She ended up enrolling at the University of Salamanca in 1964, and a little later at the University of Oviedo, where she graduated in Romance philology.

• She returned to Madrid, where she began teaching Language and Literature while continuing her membership in left-wing organizations.

• An anti-Francoist militant, she was arrested by the authorities and spent some time in Martutene Prison.

•In the 1970s, during the transition to democracy, she moved to Barcelona. There she was the leader of the Communist Movement of Catalonia.

•In 1985 she was interviewed in the magazine Interviú with the headline "I am a lesbian just because ", to demand an end to the repression of homosexual women.

• In 1980 she was co-founder of the Lesbian Feminist Collective of Madrid and participated in the creation of the Right to Abortion Commission.

• In 2008 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi for "her dedication sustained for so many years in defense of women's rights, from the action – as an active member of various organizations – and reflection – as a co-author of several volumes, including 'El feminismo que existe'."

[lgbhistory]

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962)

A writer, publisher and the owner of the prominent Shakespeare and company bookstore in Paris (yes, the pictures of which you have probably seen on pinterest).

She was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.

Sylvia was born in United Stated but in 1901 her family moved to Paris. Her father’s name was Sylvester Beach and that might be why she changed her birthname (Nancy) to Sylvia later so that she could be Sylvia Beach.

While conducting research at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in a French literary journal Beach read of a lending library and bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres. When she came there, she met an owner who turned out to be a young woman Adrienne Monnier. The two later became lovers and lived together for 36 years.

Beach started dreaming of her own book shop , so with Monnier's help, Beach opened an English language bookstore and lending library that she named Shakespeare and Company.

Shakespeare and Company quickly attracted both French and American readers, including aspiring writers to whom Beach offered hospitality and encouragement as well as books.

In July 1920, Beach met the writer James Joyce at a dinner party. Soon after, Joyce joined Beach's lending library. Joyce had been trying, unsuccessfully, to publish his manuscript for his masterpiece, Ulysses, and Beach, seeing his frustration, offered to publish it.

Shakespeare and Company gained considerable fame after it published Ulysses in 1922.

Beach would later be financially stranded when Joyce signed on with another publisher, leaving Beach in debt after she had bankrolled, and suffered severe losses from, the publication of Ulysses.

Shakespeare and Company experienced financial difficulty throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s but remained supported by wealthy friends, including Bryher.

In 1936 when Beach thought that she would be forced to close her shop, André Gide organized a group of writers into a club called Friends of Shakespeare and Company. Subscribers paid 200 francs a year to attend readings at Shakespeare and Company.

Beach later recalled "we were so glorious with all these famous writers and all the press we received that we began to do very well in business".

In 1956, Beach wrote Shakespeare and Company, a memoir of the inter-war years that details the cultural life of Paris at the time. The book contains first-hand observations of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Benet and many others.

After Monnier's (her lover) suicide in 1955, Beach had a relationship with Camilla Steinbrugge.Although Beach's income was modest during the last years of her life, she was widely honored for her publication of Ulysses and her support of aspiring writers during the 1920s. Beach died in 1962.

George Whitman (her friend) opened a new bookshop in 1951 at a different location in Paris (in the rue de la Bûcherie) originally called Le Mistral, but renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964 in honor of Sylvia Beach. Since his death in 2011, it has been run by his daughter Sylvia Whitman (who was named after Sylvia Beach).

[lgbhistory]

Anna Freud

She was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish descent born in Vienna and the youngest child of Sigmund Freud.

She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis, and she may be considered one of the founders of psychoanalytic child psychology.

After the Freud family were forced to leave Vienna in 1938 with the advent of the Nazi regime in Austria, she resumed her work in child psychology establishing the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952 (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families).

Anna Freud appears to have had a comparatively unhappy childhood, in which she may have suffered from depression which caused eating disorders.

She was a lively child with a reputation for mischief.  In adolescence she took a precocious interest in her father's work and was allowed to sit in on the meetings of the newly established Vienna Psychoanalytical Society which Freud convened at his home.

Anna Freud created the field of child psychoanalysis, and her work contributed greatly to our understanding of child psychology. She also developed different techniques to treat children. A fundamental principle of Anna Freud's work is that every child should be recognised as a person in his or her own right.

