The poem fed the medieval suspicion that women’s bonds were socially disruptive and dangerous to men.
By Dr. Carissa M. Harris
Associate Professor of English
Temple University
Introduction
William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1507) features three female friends who gather on a summer evening to drink sweet wine, share candid narratives about their sex lives, and console one another with affectionate support and practical strategies for obtaining erotic satisfaction. Dunbar writes that the women “wauchtit at the wicht wyne and waris out wourdis” [emptied out the white wine and poured out words] (39), alliteratively linking their immoderate alcohol consumption to their verbal outpourings.1 He characterizes their bond as marked by laughter, drinking, and obscene conversation:
Than all thai leuch apon loft with latis full mery
And raucht the cop round about, full off riche wynis,
And ralyeit lang, or thai wald rest, with ryatus speche (147–49)[Then they all laughed loudly with full merry demeanors
And passed the cup around, full of rich wines,
And jested long, before they would rest, with licentious speech.]
The women foment their merriment by drinking wine from the same cup and sharing “ryatus speche,” licentious confessions that bind them together.2 After these lines, the Maitland Folio’s scribe writes, “Hic bibent” [here they drink], underscoring the communal drinking that accompanies the women’s raucous conversation and inviting readers to imbibe along with them in a stage direction of sorts.3 The Maitland Folio was read by both men and women—including Helen Maitland, who wrote her name on one of its pages—thus leaving open the possibility that groups of women could have read this poem while drinking wine along with Dunbar’s fictional ladies.4 The poem’s three friends discuss their carnal experiences in a didactic framework modeled on scholarly disputation, illustrating how the feminized space of the late medieval alehouse facilitated edifying, affirming, and subversive same-sex communities.
Dunbar’s Tretis , like numerous similar texts known as “alewife poems” or “gossips’ songs” from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, depicts a model of female friendship in which women drink excessively, laugh merrily, encourage one another, share sexual knowledge, and speak candidly about their intimate experiences, humiliating their absent spouses with their blunt and bawdy sexual assessments.5 On one hand, this scenario reinforces misogynist stereotypes of women as drunken, duplicitous, idle, unruly, loose-tongued, and lascivious. It portrays them working together to undermine men, confirming a common medieval suspicion that women’s bonds are socially disruptive and dangerous to men.6 As one popular proverb claims, “Quhair there is wyves, there are there words, quhair there is geiss, there are there tuirds” [Where there are women, there are words; where there are geese, there are turds]; here, women’s fellowship is characterized by shared words that are as foul, plentiful, and worthless as goose excrement.7 Another prov-erb declares that “glib’d tongued [garrulous] women seldom chast ar found,” insisting that women’s verbal and vaginal activities are connected and tying their excessive speech to their sexual transgressiveness.8 But I argue that Dunbar’s Tretis , and other poems like it, also probes the pedagogical and consolatory aspects of a historically specific model of female friendship known as cummarship, a term coined by Karma Lochrie that signifies “female intimacy that is both pedagogical and raucous.”9 Building on Mary Wack’s claim that “[women’s] drinking songs offer a model of community that challenges and inverts masculine marital and civic authority,” I argue that these texts portray the alehouse as a merry all-female schoolhouse in which women affirm, listen to, and instruct one another using obscene speech.10 At once convivial and educational, cummarship is produced within the framework of literary and cultural misogyny, including popular stereotypes of feminine deceitfulness, unruliness, and loquacity as well as male fears of what women talk about when no men are present. However, it nonetheless challenges that misogyny by portraying the alehouse as a supportive space for same-sex intimacy and edification and depicting marriage as both unsatisfying and unnecessary. After analyzing the genre’s development over time from Gilote e Johane, its early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman ancestor, to its sixteenth-century incarnations in print and manuscript, I discuss the model of cummarship central to alewife texts, outline its historical contexts, and point to its queer possibilities. I link these texts’ representations of gendered bonds in feminized spaces where men are largely irrelevant to more recent examples of same-sex community in twentieth-century lesbian bar cultures, highlighting how medieval alehouses and lesbian bars are both spaces where women occupy leadership roles, exercise economic agency, and forge tight-knit communities.
