Women's History Commons^™

The Emergence Of Lesbianism From Women's Penal Institutions: Incarcerated Women-Loving Women, Interracial Coupling, And Women's Blues Music, 1895-1935, Sidney Wegener

Women's History Theses

This thesis explores the early-twentieth-century emergence of lesbianism as an identity label, an understanding of relationships between women-loving women, and a set of subcultures in the United States. Penal and medical professionals’ influence on the development of language surrounding and contributing to social and scientific meanings of lesbianism is analyzed as a response to the hypervisibility of women-loving women confined in women’s penal institutions. In this context, relationships between incarcerated white women and Black women received the most attention and condemnation from observers, such as reformatory administrators and research psychologists. A focus on interracial relationships between incarcerated women, especially on …