Joanne Passett: Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Foster Howard: Philadelphia: Da Capo Press: 2008.

Jeanette Foster Howard (1895-1981) was one of the foremothers of twentieth century lesbian-feminism, effectively bridging the era of women’s suffrage with second-wave feminism and the emergence of lesbian and gay rights politics.

In this book, biographer Passett tells us about the life of this remarkable woman, whose landmark Sex Variant Women in Literature was passed not long after the McCarthy era “lavender scare” of the early fifties, in 1956.

Howard was born in Ell Park, Chicago, in 1895, and came from a lineage of highly educated New England female academics, intellectuals and fledgeling professionals. Unsurprisingly, her parents encouraged Jeanette’s own professional aspirations, especially when it came to the written word. From an early age, she developed crushes on female teachers and classmates, unfortunately becoming estranged from her relatively conservative mother as a result.

In 1912, she won a scholarship to the University of Chicago. By 1915, she had decided that she was probably lesbian, and transferred to all-female Rockford College, where she thrived in the all-female academic environment. Reading the work of Havelock Ellis made her aware of the possibility of lesbian community, as well as positive lesbian academic role models.

Due to homophobic, anti-feminist and other social conservative hysteria in the twenties, Howard felt isolated and became a high school teacher, in order to earn money to enable her to earn a Masters degree that enabled her to attain economic independence, travel to Europe (1928) and revel in Paris and its lesbian Left Bank artistic and literary community. Back in the United States, she made the prudent choice to pursue a librarianship career in the thirties as the Great Depression bit home. Once more, she won a doctoral scholarship to the University of Chicago in 1933, and earned her doctorate in 1935.

In 1941, Howard corresponded with Alfred Kinsey for the first time. She attempted to persuade members of her lesbian professional networks of the significance of his studies into female and male sexual behaviour, but was unsuccessful, concerned about outing themselves and losing their hard-won professional employment. However, Kinsey and Howard themselves kept in touch, and eventually, she became librarian at his Institute for Sexual Research at Indiana University in 1948. Needless to say, it provided ample opportunities for her own research into lesbian literary endeavour, although there was some professional conflict. As a professional librarian, Howard wanted a recognisable formal cataloguing system, and Kinsey had a haphazard approach to subject classification. Eventually, this led to her departure for another academic post in 1952, although she always defended his work until his death in 1956.

In 1957, Howard was finally able to publish Sex Variant Women in Literature, although disappointingly, several academic presses refused it and she was forced to resort to a ‘vanity publisher.’ As the Daughters of Bilitis had just been formed by Phyllis Lyon and the late Del Martin, Howard found a receptive and grateful audience in the early lesbian social and political network of the fifties and sixties. She made the accquaintance of lifelong friend and lesbian icon Barbara Grier at about the same time.

By 1960, Howard had retired from her final academic position, at Kansas City University. She moved in with her ex-lover, Hazel Tolliver and Hazel’s current lover, Dorothy Ross. As noted above, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin soon made her accquaintance, as well as pulp authors Valerie Taylor and Marijane Meaker, May Sarton and Mary Renault, all steadfast admirers.

In 1969, Stonewall gave birth to lesbian and gay liberation and lesbian feminism, and there were ample tributes to the extraordinary life, courage and example that Howard had set for the emergent generation of lesbian and gay professionals and academics. She was now in a nursing home due to spinal degeneration, but was proud to see that her diligence and scholarship had led to the rise of an influential and assertive social movement. Even more gratifying, she was deluged with reprint offers.

In 1975, lesbian-owned Diana Press republished it, although that imprint suffered from unwise investments and poor strategic management, and fell apart shortly afterwards. Sadly, she had begun to develop short term memory loss, which curdled into Alzheimers, but the lesbian community contributed considerable amounts to the ongoing care of this legendary figure in her final years, until she died on July 25, 1981.

Fortunately, too, Barbara Grier’s Naiad Press imprint republished Sex Variant Women in Literature in 1985, and so Jeanette Foster Howard’s scholarship and pioneering professionalism continue to inspire new generations of lesbian and gay scholars, to this day.