Looking for the lesbians on patriarchal historical narratives is a subversive activity, requiring researching the lives of so-called spinsters and other women whose eschewing of heterosexuality has been construed as something (anything!) other than attraction to other women. Nuns, for instance… or the Chinese marriage resisters.

Marriage resistance was a “thing” in three districts of the Pearl River Delta from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930’s. In fact, anthropologists have had the temerity to call it a movement. At its height there were an estimated one hundred thousand women refusing to allow men access to their domestic and sexual services through the institution of marriage. They were referred to as the sworn sisters of the Golden Orchid.

How did such an astounding phenomenon arise? Some speculate that it might have evolved from a custom known as “delayed transfer marriage…” which something of a layaway plan for claiming brides. The woman was allowed to live with her family for a period of time after the wedding ceremony.  Here’s a quaint entry from the 1853 Shunde County Gazetteer:

Girls in the county form very close sisterhood with other in the same village. They do not want to marry, and if forced to marry, they stay in their own families, where they enjoy few restrictions. They do not want to return to the husband’s family, and some, if forced to return, commit suicide by drowning or hanging.

This “delayed transfer marriage” was unique to the Pearl River Delta… maybe because this was the center of the silk industry in China—one of the very few industries which employed women. And economic independence, as we all know, is the key to the survival of women-loving women under patriarchy. In China, this was doubly true, because of the heritage of footbinding and infanticide in the regions where marriage was a girl’s only prospect for financial security and her family’s only hope for getting her off their hands.

Obviously, the woman working outside the home could not afford to be hobbled, no matter how erotic her “little Golden Lotus Hook” (putrescent, maimed, and infected bound foot) might be to men. Also, where girls represented earning power, families would be foolish to kill off their potential breadwinners.

And so the girls of Canton were allowed to survive and to develop their bodies. They were also educated.

But there was one more factor in their favor: lack of men. In the nineteenth century large numbers of Chinese men were emigrating to America. Now, some might insist that the “marriage resisters” were not so much militant lesbians, as frustrated spinsters turning to each other, because there weren’t enough good men to go around. But the case can be made that the removal of the men allowed women freer range in expressing their affection for each other.

In addition, there were religious ideologies that supported these women of the Golden Orchid. Many of them worshiped Guan Yin, a goddess of women who herself had rejected heterosexual marriage. One anthropologist recorded this creative explanation for same-sex bonding: If a woman believed she was predestined to marry a certain man, and he happened to reincarnate as a woman, she would still be attracted to him as her predestined mate!

By 1933, the “girls” had begun to form alternative institutions to marriage. Here’s the Gazetteer of Chinese Customs:

Although the two women living together cannot be said to have the form/equipment of a man and a woman, they nonetheless enjoy the pleasure of male-female [intercourse.] Some say that they use friction or rubbing force, others say they use “mechanical devices.” … They adopt a daughter to inherit their property. When the adopted daughter also forms Golden Orchid sworn sisterhood with another woman, the woman is treated like a daughter-in-law.

Apparently, the women of the Golden Orchid understood the need to incentivize same-sex unions along the same lines at patriarchal marriage!

Another way they protected their sisterhood was by organizing “girls’ houses” where the female children of a village lived together until they either married or took spinsters’ vows. It was in these houses that the tradition of sworn sisterhood developed. Here is what Janice Raymond, a former nun, has to say about sworn sisters in her book A Passion for Friends: a Philosophy of Female Friendship:

There were various ways in which sworn sisters were pledged to each other.... a pair of girls or women would take mutual vows never to marry and never to part company. The Chinese term for sworn sisters was “shuang chieh-pai, “ “mutually tied by oath.” Very often, these girls or women had spent a large part of their childhood together... Sworn sisterhood, however was not limited to twosomes. It often comprised a larger association of many women who were committed to each other in friendship and who formed an organized antimarriage grouping.

The sworn sisters lived in “vegetarian halls “ or “spinsters’ houses.” The former were residential halls for a somewhat subversive Buddhist sect which had been outlawed for political militancy. Girls living in these halls were expected to practice “self-cultivation “ by eating vegetarian diets and abstaining from sex with men. The “spinsters’ houses” were more secular, and vegetarianism was not required. Both institutions provided for women in their old age. There were retirement and death benefits, and there were also funds for celebrations and for emergencies.