Intimacy, Pedagogy, Community: The Alewife Poem, c.1300-1700
Alewife poems feature two or more female friends—typically wives or widows—who gather to share critiques of marriage, explicit sexual disclosures, transgressive instruction, and copious amounts of alcohol. These poems are multivocal, with two or more women sharing their perspectives and respond-ing to their peers. Sometimes the friends enjoy food such as “soppe[s]” [bread soaked in wine], “bounes or maunchettes newe bake” [buns or freshly baked loaves of fine white bread], or “Gose or pigge or capons wynge, / Pastes of pig-ynnes [pigeon pies],” associating them with the deadly sin of gluttony in food as well as drink.11 The women are often given popular names such as Sarah, Margaret, Margery, Eleanor, Cecily, Anne, Alice, and Joan. These naming conventions both render the characters as familiar figures whom one might encounter at any local alehouse and generate a sense of continuity across the different poems.
Purporting to share what happens among women when no men are present, alewife poems portray female friendship as a powerful social force. In her analysis of gossip in late medieval texts, Susan E. Phillips argues that “these intimate confessional exchanges . . . transform relationships, for the characters who engage in them forge kinship through conversation,” as “women swear alliance to one another at the expense of loyalty to their husbands.”12 These texts underscore the transgressiveness of women’s alehouse conversations and vividly express the wives’ anger at the institution of marriage, showing how homosocial fellowships foment women’s collective rage over misogyny and lack of agency. They represent women as empathetic to one another’s struggles, helping each other arrive at solutions by generating collective knowledge through bawdy personal disclosure. And as Phillips notes, many women in these texts “use their idle talk to teach” their friends.13
The alewife poem emerged in the second half of the fifteenth century with the staggeringly obscene Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware (1453–1500) and the popular Good Gossip carols (a. 1500), which survive in two different but related versions across four manuscripts.14 These poems were followed in the first half of the sixteenth century by Dunbar’s Tretis and The Twa Cummaris (c. 1507), John Skelton’s The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge (c. 1521), “The Fyfth Sorowe” in Robert Copland’s The Seven Sorowes That Women Have When Theyr Husbandes Be Deade (c. 1526), the “gossip’s song” in the Chester Deluge play (added 1505–32), and the anonymous Cryste crosse me spede (1534?).15 As Francis Lee Utley observes, the turn of the sixteenth century coincided with a rise in popular misogyny, and texts denigrating women become increasingly plentiful and virulent.16 Tricia A. McElroy analyzes how Scots Protestant propagandist Robert Sempill drew on the genre to write The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis (c. 1570), a political poem in which female friends gather in an Edinburgh tavern to drink together and disparage Mary Queen of Scots’s supporters.17 The genre’s popularity continued through the seven-teenth century with printed broadside ballads such as Samuel Rowlands’s Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (1602) and A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, All Met to be Merry (1609), and the anonymous Fowre Wittie Gossips Disposed to be Merry (c. 1632), The Gossips Feast (1635–36?), The Seven Merry Wives of London (1664–1703?), The Merry Gossips Vindication (1672–96?), and The Gossips Meeting (1674).18
One ancestor of the alewife poem is the Anglo-Norman comic debate poem Gilote e Johane, performed at Winchester in 1301 and copied in Lon-don, British Library, MS Harley 2553 (1331–41).19 While its titular speakers do not consume alcohol, the poem features other key elements of cummarship such as female friendship, bawdy confession, and peer education. In an over-heard dialogue between two friends “talking about their lives” [de lur vies entreparleyent] (8), the pleasure-loving Gilote uses graphic sexual details to edify her friend Johane and convince her to forsake her life of chastity in favor of erotic enjoyment. Gilote critiques marriage as entailing confinement to the home, domestic violence, excessive childbearing, and lack of recourse to divorce (53–62). She frames her arguments as explicitly pedagogical when she commands Johane twice to “educate [her]self ” [Afeytez vous, file! Afeitez vous, fole!] and “come to school” [venez a l’escole] (147–48). Johane follows her friend’s teachings to the letter and affirms them as gospel. The two women then roam through Winchester together, with Gilote as “headmaster” [chef mestre], “preaching” [precher] their gospel to their peers (204–5). When a young wife seeks their instruction because her husband has “a prick / That’s too pliant and too little” [il ad un vit / Trop est il plyant e trop petit] (230–31), Gilote teaches her how to take a lover and avoid punishment for adultery because her husband “can’t fuck or fulfill her desire” [Yl ne puet foutre ne fere talent] (244; also 262). The wife follows “all the things that Gilote had taught her” [totes choses qe Gilote la aprist] (320). Here the Anglo-French term coun-sail [counsel, advice] repeatedly designates Gilote and Johane’s carnal peer education (213, 218, 240).20 The poem ends with Gilote, Johane, and their con-verts traversing England and Ireland to preach their gospel of feminine plea-sure to all the women of the British Isles. In this poem, Gilote and Johane denounce marriage and draw on their corporeal experiences to teach their peers more enjoyable and livable alternatives. The poem frames itself as both entertaining and educational, at once “a jest to please the people” [une bourde de reheyter la gent] (342) and valuable “teaching” [aprise] (347).
