Book review: Awfully Devoted Women by Cameron Duder

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      Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900-65
      By Cameron Duder. UBC Press, 313 pp, softcover

      The lives of lesbians in English Canada prior to 1965 are as secretive and cloaked as the relationships during that time. While much has been documented about lesbian relationships experienced by women in upper-class and working-class circles, the types of same-sex relationships experienced by middle-class women in Canada have been largely unaccounted for. Vancouver author Cameron Duder attempts to uncover and build intimate portraits of these women in Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900-65.

      Drawing from interviews, letters, journal entries, and newspaper articles, Duder builds a history of women who were "devoted" to one another. He first examines the relationships between professional women from 1900 to 1950, called "romantic friendships" at the time. Duder argues that while many people considered these relationships merely as close friendships, women were required to use the utmost discretion to not create suspicion. "Women were not perceived as, and did not perceive themselves as, sexual beings," he writes. "Had physical sexuality been revealed, the women concerned would have been condemned."

      Throughout the book, Duder references Radclyffe Hall's infamous 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. And much like the social difficulties plaguing the characters in the novel, many women in romantic friendships during the early part of the 20th century lived apart and led otherwise "normal" married lives, knowing that they could never act on their desires in public.

      In discussion of these concealed relationships, Duder also investigates the use of the term lesbian to identify these women, as "anyone writing about lesbians before the homophile movement and the lesbian and gay rights movement is faced with the question of terminology," he writes in the introduction. "Most women who had relationships with women before the 1970s did not use the word 'lesbian' to describe themselves."

      In the second half of Awfully Devoted Women, Duder examines the lives of lower-middle-class women in the postwar period. By compiling 32 interviews with women who self-identified as lesbians living in Canada between 1950 and 1965, the reader gains a sense of how these women understood their desires and attraction for other women in an age fixated on the nuclear family. Duder also talks about the important role that schools, universities, and workplaces played in sparking these intimate relationships. He offers a candid exploration of everything from first encounters with lesbian sexuality to the rise of lesbian bar culture, to the impact of butch-femme relationships on heterosexuality.

      Awfully Devoted Women is one of the first books to document lesbian sexuality in Canada prior to 1965, and is a fascinating and inspirational read for those engaged in the study of history, sexuality, and gender.

      You can follow Michelle da Silva on Twitter at twitter.com/michdas.

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