Some of the vegetarian halls had libraries, and in these were found “good books,” treatises written by Buddhist nuns, urging girls to resist marriage and representing such resistance as an act of moral courage. These teachings even went so far as to depict suicide as an honorable alternative to arranged marriages. Sworn sisters, sometimes as many as six, had been known to drown themselves together rather than see one of their number married against her will.

Some resisters went through with the marriage, but refused to consummate it, returning to their families of birth. Other women, “tzu-shu nu,” were “never to marry. “ The tzu-shu nu would have ceremonies to mark their unions with other women, and these were recognized by the whole community. In fact, Chinese newspapers carried accounts of the ceremonies.

Marjorie Topley, the anthropologist who did the original work on marriage resisters in the 1950’s, claims that lesbianism was common among the tzu-shu nu. She notes that lesbian practices were called “grinding the bean curd “—a reference to a dildo made from silk and packed with bean curd.      

The collapse of the silk industry and the threat of Japanese invasion in the 1930’s, forced “sworn sisters” to retire early to their spinsters’ houses, or to migrate to Hong Kong or Singapore as domestic workers, where they lived in “kongsi,” dwellings of women from the same region in China.  The women of the kongsi would not take jobs in establishments which had fired another member of the kongsi. Many of these houses carried on the tradition of marriage resistance, and some even established banks for the purpose of making loans to the members. Single women would sometimes adopt daughters, but it was more common for sworn sisters to adopt jointly.

Although the Communists, who considered the resisters “counter-revolutionary,” wiped out the movement in China, some of the tzu-shu nu were still surviving in the 1990’s survive in Singapore and Hong Kong, keeping alive the tradition of their vows: “that there might be nothing but truth us.”

As an interesting footnote, Chinese revolutionary, feminist and writer Qiu Jin exchanged vows of eternal friendship with poet, calligrapher and reformer Wu Zhiying in 1904... the same year she began wearing men's clothing. She marked the occasion with a poem called "Orchid Verse"... perhaps a reference to her earlier sisters of the Golden Orchid?

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And I appreciate the reminder from an anonymous reader to footnote my sources... I did read the entry in  Lesbian Herstories and Cultures... and the other two sources were internally referenced in their article:

Sankar, Andrea. "Sisters and Brothers, Lovers and Enemies:
Marriage Resistance in Southern Kwangtung." Journal of Homosexuality 11:3-4 (1986): 62-82.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

Wolf, Margery, Roxane Witke, Emily Martin, ed. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.

Note to the reader:

Most of the dashes were edited out of Emily Dickinson’s poems when they were first published in 1890. The editors, Mabel Todd Loomis and Thomas Higginson, also “regularized” her spellings and word usages. The poems were not “un-edited” until the 1950's.

Mabel Todd Loomis also suppressed all references to Emily’s lesbian relationship with Susan Huntington Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law and next-door neighbor. There is no mention of Susan in the Letters of Emily Dickinson, published by Loomis in 1895—even though Emily’s correspondence with Susan is voluminous, spanning four decades and including drafts and notes about the poems as works-in-progress. (Loomis was the mistress of Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband.)

The letters were not published until 1998.
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DASHING
By Emily Dickinson's Dash


I am Emily Dickinson’s dash—the hand-off in a relay race. I am “Heads-up!”—“Your turn!”—“Last tag!” I indicate a synapse. I spark the gap, up the ante, pass the baton. I am the very first thing that had to go, when they decided to publish Ms. Dickinson’s work—but, no!— I am the second. The first, of course, were the poems that made reference to Emily’s passion for Sue Gilbert.

The dash is an elevated blank, if you think about it.  It is an appropriation of silence. It indicates an intentional—defiant?—ambiguity. It is the author’s evasion of the literary house detectives. What cannot be named can be synapsed around, and after a while, there is—there will be—a connection.

If you teach yourself to follow the multiplicity of readings in Ms. Dickinson’s poems, you will find the synaptic pathways of your brain altered. They will have become reprogrammed. You will, in short, have a brain that makes connections—dangerous ones—exactly the way Ms. Dickinson’s did. I do not exaggerate. I leave that to the italics, to the exclamation point, to the upper cases.  How do you illuminate, clarify, elucidate—how do you organize— brilliance?  I am her invitations, instead. I am license to jump the track. This is all about speed, about mental reflex. Where there aren’t words, there are always connections.

