Lesbian Mothers Anthrop ology of Contemporary Issues A SERIES EDITED BY ROGER SANJEK A list of titles in the series appears at the end of the book. Lesbian Mothers Accounts of Gender in American Culture Ellen Lewin Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewin, Ellen. Lesbian mothers : accounts of gender in American culture / Ellen Lewin. p. cm. — (Anthropology of contemporary issues) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2857-9 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-8099-7 (paper) 1. Lesbian mothers—United States. 2. Single mothers—United States. I. Title. II. Series. HQ75.53.L49 1993 306.874'3'086643—dc20 92-54977 CIP The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Illustration by Sophia Young Ok Dean 3050-2571d-1Pass-r03.indd 1 6/29/2017 11:40:30 AM For Beaumont and Rosie, who stayed with me as long as they could, and fo r Liz, who brought me to a new beginning . Contents Acknowledgments IX Prologue XIII I Looking fo r Lesbian Motherhood 2 Becoming a Lesbian Mother 19 3 "This Wonderful Decision" 47 4 Ties That Endure 75 5 "This Permanent Roommate" 95 6 Friends and Lovers 117 7 Life with Father 143 8 Lady Madonna in Court 163 9 Natural Achievements: Lesbian Mothers in American Culture 181 Appendix 193 Notes 199 Works Cited 209 Index 225 Acknowledgments This project has involved many people along the way-too many to acknowl­ edge by name here. The exploratory discussions I had on this topic with Harriet Whitehead were fo llowed by more fo rmal conversations with Susan Griffin, Shirley Johnson, Marcia Kallen, and Ina Jane Wundrum. Their advice was essential to the first fo rmulations of a research design, as were the comments and suggestions of therapists, attorneys, researchers, and community service providers whom I talked with early on. Among those who contributed in this way are Alice Abarbanel, Roberta Achtenberg, Susan Bender, Ricki Boden, Barbara Bryant, Christa Donaldson, Renee Epstein, Marilyn Fabe, Ann Garrett, Sherry Glucoft, Margo Hagaman, Carol Hastie, Donna Hitchens, Sheila Israel, Carol Jausch, Katy King, Camille LeGrand, Jill Lippett, Phyllis Lyon, Janice Macombers, Del Martin, Sandra Meyers, Mary Morgan, Byron Nestor, Pat Norman, Saralie Pen­ nington, Cheri Pies, Barbara Price, Sue Saperstein, Donna Scott, John Sikorski, the late Fay Stender, Sarita Waite, Norma Wikler, and Yvette Williams. A meeting early in the project with Mary Jo Risher and Ann Foreman clarified my understanding of the long-term im­ pact of custody litigation on lesbian mothers' lives. Most vital to the completion of this very lengthy project were the 135 mothers who opened up their lives to me, taking hours to share their experiences and their fe elings with little indication ofhow these confidences would be employed. I cannot acknowledge them by name, but I hope they will find something in this volume that will compensate them fo r the time they devoted to telling me about them­ selves. [ix) [ x] Acknowledgments The work ofTerrie A. Lyons as research associate was fu ndamental to the successful design of the study and collection of data. I have benefited enormously fr om conversations with her about the inter­ pretation of the findings and was constantly challenged by the clinical perspective she brought to her understanding of the mothers' lives and decisions. Colleagues and staff at the University of California, San Francisco, and at other Bay Area institutions made tremendous contributions to this project. Victoria Peguillan and Sheryl Ruzek contributed to the preparation of the original proposal, along with staff members at Scientific Analysis Corporation in San Francisco. Betty Kalis was invaluable to the project as a consultant during the preparation of the interview schedule. Beverly Cubbage, Barbara Jordan, and Andrea Temkin had the major responsibility fo r the transcription of the inter­ views, aided by other staff fr om the Medical Anthropology Program and the University clerical pool. As the project continued, Linnea Klee and Judith Barker served very ably as research assistants. Alan Bostrom trained project staff in the use of SPSS. Margaret Clark, Carol McClain, Ann W. Merrill, Virginia Olesen, and Harry F. Todd, Jr. , provided advice and encour­ agement. When I began this project, oth�r research efforts in related areas were beginning as well. There was a tremendous amount of sharing among those of us who were undertaking this work, and our interac­ tions were remarkably fr ee of competitive fe elings. Those whose