While Anna was the closest intellectual and emotional companion of Sigmund Freud, she was also a lesbian. Freud taught that lesbianism is always the fault of the father and is curable by psychoanalysis. Hence, Anna involuntarily became an object of his inappropriate experiments.Nevertheless, Freud failed to “correct” Anna’s lesbianism.

Anna Freud's life-long romantic partner was Dorothy Burlingham, an American child psychoanalyst and educator. Anna and Dorothy soon developed intimate relationships and lived together as "companions".

Freud died in London on 9 October 1982. Her life-partner Dorothy Burlingham and several other members of the Freud family also rest there. 

[lgbhistory]

Ladies of Llangolen

The "Ladies of Llangollen", Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, were two upper-class Irish women whose relationship scandalised and fascinated their contemporaries during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Their families lived 15 miles (25 km) from each other. The two women met in 1768, and quickly became close. Over the years they formulated a plan for a private rural retreat. It was their dream to live an unconventional life together.

Rather than face the possibility of being forced into unwanted marriages, they escaped together in April 1778. Their families found them and forcefully tried to make them give up their plans—but in vain. They moved to Wales and then sent for Sarah's servant, Mary Caryll, who lived with and worked for them for the rest of her life. Mary died first and they were buried in the same plot and share the same grave marker.

Putting their plan into motion, they undertook a picturesque tour of the Welsh countryside, eventually settling in North Wales. Living first in a rented home in the village of Llangollen, they moved in 1780 to a small cottage just outside the village they called Plas Newydd or "new mansion". They proceeded to live according to their self-devised system, though they could rely on only a modest income from intolerant relatives, and eventually a civil list pension. They "improved" Plas Newydd in the Gothic style with Welsh oak panelling, pointed arches, stained glass windows, and an extensive library, in which they received their many guests. They hired a gardener, a footman and two maids. This led to significant debt, and they had to rely on the generosity of friends.

After a couple of years their house became a haven for visitors travelling between Dublin and London, including writers such as William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, but also the military leader the Duke of Wellington and the industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb, who was born a Ponsonby, came to visit too. Anne Lister from Yorkshire visited the couple, and was possibly inspired by their relationship to informally marry her own lover. Eventually their families came to tolerate them.

Butler and Ponsonby lived together for 50 years. Their books and glassware carried both sets of initials and their letters were jointly signed. Towards the end of their lives, they both dressed in black riding habits and men's top hats; some visitors thought it was eccentric and outdated – especially the hair powder – but neighbours thought the clothes were practical for living outdoors.

[lgbhistory]

Lesbian summer camps in New Zealand

Between 1975 and 1991 there were nine summer camps organized by lesbians in Canterbury (a region on New Zealand's island) and also a separate weekend camp at Nolan House in Kirwee.

Those camps were not just a holiday getaway, but a solace for lesbians, a place where they could be with their community, together, a place where they could feel free to be themselves.

The 1970s camps were initiated by Christchurch feminist lesbians who wanted somewhere cheap to take their children on holiday, and somewhere private where they would not have to deal with the negative reactions of straight people. 

Advertised by word of mouth, the camps were attended each year by about 30 lesbians and their children. 

They took musical instruments and made songs, told stories, swam and sunbathed, played cards, shot and cooked possums and created a lesbian language.

As one of the campers said "At camp we created our own reality."

The second series of camps were held at the Boys' Brigade Camp, Waipara, from 1985 to 1987, at Stavely Campsite in 1988, and at Leigh Camp, Loburn, from 1989 to 1991. 

The women who held it tended to be more middle class than the earlier organisers; more had come out through the women's movement, and they called their camps 'Womyn's Summer Camps', inviting both lesbians and 'lesbian-oriented' women.

These camps were bigger, more structured, and widely advertised in lesbian and feminist magazines and organisations throughout New Zealand and overseas. They attracted lesbians from around New Zealand and were a focal point for travellers from other countries.

Due to precautions and confrontations, the organizers didn'd advertise the location of the first club and booked it as the 'Women's Health and Fitness Club'.

