p. 48 “Women not protected in the higher reaches of society met secretly in restaurants and bars, travelled by train and hired cans, and frequently risked exposure, if not legal punishment, should they reveal their sexual orientation through dress of publicly demonstrated erotic attachments. … The Marquise de Belbeuf became an object for woman-haters, who considered her perverse and degenerate. Adopting male dress and forms of behaviour, the marquise reversed the premises by which patriarchal society functioned, assuming for herself male pivileges and power … On 3 January 1907, the Marquise de Belbeuf and Colette were very nearly arrested for enacting a scene of lesbian love in a pantomime skit at the Moulin Rouge…. the mime portrayed the awakneing of a mummy from her eternal sleep by the kiss of a former lover. The scene incited a near-riot in the theater, making it necessary to call in the police. Future performances of the play were banned by Lepine at the request of the marquise’s ex-husband; Willy, Colette’s estranged husband lost his position no the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and the two women were forced to stop living openly together.”
p. 99 For women, America was a particularly oppressive environment, and amond the expatriate women were those who took up Edith Wharton’s ‘argument with America’ on the ‘woman question’ finding in their personal sense of alienation from their native land important literary themes.”
p. 101 Janet Flanner’s only published novel, The Cubical City, recreates the cultural life of New York in the 1920s… the t hematic concerns of the novel turn on American sexual puritanism – in particular its double standard of behaviour for men and women – and it contrasts life for a modern woman set ‘in the midst of a mechanical civilisation (New York City) with that of ‘ancient females who in small select numbers had received in absentia grain, praters, milk, worship of hyacinth buds placed on credulous rural shrines… “for thousands of years the concernrated aim of society has been to cut down kissing. With that same amount of energy … society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”.. reflects her determined effort to break free of midwestern puritanical thought.”
p. 139 In 1937, “writing from Budapest following her trip to Salzberg and Vienna, Flanner commented almost as an aside that ‘history looks queer when you’re standing close ot it, watching where it is coming from and how it is being made.” .. It was precisely her avility to capture the ‘queerness’ of history observed close up, her instinctive knowledge of ‘where it is coming from and how it is being made’ that is revealed in retrospective reading of the Paris Letters.
p. 188 “Stein distinguished herself by making herself appear to be a man… Once her liaison with Toklas was established, Stein made the following remark in her notebook: ‘Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussie, perhaps.” (A Different Language, 136, fn 31)… Unable to step outside the heterosexual cultural imperative, Stein clothed her homosexuality in heterosexual forms.”
p. 194 Adrienne Monnier – “An unabashedly feminist analysis of women’s relation to books, ‘Les Amies des Livres’ examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman’s work rather than of leisure: ‘Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious”.
p. 217 “the misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard who was – briefly – Louis Aragon’s mistress. “…Women plated a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrillling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes.The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or uppper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate.”
p. 243 Djuna Barnes “poetry did not seem to follow the currenst of the most recent American and English poetry – and there is no reason why it should have … her interest in earlier historical periods and to the use of outmoded and antiquated verbal forms. But Barnes was also at work reconstructing the ‘abandoned traditions’ of woman’s culture. This effort simultaneously searcged for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced… Barnes’s work has fallen prey to the same set of received notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein: both women have been chastised for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to maste the Modernist enterprise.
p. 268 Natalie Barney “saw in English culture and extreme form of patriarchal power and described England as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men”. (Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 15)
p. 400 “The thirties has been defined as a ‘masculine decade’, a male preserve in which narrowly defined class distinctions exluded ‘issues of gender and sexual politics’. The collective experience of this generation of writers was masculine, its participants products of the English public school The Auden Generation, like the men of Bloomsbury, shared preparatory and public school experiences, were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and were predmoinately homosexual.
p. 401 “homosexuals of the period defined themselves against a romanticized image of the rugged and heroic young men who died on the battlefields in World War I…. feared a failure of courage and conscience, imagined war as the ultimate ‘Test’ of masculinity, and dreamed of ways to escape the death sentence meted out to those who passed the ‘Test’.”
p. 411 Woolf saw in the Fascist state a more violent and indoctrinated form of the patriarchal dominance already at work in Western society, a force that associated the female with weakness in order to keep women (and other marginal elements) outside the societal power structure. As an alternative to the masculine values enforced by the Fascist state, Woolf proposed in Three Guineas that women establish themselves as a Society of Outsides, defining the goals of freedom, equality and peace in terms radically different from those established under state patronage.”
p. 415 Natalie Barney shockingly racist, anti-Jewish views
p. 419 Nancy Cunard “began her work as a journalist at the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, reporting first for the Associated Negro Press at the League of Nations. During the Spanish Civil War she wrote for various British publications, including the Manchester Guardian, the most prestigious of the pro-Republican English papers, and practiced a form of activist jounalism more common roday than in the 1930s… also took an active part in relief work,”
About