collegiality I especially appreciated were Beverly Hoeffe r, Mary Hot­ vedt, Martha Kirkpatrick, Jane Mandel, and Daniel Ostrow. The preparation of this book in its final fo rm owes an immeasur­ able debt to those colleagues and friends who spent many hours reading, evaluating, and criticizing the various drafts of the manu­ script. I thank especially Mary Anglin, Melinda Cuthbert, Julie Hemker, Lois Helmbold, Kathleen Jones, Esther Newton, and Wen­ dy Sarvasy fo r the important contributions they made to this work. I also thank Earl Klee fo r his useful suggestions in regard to Chapter 9. An earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared in Uncertain Te rms: Nego­ tiating Gender in American Culture, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Acknowledgments [xi] Tsing; their insightful comments while I was preparing that paper were enormously helpful to me as I returned to the larger project of this book. I thank them and Beacon Press fo r permission to use the material here. I also presented portions of the book at a Wenner-Gren symposium on th e politics of reproduction in November 1991. The critiques of all the symposium participants, but especially those of Rosalind Pollack Petchesky and Shellee Colen, and of the organizers, Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, were central to the thinking I have done since then in trying to understand what I have accomplished in this project and what I need to do next. Carole Browner read the penultimate version of the manuscript with great care. She has known me so long that she knows what I mean to say when even I'm not sure, so she was often able to help me unravel my most wayward sentences. Most particularly, I acknowledge the meticulous com­ ments Kath Weston offered on the entire manuscript in its final stages; her eye fo r detail and her clear understanding of what I was really trying to achieve prevented me fr om losing track of my own objec­ tives. As series editor, Roger Sanjek has been consistently supportive, offering incisive comments even as he must have wondered whether I was ever going to finish. Peter Agree, of Cornell University Press, has been cheerful and encouraging throughout the preparation of the book and I am grateful fo r his patience. This project could never have been completed without the support of the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant MH-30980) and the Rockefeller Foundation Gender Roles Program. Also essential to its completion have been the support and encouragement of valued friends: Dennis DeBiase, Mary L. Hackney, Ann W. Merrill, Esther Newton, the late Barbara Rosenblum, and Helene Wenzel. I thank them fo r their confidence in me and their willingness to challenge me during my many bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. Most particularly, I owe a boundless debt to Liz Goodman, whose resilience has never wavered and whose ability to shore up my sagging spirits has been without limits. ELLEN LEWIN San Francisco, California Prologue Whenever people learn that most of my work concerns mothers and mother­ hood, they have one predictable question: Am I a mother? Learning that I'm not leads to fu rther questions. If my interest in mothers does not come fr om personal experience, then surely I must be drawn to study mothers either because I'm trying to decide whether to become one or (increasingly the assumption as I have advanced in age) because my research fo cus represents a way to compensate fo r losing my chance to be a mother. When I reveal my devotion to teaching and the pleasure I take in working with young people, these same inquisitors are convinced that they have located yet more evidence that I need to resolve my nonmaternal state. My students (and very likely my many cats, as well) are obvious child surrogates. But a desire to be a mother is not what drives my work. I have never wished to be a mother and have little firsthandexperience with small children. My fe elings about motherhood when I began to study it were not unlike th ose of any other anthropologist encountering a strange and temporarily opaque local custom. An incident that occurred while I was conducting fieldwork with Latina im migrants in San Francisco illustrates the abyss that I perceived between myself and women who were mothers. I was visiting with one of my informants, a young mother of three, recently arrived fr om Mexico. Several ofher relatives were gathered in her home, all women in their twenties (as I was at the time) and all mothers.