The Lesbian Revolution by Sheila Jeffreys

Author:Sheila Jeffreys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Describing herself as a ‘friend and lover of men and mother of sons’, she said lesbian separatists – a phrase she used in place of ‘lesbian feminists’ – would have to change: ‘[S]‌ome lesbian separatists are going to have to do some thinking about their proselytising, aggressive attitudes to other women’ (ibid.).

Pettit’s strong negative reaction might signify her recognition that what one of my interviewees, Lynn Alderson, saw as a shift of power had taken place in the WLM, in which lesbians had become much more assertive. Lesbianism had become ‘something that was the groovy thing to be as well… [I]‌t wasn’t just right, it was the thing you wanted, and aspired to be, and it became a challenge to every heterosexual’ (Lynn Alderson, interview 2013). This shift of power represented the fact that lesbian feminists had created a culture and politics that enabled a new way of being a lesbian and made it possible for women to confidently choose women partners. This new political culture enabled lesbians to throw down a challenge to heterosexual women in relation to their own sexual choices:

But you know it was the first time that the…balance of power shifted…I think, and it was partly a growing confidence on our part. You know we had spent these years in a way making a lesbian life possible… Nobody had been a lesbian like we were lesbians. Nobody. So, it was a new form of lesbianism that came about as a result of the women’s movement.

(ibid.)

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