After the Black Death decimated England’s population during the period 1348–50, alcohol consumption rose and alehouses proliferated because of increased workers’ wages, urbanization, and ale’s reclassification as a dietary staple.21 As Judith M. Bennett has shown, women brewed and served ale, ran alehouses, and employed other women, performing the domestic labors of brewing and hospitality on a larger scale outside the home.22 Because of increased employment opportunities in urban centers, adolescent women left their families in the countryside to work in the rapidly growing towns and cities, where they found jobs as servants and tapsters (barmaids) in alehouses or as tipplers (mobile ale-sellers) in the streets and marketplaces. Elizabeth Ewan demonstrates how brewing was similarly feminized in medieval Scotland, with urban women utilizing female friendship networks to sell their ale.23 As a result of the rise in alehouse culture as well as its feminization, alewife poems began to emerge in the fifteenth century. Like Gilote e Johane, these texts center on female friendship and obscene conversation but feature a boozy twist with the addition of alcohol. They frame the alehouse as a physical space that is particularly conducive to fostering women’s fellowship and affective expression, functioning similarly to Gaynor’s private chamber in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur discussed by Usha Vishnuvajjala and Lady Arbo’s bower of maidens in Lydia Yaitsky Kertz’s essay on Emaré.
A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware (1453–1500), copied in a Cheshire household miscellany in the latter half of the fifteenth century, is one of the earliest surviving alewife poems. In it, ten married women gather at their local alehouse to disparage their husbands’ genitalia. The eavesdrop-ping narrator promises to “tell yow a tale, / Howe ten wyffys satt at the nale [alehouse], / And no man hem amonge” (4–6), setting up the genre’s foundational elements of entertainment, female fellowship, drinking, and men’s ostensible exclusion. Over wine, the women amuse themselves by holding a storytelling competition to determine whose husband’s penis is “most worthy . . . Today to bere the bell [take the prize]” (11–12). However, the game quickly devolves into a contest over which penis is the worst. The first wife commands her friends, “Talys lett us tell / Of owre hosbondes ware” (9–10), emphasizing the valences of “tale” as personal narrative, entertainment, and instruction.24 This emphasis on “talys” shared among women also points to the genre’s queer undertones: “tayl” was a popular term for the vulva, and their homophonous verbal and genital “talys” were often conflated with one another, as in Lady Mede’s characterization as “tikel of hire tail, talewis of tonge” [lascivious of her vulva, talkative of tongue] in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1380).25 The women can thus be read as obtaining erotic pleasure from sharing “talys” with one another in the all-female alehouse space.
A Talk of Ten Wives underscores cummarship’s physical and relational intimacy and stages its trademark obscene pedagogy. The narrator emphasizes the women’s bond by describing them as “the floke” (43), a term denoting a group of people or a family, and “felowys” (56), which typically names close same-sex companions.26 He points to the physical intimacy among the women (“The secund wyffe sett her nere,” 19; “The ninth wyffe sett hem nyghe,” 102) and highlights their affective responses to one another’s bawdy disclosures. One wife is “full woo” [emphatically upset] (31) upon hearing about her friend’s lack of pleasure. Another is “full fayn / When sche hard her felowys playn” (55–56), with “fayn” indicating that she is filled with either eagerness to share her experience or pleasure at knowing that she is not alone in her struggles.27 The rhyming link between “fayn” and “playn” emphasizes the consolatory pos-sibilities in shared complaint. The women repeatedly articulate the obscenities “pentyll” (35, 105) and “tarse” (58, 62, 94)—the most explicit terms for penises in Middle English—in their confessions, at once embodying misogynist stereotypes of women’s transgressive speech and using the shock of obscenity to underscore the magnitude of their displeasure with marital monogamy. They direct animosity at their husbands with repeated curses, their anger contrasting sharply with the affection they show one another and illuminating how they view the all-female alehouse fellowship as a salutary substitute for the loneliness of marriage. The women use the first-person domestic plural to name their husbands and their penises, and their references to “owre syre” cast their individual experiences as a collective articulation of displeasure that can be read as critiquing the institution of marriage as a whole (34, 44, 61, 84, 94). As I argue elsewhere, we can read obscene conversations in alewife poems as a form of feminist consciousness-raising, with each woman sharing her private experience in order to generate knowledge about deeply entrenched inequalities that affect them all.28 The women also perform sexual education by sharing strategies for manipulating their husbands’ members: one discloses, “I bow hym, I bend hym, / I stroke hym, I wend him . . . I torn hym twofold” (108–9, 112). Another relates, “I lyrke [squeeze] hym up with my hond” (72), telling her friends how she attempts to obtain pleasure. The women portray corporeal experience as a form of education: for example, the eighth wife is described as “well i-taghte” (90), which meant both “educated, learned, wise” and “experienced.”29 The wives generate mutual comfort through drinking together, with periodic calls to “fyll the wyne” (80) and references to alehouse furnishings (“the bynch,” 78).
