Lesbian/Woman

Lesbian/Woman

Cover of the first edition
Authors	Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Lesbian feminism
Publisher	Glide Publications
Publication date	1972
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	283
ISBN	978-0553235975
OCLC	506556

Lesbian/Woman is a 1972 book about lesbianism by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. It is considered a foundational text of lesbian feminism.

Summary

Martin and Lyon describe their book as a subjective account of lesbianism. They try to recuperate the experiences of lesbians from what they see as the distortions of most medical and scientific accounts. They claim to have produced neither a true confession nor a scientific book, but one written from subjective experience. Rejecting the idea of objectivity and scientific neutrality, they affirm the book as partisan and argue that lesbians must speak in their own terms, not through those set out in the experts' frameworks.

The authors argue that a woman's sexual orientation as a political choice. They believe that lesbian relationships are appealing because of the absence of clearly defined gender roles.

Scholarly reception

Jennifer Terry, Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, comments that in many respects the book, "resembles previous social scientific surveys and early psychiatric case histories produced as a result of voluntary lesbian participation in studies." She adds that, "One can identify a similarity in the discursive structure of the subjects' self-descriptions reported in Lesbian/Woman and those of the early psychiatric interviews that were part of the Sex Variants study of the 1930s."

See also

• Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women
• Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry

References

Bibliography

Books