LILLIAN FADERMAN.

To Believe in Women

The feisty historian ties the same-sex loves of Susan B. Anthony and others to their pioneering achievements

Begone, lesbian invisibility. Author-historian Lillian Faderman is back this summer with more true stories of our lives in To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America--A History (Houghton Mifflin, $30).

With such works as Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers and Surpassing the Love of Men, Faderman has dedicated her career to unearthing the hidden history of lesbians. (In fact, she just won the prestigious Monette/Horwitz Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation for her life contributions to gay and lesbian history.) Now she tums her gaze outward, examining the effect lesbians have had on the American political landscape. "I planned this project partly because I wanted to give lesbians stronger psychological armature against homophobia," says Faderman. And her study of some of our most influential female leaders shows that, whether or not they would have called themselves lesbian, each was able to effect change thanks partly to the support of a loving, long-term female life partner.

Faderman offers compelling portraits of the same-sex affectional lives of activists such as Susan B. Anthony and shows that an impressive circle of female couples played major roles in all the political movements (temperance, suffragism, etc.) that led to modern-day feminism.

"I wanted to confirm exactly how important these women were to American history," Faderman says, "and, at the same time, to show how their nontraditional personal lives made their accomplishments possible." In our age of so-called postfeminist anxiety over women's "negligence" of traditional female roles, Faderman resolutely shows how her subjects' achievements blossomed largely because they managed to relax, if not completely abandon, all such roles.

"The women in my book were true pioneers," Faderman argues. "They started their movements from scratch and had nothing but their own considerable resources to rely on. We at least have the legacy of their very real accomplishments from which to build our own movements."