William Dunbar’s The Twa Cummaris, surviving in four manuscripts, portrays women’s friendship as both mutually affirming and dangerously subversive. It features two women drinking wine in front of a fire on the first day of Lent: “Drinkande the wyne sat cummaris tua. / The tane couthe to the tothir complene” [Two female friends sat drinking the wine. / The one began to complain to the other], we are told (2–3).30 By naming them “the tane” and “the tothir,” Dunbar portrays the women as inseparably paired. Their wine-fueled conversation is at once confessional, consolatory, and didactic. Emphasizing the closeness of their bond, they address each other as “cummar” [intimate female friend] a total of four times (9, 11, 16, 21). They share marital advice and encourage each other to break Lenten fasting rules, demonstrating how women’s friendships were imagined to subvert both patriarchal and religious authority. One of the woman declares, “Cummar, be glaid baitht ewin and morrow . . . And lat your husband dre the sorrow” [Cummar, be joyful both evening and morning, And let your husband suffer the sorrow] (16, 19), offering encouragement and ordering her friend to enjoy herself while her spouse suffers for her transgressions. In response, her friend affirms her instruction and shares intimate details about her sex life:
“Your counsaile, commar, is gud,” quod scho.“
Ale is to tene him that I do;
In bed he is nocht wortht ane bane.
File anis the glas and drink me to.” (21–24)[“Your counsel, cummar, is good,” she said.
“Everything I do is to make him suffer.In bed he is not worth a bean.
Fill the glass once and drink to me.”]
She confesses that her chief aim is to “tene” her husband, choosing a verb that means “to annoy, to afflict, to cause harm” and embodying antifeminist stereotypes of wifely shrewishness.31 Like the women in A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware, she disparages her spouse as worthless in bed and wishes him suffering as punishment for his failure to satisfy her. She links bawdy homosocial sex-talk with shared alcohol consumption by calling for a refill and encouraging her friend to drink with her. The poem closes with the two women drinking wine from a shared cup while plotting how to circumvent Lenten dietary restrictions. They consume “tua quartis” of “wyne out of ane chopin stoip” [a half-pint measure] (26–27), a feat requiring that the drinking vessel be filled at least eight times.
The incomplete Cryste crosse me spede does not even mention men, instead focusing solely on the merry solace created by women’s drinking fellowship.32 The poem names itself twice as Cryste crosse me spede A. B. C., the addition of the pedagogical tag “A. B. C.” echoing instructional texts aimed at young men such as the extremely popular A. B. C. of Aristotle.33 In this text printed by Wynkyn de Worde, which is missing its middle pages, a group of women wielding domestic implements such as distaffs, reels, and bread peels descends upon their local alehouse like an army: “A grete company of gossyps garded on a route / Went to besyge an alehous rounde about,” we are told. Martial terms such as “company,” “garded,” “route,” and “besyge” suggest cummarship’s militant possibilities and its capacity to engender social disruption through cummars banding together. Dame Molde the Greate commands, “Nowe give us drynke aboute,” with the adverb “aboute” [to all, in a circular course] emphasizing the group’s collectivity.34 Her friend Joan responds, “Thou shalte not drynke alone,” portraying drinking together as a meaningful act of soli-darity. The narrator casts the women’s alehouse gathering as a form of alcohol-based kinship by closing with the declaration “Here endeth the kyndred of cuppe royall,” centering the women’s “kyndred” [family, closely knit group] on their sharing of the “cuppe.”35 This emphasis on fictive kinship generated by sharing drink in the alehouse posits cummarship as a queer family of chosen kinswomen. The narrator wishes that all readers might experience the joys of cummarship: “All ye be present, God sende you suche an ende / Ones to be gossip lyke or you hense wende,” they declare in their closing benediction. This address to those who are “present” before they go “hense” points to how these texts themselves, when read or sung in alehouses, could engender cummarship among living bodies and with fictional figures through sharing drink and “game and gle” together.
