Historian Lillian Faderman’s text is taken from her book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, which was published by Columbia University in 1991. For the present edition of the Journal for the Critique of Science, author’s introduction and the first chapter are translated. Author is interested in, as she says, the development of love between women in America in the 20th century, beginning with the institution of the romantic friendship, which reached its peak at the turn from the 19th to 20th century, when an increasing number of middle-class women became, for the first time in history, capable to maintain themselves independently. The book is generally aimed at tracing the development of lesbian subcultures, while also trying to offer the views of those lesbians from both the past and the present who remained out of them, those whose lives have been held or are still held primarily or exclusively within the heterosexual communities and can be understood as lesbian just because of their secret sexual identification.