Virginia and Gertrude were dashing women, also. But Emily was the only one who could dash her brains out. I am the fragments of that broken plank in reason. I didn’t come cheap.

I am horizontal—not hierarchical, but lateral—like hostility. The dash is an outstretched hand.  I can pull you across or ask for a handout. Emily did both at the same time, because she knew too much. She wanted to recruit and be rescued at the same time. If you could follow her thought, she was not alone. That was something. And, then, of course, there was Sue.

Ah, Sue—How to measure the distance between Sue Gilbert’s kitchen and Emily’s bedroom window? No dash in the world could bridge that gap, but I was the gesture. And—yes, let it be said—I was also the taunt: “See what I can do.” Because everyone could see what Sue could do. She could procreate. She could delegate. She could regulate.

But Emily, Emily—one-trick-pony!—Emily could synapse. Sly Emily. Shy Emily. Gay and dashing Emily. Emily was quantum, where Sue was algebraic. Emily was possibility; Sue was probability. Where you locate Emily in time—the “onset of Eternity”—you cannot graph her coordinates in space. When you pinpoint her in “Amherst,” it’s “Good Morning—Midnight—.” I did that for her. I am the quark of punctuation.

What started as morse code for Sue ended up a cryptogram. Clumsy dyke, Emily only wanted to bridge the gap between houses. Naive Emily! Little did she know those houses were galaxies apart, and the little dash—the wistful open palm—(my house or yours?)—was the password through language to the boundaries of thought. And she went there. And every time she did, a part of her never came back. And between what jumped the fence to Sue’s house, what fell through the floor of reason, and what bled out between synaptic gaps—what lived upstairs in her father’s house became more and more translucent—a doppelganger. Emily’s body became the punctuation they craved so much for her. Her body was the period that anchored a life sentence. It was the comma of the essential—for women, anyway—subordinate clause. It was the quotation mark of other people’s ideas, the semi-colon caution light before we can proceed through the intersection. She was all punctuation when she died. Her spirit had fled long ago in great mad dashes. And Sue Gilbert was left holding the memories, which, finally, were containable after the dashes had been deleted.

When love is gone, there is the dash.  The plank in reason breaks when there is no love, no possibility of love left—when every woman’s heart is connected to her body and that body is indentured out forever. No love… no love. The mind has been constructed for denial. It was never designed for truth. Poor Emily. She didn’t know that—until it was too late. Eventually she would have exhausted even the possibilities. That would be enough to stop most people. But not Emily. Lay down Emily’s dashes side-by-side, and they’re like a cattle crossing. Living next door to impossibility, where else could she go but up through the roof—or, as she put it, down through the floor?

Virginia reserved her dashes for letters. They could be mistaken for haste. Her readers had an out. Gertrude alternated with ellipses. She invited sighs—handrails. There are absolutely no sighs associated with the dash. No trailings-off, no “ah, well . . . another day, perhaps . . .” No “if only . . .” where Sue Gilbert was concerned. “If only’s” are for novelists, not poets. Poets are about precision— or nothing at all. When Emily failed to finish a sentence, it was an act of courage, not cowardice. I was her springboard into eternity.

Emily took no prisoners except herself. Her sentences were all meant to be executed. That’s the beauty of the dash. You have to throw the switch yourself. She gave her readers lessons in electrocution.

“Think like me and see where it gets you.” All dressed in white, talking through closed doors. No need to open them when one can trans-port—literally—with the dash. And the white? Absence of color, that “Element of Blank”—traveling clothes for the synapser? What is the opposite of mourning? Surely not life—That only leads back to death.

The opposite of death is the dash. But it will kill you.

I have been reading the memoirs of Ethel Smyth, a British lesbian composer and part-time militant Suffragist.  In Ethel's methodical way, she decided to commit exactly two years of her life to the Suffrage Movement, and during this time she became a comrade-in-arms, literally, to Emmeline Pankhurst--undertaking to instruct her in the fine art of rock-throwing, so that she could make the desired impact on 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

During this smashing campaign, both Ethel and Emmeline were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison, where they were assigned adjoining cells and where a sympathetic matron would allow them to take tea together and occasionally "forget" to fetch Ethel back to her cell.