“An No Man Hem Amonge”: Creating Cummarship
Cummarship, the model of female friendship central to alewife texts, comes from the Middle Scots term c ummar, which designated “a female intimate, a woman gossip.”36 It originated from the Old French comere, meaning “godmother; (as friendly appellation) friend, neighbor.”37 As Gail McMurray Gibson observes, the requirement that godmothers be present at a godchild’s birth generated intimate fellowships of women, since close female friends and relatives gathered to assist the laboring mother and share wine and food with one another.38 Cummar is a fitting term for my analysis because it encompasses the generative, knowledge-building, and empowering, as well as the misogynist and disruptive, social valences of this female friendship model. On one hand, it is a term of gendered intimacy that women use to address each other. In Dunbar’s Tretis , the women “carpit full cummerlik [chatted like sisters] with cop going round” (510), with the adverb cummerlik denoting a relational style of affectionate same-sex speech accompanied by drinking.39 A popular Mid-dle Scots dance song states, “Commer ga ye before, commer ga ye, / If ye wil not ga before, commer let me.”40 Here, participants perform “cummarship” by dancing and singing together, the rhyming pronouns “ye” and “me” emphasizing their bond.
At the same time that it served as a positive designation of female fellowship, cummar also functioned as a term of misogynist abuse. In many texts, it links women to witchcraft and depicts them as violent, quarrelsome shrews. These connections to both sisterly intimacy and antifeminist stereotype illustrate how “cummarship” in these texts both portrays female friendship as a desirable alternative to marriage and denigrates it as deviant and disruptive. For example, in Alexander Montgomerie and Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth’s The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart (c. 1582), Montgomerie narrates Polwarth’s supposed discovery as a foundling by a group of “wirdsisteris” [witches] (II.27). He names the witches repeatedly as “cummaris” (II.207, 209, 229, 278) who cast spells using “deid menis memberis” (II.178), associating the term cummar with witchcraft and castration. Dunbar and Walter Kennedy’s The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (c. 1505) features a conversation in which one woman warns her friend, “I reid yow, cummer, tak in your lynning clais” [I advise you, cummar, take your linen cloths inside (to protect them from theft)] (224). This text ties cummarship to pedagogy and domesticity with the instructional verb reid and the woman’s concern for her friend’s linens, while its disparaging designation of the women as “carlingis” [decrepit, lower-class old women] (221) aligns the term with popular misogyny directed at old women in particular.41 Finally, cummar carried valences of collective female drunkenness, illustrated by Scottish Catholic controversialist John Hamilton’s religious tract referring to “sipplers of guid sueit wyne” [imbibers of good sweet wine] who “tipple willinglie [eagerly] at their Comeres banquets.”42
As illustrated by cummar’s rich and varied web of cultural associations—including witchcraft, drunkenness, shrewishness, intimate same-sex friendship, and support of vulnerable women who have just given birth—cummarship entails both unruliness and fiercely forged community. It aligns with Alice Walker’s formulation of womanist, which signifies “a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually” and designates “outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior .”43 Cummarship’s collective femi-nine willfulness is united in staunch opposition to husbands and marriage as well as to religious and cultural rules governing feminine behavior. As Sara Ahmed notes, the communities created by cummarship illustrate “how a we can be brought forth by the willingness to go the wrong way.”44
Same-sex pedagogy, particularly regarding erotic pleasure and marital relationships, is central to cummarship, since cummar was linked to peer instruction regarding spousal disobedience through its frequent alliterative pairing with counsall [counsel, advice].45 These texts highlight cummarship’s educational capacities by drawing on popular depictions of the alehouse as a perverse pedagogical space, such as The Book of Vices and Virtues’s assertion that “the taverne is the develes scole hous.”46 Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552) depicts cummarly teaching between two friends, a shoemaker’s wife and a tailor’s wife, who repeatedly address each other as “cummar” while beating their husbands in an alehouse after they discover the men drinking with a strange woman.47 By linking cummar with counsall, they tie their sisterly bond to peer instruction. When the tailor’s wife expresses dismay at their husbands’ behavior, her friend declares, “Cummar, this is my counsall, lo: / Ding ye the tane, and I the uther” [You strike the one man, and I the other] (1325–26).48 Lyndsay imagines “cummar’s counsall” as instructing wifely willfulness; here, women teach one another how to be shrews who defy their husbands. After they beat their men with distaffs, the women address each other as “cummar” while celebrating their marital violence and planning to enjoy good wine together:
Sowtars Wyfe: Sen of our cairls we have the victorie,
Quhat is your counsell, cummer, that be done?
