'This is how we disappear from history ...'

Now You See Me 

Jane Traies

Enjoy this extract from Now You See Me, a collection of life stories from older lesbians across the UK, recorded by Jane Traies over nearly a decade. The stories are told in the women's own words and vividly recreate a time when being a lesbian meant either hiding your true identity or paying the price for breaking society's rules. But there is plenty of joy here too: whether snogging to Dusty Springfield songs, or cruising women by bicycle. The personal is still political in this moving and inspiring book.

One day, early in the Second World War, a lorry full of prisoners-of-war trundled down the main street of a small market town in Middle England on its way to deliver the men to their work on local farms. The County Secretary of the Women’s Land Army watched it from her office window, and took particular note of the driver. Perched up in the cab of the lorry in shirt and cravat, her beret at a jaunty angle, the only woman driver employed by the War Agricultural Committee was certainly an unusual sight. Aged twenty-two, with a preference for wearing breeches and a passion for motor-cars, Joan had left her respectable middle-class family far away and earned her living in a string of non-traditional jobs. She had tried to join the armed forces when war broke out; judged medically unfit, she was now determined to help the war effort in other ways, and driving was what she did best. The Secretary of the WLA who watched her so intently that morning was a respected local figure: a forceful unmarried lady of good breeding, she was well known for her powers of persuasion. And she had plans for that young driver. 

Which was how Joan, though entirely unqualified for the job in question, was persuaded not only to leave the ‘War Ag’ and join the Land Army, but to become the Warden of the local ‘milkers’ hostel’. For only six pounds a week, she was to be responsible for recruiting, training, supervising and deploying dozens of young women from all over the country who would be sent to local dairy farms to fill the places left by men called away to fight. It was a challenge, but Joan rose to it with characteristic enthusiasm, teaching the girls to pass their proficiency exams as well as to milk cows and ride motorbikes. One day, she heard reports of a particularly good milker, equally skilled with hand and machine, working on a nearby farm that was soon to be sold. Joan drove out to see if she could persuade the girl to come into the hostel when her employment ended. Slipping quietly into the milking parlour, she watched from the shadows as a shy, dark-haired teenager expertly milked out her cow. The pail was brim-full, the milk frothy: the girl was clearly exceptional. Joan recruited her on the spot.

I can tell you that much of the story, because later in her life Joan wrote and spoke very entertainingly about her Land Army days, including that moment in the milking parlour when she first met Peggy. But the story of their lives after that, of the sixty-plus years they were to live and work together, was never told; which is why I have not used their real names in this account, and why the rest of their story is not included in this collection. Like so many women of their generation, ‘Joan’ and ‘Peggy’ never publicly acknowledged the nature of their relationship. Both are dead now; their long love story was not acknowledged at either of their funerals, and is known only to a handful of their friends. This is how we disappear from history.

I was born in 1945, so I’m a generation younger than Joan, but I’m still old enough to remember the time when it was quite usual for lesbian and gay people to live their whole lives in the closet. I have seen how secrecy can become a habit that is impossible to break, even when social attitudes change: many lesbians of my own generation, too, have a history of not telling all, and therefore of being invisible to the outside world. Even among those who appear in this book, not all have felt able to use their real names. For some, being part of this collection has been an act of real courage, an act of coming out. Others, as you will discover from their stories, have been out for years. Our stories are all different. 

Queer history and why women's life stories matter

Thinking about queer history,

and why women’s life stories matter

by Jane Traies

In 2017 we celebrated 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 passed into law and homosexual acts between men were – at least in part – decriminalised. Last year, 2019, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York, which are widely regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement.

And, when I say ‘we’ are celebrating these events, I don’t just mean the LGBTQ community. A strange and wonderful thing has happened in much of Europe and the US in the 21st century: our queer history has suddenly gone mainstream Everyone wants a bit of it. Everyone wants to be part of the cool, liberal, equalities-supporting society we have recently become. And that’s great.

But, as the story of half a century of progress and liberation begins to harden into a generally-accepted historical narrative, it is important not to let LGBTQ history become homogenised, as if the story was the same for all of us. It wasn’t; and this is why individual life stories remain an important tool in the proper understanding of our shared past. 

Lesbian relationships were never illegal, and so do not figure much in the story of 1967. Neither does the story of that iconic night outside the Stonewall Bar give lesbians much air-time. In fact, they don’t get much of a mention in many gay histories. They were always there, of course, and subject to the same social stigma as gay men; but their lives – like those of so many other women at the time – were ‘hidden from history’ then, and have to some extent continued to be so. My oral history research with lesbians born before 1950 has revealed some of the ways in which, in the second half of the 20th century, the lives of lesbian and bisexual women differed from those of gay men. We were never illegal – but we were second-class citizens nonetheless, in many ways.

The stories I collect offer a forceful reminder that the experience of stigma and discrimination is always gendered. For the women who tell me those stories, homophobia was always inflected by the institutionalised sexism of the time. In 1960s Britain a lesbian faced not only the opprobrium of society towards homosexuality in general, but also all the barriers to women’s equality shared by her heterosexual sisters. A woman without a man was still at a serious social and economic disadvantage, and that disadvantage was doubled for lesbian couples, where both partners shared the female fate of low incomes and limited job prospects. Equal pay and equal opportunities were still a decade away, and there was no redress against unfair dismissal on the grounds of either gender or sexual orientation. In 1967, women could not obtain mortgages, or take out hire purchase agreements unless a male relative signed the contract. Married women’s incomes were still taxed as if they were their husbands’ property. A lesbian was considered an ‘unfit’ mother who could – and often did – lose custody of her children if her sexual orientation was discovered. 

In the second half of the twentieth century, then, lesbians still faced the ‘double whammy’ of homophobia and institutionalised sexism. Their experiences remind us that a truly intersectional and nuanced view of history is one that takes into account not only LGBTQ people’s collective difference from the mainstream, but also the diversity of experience within the LGBTQ ‘community’. Personal histories are a key tool in this project: they remind us of the individual humanity of every teller and of the intersecting influences that make each of us, straight or gay, unique. 

So that’s why I do what I do.

Jane Traies

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lives-Older-Lesbians-Sexuality-Identity/dp/1349717649

Now You See Me: Lesbian Life Stories: Amazon.co.uk: Jane Traies, Jane Traies: Books http://ow.ly/U1V830qKE3F