The period was one of challenge and questioning among Christchurch lesbians, and the organisers were initially wary of potential conflicts, for example over children, access for disabled women, and how the all-Pākehā organisers could make Māori lesbians welcome.

Lesbians came to camp overwhelmingly to relax and have fun. They played softball, canoed, tramped and ran a huge variety of workshops.

For many lesbians, the camps were a safe space to try out teaching and presentation skills. There were concerts, dances, home-made videos and a circus. Short affairs and long relationships started and ended.

Huge circles of women welcomed newcomers, debated how to deal with intrusive teenage boys at the swimming hole, and invented ad hoc rituals to celebrate lesbian heritage.

For many, the strongest memory was of the communal swimming and sunbathing, the feeling of safety and freedom that came with being naked in the sunshine among so many other lesbians. 

Back in the city the euphoria spilled into rounds of parties, and in 1987 a weekend mid-winter camp was held at Arthur's Pass.

About 150 women and 20 children attended the camp.

The second series of camps ended partly because of the difficulty finding site-owners willing to lease to lesbians.

[lgbhistory]

Yuasa Yoshiko ( 1896 – 1990)

Was a Russian language scholar and translator of Russian literature in Shōwa period Japan.

Born in Kyoto, Yuasa was an early supporter of the feminist movement in Japan.

Moving to Tokyo, she was also drawn to leftist political movement and became involved with a leading female proletarian literature movement novelist Chūjō Yuriko.

In 1924, after Chūjō divorced her husband, the two women began to live together, and from 1927–1930, traveled together to the Soviet Union, where they studied the Russian language and literature, and developed a friendship with a noted movie director Sergei Eisenstein.

While Yuasa has also been romantically linked to writer Tamura Toshiko among others, Chūjō is said to have been the love of Yuasa's life. 

Yuasa was never again romantically linked to another woman after Chūjō's marriage to proletarian author and Japan Communist Party leader Miyamoto Kenji , although in an interview later in life Yuasa said that the word "lesbian" (rezubian/レズビアン) applied to her.

After their return to Japan and after Chūjō remarried, Yuasa continued with her translation work of Russian authors, especially the works of Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov and Samuil Marshak. She is especially known for her translation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Yuasa died in 1990, and her grave is at Tōkei-ji, a temple in Kamakura.

After her death, the Yasa Yoshiko Prize was established for the best translation of a foreign language stage play into Japanese.

Yuriko,Dasvidaniya is a 2011 drama film, depicting a brief period in 1924. The film is based on two of Yuriko's autobiographical novels, Nobuko and Futatsu no niwa, and on Hitomi Sawabe's non-fiction novel Yuriko, dasvidaniya: Yuasa Yoshiko no seishun.

[lgbhistory]

Takiko Mizunoe

(20 February 1915 – 16 November 2009)

The first woman to produce films in Japan

She was an actress and a male impersonator,possibly a butch lesbian

One of her best works is "Crazed Fruit" (1956)

In 1928, she enrolled in the training program for the all-female Shochiku Opera Company. There, she was given the stage name Takiko Mizunoe. (Her birth name was Umeko Miura)

Mizunoe cut her hair short, a novelty at the time.This marked the beginning of Mizunoe's signature "cross-dressed fair lady" style, and she became known for her appearances onstage in a silk hat and tuxedo.

 at age 18, Mizunoe led one of the Japanese labor movement's few successful actions of the period when she headed a strike of the Shochiku Opera Company's performers in reaction to wage cuts. By that point, Mizunoe had become a star, and news of the "Pink Strike"—so called because it was led by young women in their teens and twenties—spread throughout the media.

The strike lasted for a month, and nearly 50 strikers were arrested, including Mizunoe.But eventually the action was successful, in part because the company could not be seen as exploiting its most popular star, and the company's management offered improved labor conditions and a wage increase for musicians.

 She toured northern China, the United States, and Europe, but returned to Japan as the country entered WW2. During the war, Japan imposed restrictions on cross-dressing, which forced Mizunoe to perform in female roles. Touring also became difficult due to restrictions.

Mizunoe never married

She died of natural causes in 2009 at the age of 94