Taylours Wyfe: Send for gude wine and hald our selfis merie:
I hauld this ay best, cummer, by Sanct Clone! (1376–79)49[Shoemaker’s Wife: Since we have the victory over our husbands,
What is your advice, cummer, that we do?
Tailor’s Wife: Send for good wine and keep ourselves merry;
I consider this to be always best, cummer, by St. Clone!]
Once again, “cummer[s]” provide each other “counsell” that uplifts body as well as spirit, underscoring these texts’ recurring connections between friend-ship, pedagogy, and drinking. An anonymous political broadside ballad titled The Lamentatioun of Lady Scotland (1572) similarly features a scene of “cummers” sharing transgressive “counsall” to undermine their husbands.50 The allegorical female speaker warns men what their wives have been doing in secret: “ane yule evin your wyfes to counsall went” [one Yule evening your wives went to council] (301), she says, with the women’s clandestine all-female “counsall” operating as a transgressive inversion of all-male meetings of sec-ular or religious authorities. At this gathering, a lawyer’s wife addresses the women as “cummers” (303, 315) and instructs them to entertain the sins of pride and envy in defiance of their virtuous husbands.51 The women’s spouses are “Burges, Craftis, & Merchand men, / And . . . Commounis, with . . . hynd yemen” [burgesses, craftsmen, and merchant men, and common men, with farmworker yeomen] (293–94). They come from the urban mercantile class as well as common and rural working social orders, portraying this “counsall” of “cummers” as facilitating bonds across class divisions. Cummars use their “counsall” to teach each other how to overcome and defy men, according to alehouse texts portraying female friendship as dangerous and disruptive to marriages. But we can also read these moments of “counsall” as women teaching each other how to navigate the abuses enabled by marital power imbal-ances and larger structural inequalities.
In addition to their portrayal of pedagogy among cummars, these texts perform another model of same-sex peer education, this one directed by the genre’s eavesdropping male narrator to other men. He violates women’s private spaces and reports back to his peers, teaching them what women do and say among themselves. One narrator highlights this model of man-to-man instruction when he informs his male listeners, “This is the thowght [frame of mind] that gossippis take” and purports to disclose their practices of habit-ual tavern-going and husband-deception.52 Reflecting their framing by male speakers who teach other men about women’s secret drunken revels, these texts were largely authored, copied, and printed by men, and they dramatize male fears that women’s conversations are focused solely on mocking penises and strategizing how to overthrow men. But even though they are produced within a rotten misogynist framework, alewife poems nonetheless manage to portray the joys of cummarship as irresistible, as a source of “dysport” and “jest” for all who read them.53 Rather than simply confirming tired stereo-types about women’s collective depravity, these texts end up peering longingly through the alehouse window at the groups of women drinking and laughing raucously inside.
Cummarship entails a shared discourse connecting friendship, peer instruction, drinking, and mutual consolation. These texts feature intimate terms such as cummar, sister, and gossip (or good gossip) used by female friends to address one another, often coupled with rede or counsall to designate same-sex teaching. They depict women encouraging each other to “be glad” and generating “good chere” and “comfort” through fellowship, verbal solace, instruction, and drinking together, often with the vocabulary of alcohol consumption such as measures and drinking vessels (“pot,” “cup,” “quart,” “galoun,” “glas”) and types of drink (“wyne,” “muscadell” [sweet wine], “mal-wasy” [a type of wine], “good ale”). For example, Copland’s Seven Sorowes that Women Have When Theyr Husbondes Be Deade features a recently bereaved widow who summons her “gossyps . . . her owne selfe for to chere” (225). The women arrive promptly to comfort their friend: “And whan the gossyppes assembled be, / ‘What chere, goode gossip?’ than sayeth she and she. / ‘Be ye of good chere . . .’” (241–43). They attempt to lift the widow’s spirits, with the designation “she and she” emphasizing their gendered collectivity. They share “a quart of Muscadel” (236) and encourage their friend: “‘Alacke good woman, take it not so hevyly,’ / sayth her gossyppes . . . Thus this wydowe they comfort every day” (273–74, 276). Dunbar’s three women similarly link drinking with sisterly solace: “Thai drank and did away dule . . . Thai swapit of the sueit wyne” [They drank and chased away sadness . . . They quickly downed the sweet wine] (242–43), we are told. By linking cummarship’s foundational elements of sisterhood, pedagogy, and drinking and casting them as sources of merriment, these texts transform negative associations of women with drunkenness to positive portrayals of communal feminine drinking gen-erating laughter and wisdom.
