Many years in the making, this book is Vicinus’s answer to some of these chronological and terminological quagmires. We have equally concerned ourselves with what happened in the bedrooms, dorms, and apartments of female “friends,” while often debating whether or not, to quote an important Sheila Jeffreys article, did it actually matter if “they did it?”2 For Vicinus, the answer very clearly is yes, sex matters, and Intimate Friends restores the erotic and sexual component of romantic friendships. Considerable debate has, not surprisingly, ensued about the issue of when lesbian identities were forming/formed, where they tended to form, and of what those various formulations consisted.
In particular, scholars have debated the key chronological moments of the Anglo-American lesbian past. In the ensuing twenty-five years, many historians have contributed to this literature, attempting to advance beyond Faderman’s chronological, methodological, and theoretical notions of what constitutes lesbian history. Much as scholars applauded her bold recasting of those relationships, since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men scholars have worked to clarify or challenge a couple of key assertions of her work, namely whether or not there was a sexual component to such romantic friendships and whether or not Faderman’s chronology of the development of “lesbian identity” (which she yoked to the work of sexologists) was legitimate.
This work is valuable for all scholars in women’s and gender history, as well as those in lesbian history, histories of sexuality, and women’s literature and letters, as Vicinus insightfully reconceptualizes ground covered twenty-five years ago by Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men.1 Faderman’s work was groundbreaking, for she was the first to draw corollaries between eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women’s romantic friendships and contemporary lesbian relationships. Martha Vicinus’s recent tour de force, Intimate Friends, provides an exquisitely detailed account of one hundred and fifty years of Anglo-American women’s erotic friendships.
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