Emmeline and Ethel became very close friends, and they continued to stay in touch after 1913, when Ethel's self-appointed term of service expired and she returned to the world of music.  In 1914, Ethel rendezvoused with Emmeline in France during one of Mrs. Pankhurst's periodic flights from arrest in order to recover from the debilitating effects of another hunger strike--this time her tenth!   Under the infamous "Cat-and-Mouse Act," she would have been subject to immediate re-arrest, even though bed-ridden, had she remained in England.

And then war was declared.  Ethel joined the French army as a radiographer, and Emmeline returned to England, where she placed her considerable charismatic powers at the service of the British government, becoming a spokesperson for the government she had devoted so many years of her life to tearing down.

It was during this period that Ethel published a volume of her early memoirs, a large portion of which was devoted to her first lesbian passion, a relationship with one Lisl Herzogenberg.  Lisl, a married woman, had come to Ethel's rescue during her student days in Germany, when she was experiencing a nervous breakdown.  Lisl moved into Ethel's rooms and cared for her during the crisis, bathing her and feeding her.  Later, she "adopted" Ethel into her home. 

The two women maintained a passionate friendship for seven years.  The friendship came to an abrupt and traumatic end over Ethel's first romantic involvement with a man--who happened to be married to a mutual friend.  Both the husband and wife had told Ethel that theirs was an entirely open marriage, and Ethel, young and naive, had taken them at their word.  Even though their dalliance had been entirely platonic, Ethel was cast in the unsavory role of the "other woman" and socially shunned.  Under pressure from others (most notably Lisl's mother, who despised Ethel), Lisl cut off all contact with her.  A few years later, Ethel found out that she had died.  It was the great tragedy of Ethel's life, and she gave it that weight in her memoirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, however, had no patience with what she considered self-indulgent sentiment.  On reading Ethel's memoirs, she remarked that readers might feel that the whole affair was just a "tempest in a teapot."  Ethel, in her later remembrances about her relationship to Mrs. Pankhurst, noted that, although she laughed at the time, still "between reader and writer a gulf was fixed."  Sure enough, their friendship ended shortly after.

Reading this narrative reminded me of my own experience with heterosexual radical activists.  There was always this "gulf fixed."  For these women, there was a sharp dividing line between their personal lives--usually petrified into social routines associated with long-standing marriages, and their political lives, teeming with activity.  They looked down on us lesbians, whose personal lives were very much in the forefront of our experience-- and inextricable from our commitment to women's causes.

That this priority might play itself out in unstable relationships, heady crushes, profound inquiries into the nature of desire, and bitter factionalizing came with the territory.  Women loving women in the most intimate sense were breaking far newer ground than those who marched with signs or circulated petitions.  While others asked for liberation, we were attempting to determine what that might look like.  And not afraid to look foolish in the process.

Ethel Smyth was working out the most basic algebra of her liberation with Lisl.  Wildly unmothered, she had needed to detach from her mother, a woman whose brilliant youth had been cut short by seven more-or-less consecutive pregnancies, and whose subsequent behaviors towards her children--not surprisingly--were indicative of serious emotional disturbances.  Ethel, through her own form of "hunger strike," had finally obtained permission to study music in Germany, and here she was confronted with the suffocating social strictures for "unattached" females, as well as the brutal misogyny of the music world. 

That Ethel was able to find the nurturing and the shelter so critical to her survival was a miracle.  That she found it in the bosom of a heterosexual marriage was profoundly subversive.  That she and Lisl were able to sustain the intensity of their love for seven years in the face of both their dependency upon male privilege is astonishing.  And it was the devastation of the final break which released Ethel forever from any and all concessions  to conventional morality. 

When I think of Mrs. Pankhurst's hunger strikes, her violence against her own body, and her total capitulation to the worst extremes of patriarchy--namely war, I am called to reconsider the definition of militancy, of radicalism.  It was Ethel's fearless quest to feed herself, to feast on the love of another woman, even in the heart of their respective heterosexual prisons, which inspires me with hope for a revolution.