Finally, these texts’ portrayals of same-sex bonds can be usefully analyzed through a queer interpretive framework, using Lochrie’s claim that “‘queer’ cites a disruption of heteronormativity.”54 While the alehouse conversations in these texts are often (but not always) aggressively heterosexual—as my stu-dents always note, these poems do not pass the Bechdel test—they nonetheless critique heteronormativity by emphasizing the primacy of same-sex bonds, portraying all-female spaces from which men are ostensibly excluded, and depicting marriage as marked by violence, dissatisfaction, and lack of agency for women. The cummars in these poems do not seek their husbands’ affection or express care for them. Instead, they teach one another how to resist men, as when they instruct each other to take circuitous routes to and from the ale-house in order to evade their suspicious spouses.55 While these unruly wives embody derogatory stereotypes of women as conniving and disobedient, they are also women who see each other as the most important sources of love, intimacy, wisdom, and support. The sole example of a woman in an alehouse text who does not despise her husband is in Copland’s Seven Sorowes, where her spouse is dead; here, the narrator suggests that he was “unto her unkynde” (217) and is beloved only because he is deceased. Sad that she now must dine alone, the widow calls her gossips and neighbors to join her, portraying her community of cummars as a superior replacement for marital companionship. In some alewife poems, women abandon their household duties to drink and make merry with each other, privileging cummarship’s homosocial bonds over marital expectations.56 Lochrie traces how medieval depictions of female fellowship with no men present are often shaped by the misogynist logic that women’s natural carnal perversion renders them prone to sexual contact with one another.57 She also notes how John Gower’s rendering of Ovid’s tale of same-sex love between Iphis and Ianthe in his Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) uses the designation “sche and sche” to characterize the women’s erotic bond; this same pronoun pairing appears in Copland’s Seven Sorowes to name the women who arrive to console their widowed friend.58 Alewife poems such as Cryste crosse me spede portray men as inconsequential by failing to mention them at all; instead, they emphasize the convivial pleasures of women drinking and making merry together.
Contemporary Connections: “The Kyndred of Cuppe Royale”
While the cummarship in these alehouse texts is culturally and historically specific, connected to social conditions arising in the aftermath of the Black Death, we can nonetheless identify more recent versions in order to explore its ongoing significance. One important transhistorical connection to premodern cummarship lies in twentieth-century lesbian bar cultures, where queer all-female communities formed beginning in the 1930s and 1940s.59 The lesbian bar renders explicit the medieval alehouse’s queer undertones of same-sex physical and relational intimacy as well as its political possibilities.60 Lesbian bars have historically been owned, operated, and staffed by women, mirror-ing medieval alehouses in functioning as spaces where women held social and economic power and enabling their communities to be fostered by those who have a deep personal stake in them.61 For example, Nancy Novak worked as a bartender at Attitudes, a lesbian bar in St. Louis, before opening her own now-shuttered lesbian bar Novak’s, where I spent many merry weekends dancing with my roommates in the mid-aughts. The documentary Last Call at Maud’s, which depicts the final night at a long-running lesbian bar in San Francisco, is narrated by Rikki Streicher, the bar’s owner.62 And in a recent list of lesbian bars still operating in the US, all were owned by women.63 Because of their status as alehouse spaces run by women, typically with “no man hem amonge,” lesbian bars created the conditions for community formation and marginalized group consciousness. At the same time, the lesbian bar’s susceptibility to police intrusion echoed attempts by male medieval civic authorities to regu-late medieval alewives by taxing their ale, testing their measures, and levying age restrictions on tapsters.64
Lesbian bars in cities across the US were integral for fostering shared identity, political solidarity, and collective action throughout the twentieth century. In their history of Buffalo’s working-class lesbian community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis argue that “bars . . . and public house parties were central to twentieth-century lesbian resistance” because they facilitated both socializing and political consciousness.65 They state that “bars were the only possible place for working-class lesbians to congregate outside private homes” during these decades, and they trace how Buffalo’s les-bian bars were important spaces for drinking, dancing, friendship, erotic partnership, and community formation. Nan Alamilla Boyd argues in her history of lesbian bar culture in post–World War II San Francisco that “the height-ened group consciousness that . . . lesbians secured in bars and taverns in the 1930s and 1940s enabled them to resist more forcefully the repressive policing and prosecution of the 1950s,” illustrating cummarship’s powerful political potential.66 And Janet Kahn and Patricia A. Gozemba emphasize how lesbian bar culture in a working-class neighborhood bar near Boston generated strong friendships and love relationships and provided a means of psychic survival, much as alehouses in medieval texts furnished solace and generated survival strategies for the women who congregated there.67
The lesbian activist organization known as the Daughters of Bilitis powerfully illustrates the political possibilities of twentieth-century lesbian bar cummarship and underscores how it, like premodern cummarship, can foster peer pedagogy that empowers and edifies its participants and provides them valuable knowledge to challenge their marginalized position. Founded in 1955, DOB was originally intended to be an exclusive social club serving as an alternative to San Francisco’s lesbian bars, which were subject to police raids after California’s Alcoholic Beverage Control agency was formed that same year.68 The eight founders sought to create a community for friends and friends-of-friends to drink, talk, dance, and “mix socializing with social action.”69 Each new member had to apply for inclusion and needed to be “a gay girl of good moral character,” at least twenty-one years old, and “interested in promoting an educational program on the subject of sex variation, and for sex variants.”70 DOB’s statement of purpose outlined a commitment to educating its members as well as the public about lesbian rights. In order to facilitate this education, the organization established a library of lesbian fiction and nonfiction for members.71 The Daughters of Bilitis illustrate how cummarship’s combination of shared drinking, female fellowship, and peer pedagogy, which I have traced throughout this essay, became explicitly political and explicitly queer. While the raucous women’s alehouse fellowships in the premodern texts are fictional—albeit grounded in the alehouse’s real-life feminization—they nonetheless function as important precursors for imagining how the alehouse can be a place of inclusion, community-building, and conviviality that leads to necessary social change.
At the end of Cryste crosse me spede, the gossips’ outspoken joy at creating cummarship together is transformed to bitter sadness when they must leave the alehouse: “To the ale they went with hey troly loly / But whan they came home theyr songe was not so / Theyr songe was of sorowe and most hatefull wo,” reads the poem’s title-page summary.72 The poem’s ending emphasizes the women’s sorrow at leaving the company of cummars: “Forsothe thys partynge maketh theyr hertes to blede,” notes the narrator. A similar sense of nostalgia for lost community pervades Last Call at Maud’s, lamenting how the bar was forced to close in 1989 after the AIDS epidemic, declining business, and the owner’s cancer diagnosis. The decline of lesbian bars in the US was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the formation of a fundraising campaign called the Lesbian Bar Project to preserve the fourteen establishments that remained across the country; they claimed that “without space, we lose power, validity, communal safety, and access to intergenerational dialogue.”73 This profound sorrow at leaving the alehouse space, with its intimate fellowship, raucous laughter, and free-flowing drinks, concludes many alewife poems, where the cummars disperse to homes where they do not feel supported and are in some cases subject to spousal violence.74 But the survival of alewife poems, and the potential for communities of feminist medievalists to read them together and analyze them merrily over wine at academic conferences, means that the psychic space of the alehouse is always there, that the gossips do not need to part, that we can continue to make cummarship’s energizing, illuminating, and convivial connections across space and time.
Endnotes
- William Dunbar, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (Digital Index of Middle English Verse [henceforth DIMEV] 6134), in The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), 1:41–55.
- Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (henceforth DOST), s.v. “riot(o)us” (adj.), 2.
- Cambridge, Magdalene College Library, MS Pepys 2553, p. 86. Similar directions occur on p. 88 (“Nunc bibent” [Now they drink]).
- This note referring to “helyne m” appears on page 256 of the manuscript. Julia Boffey discusses the manuscript’s female readership in “The Maitland Folio Manuscript as a Verse Anthology,” in William Dunbar, “The Nobill Poyet”: Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell, 2001), 40–50.
- Susan E. Phillips gives an overview of these texts in Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 148. For more on these poems, see Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 122–44; Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 177–82; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 224–43; Sarah Annette McLoughlin, “Gender and Transgression in the Late Medieval English Household” (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 2013), 163–222.
- Mary Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–51. Wack notes how Chester mayor Henry Gee passed laws to curtail women-only childbed rituals in the 1530s (40).
- M. L. Anderson, ed., The James Carmichaell Collection of Proverbs in Scots (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), no. 1302.
- Erskine Beveridge, ed., Fergusson’s Scottish Proverbs, from the Original Print of 1641, Together with a Larger Manuscript Collection of About the Same Period Hitherto Unpublished (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons for the Scottish Text Society, 1924), 124.
- Karma Lochrie, response to “Female Friendship in Medieval Literature I” session at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 2017.
- Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays,” 35.
- Robert Copland, The Seven Sorowes That Women Have When Theyr Husbondes Be Deade, in Robert Copland: Poems, ed. Mary Carpenter Erler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), lines 266, 236; I shall you tell a full good sport, in The Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 249–51, lines 35–36.
- Phillips, Transforming Talk, 120–21.
- Phillips, Transforming Talk, 165.
- Now shall youe her a tale fore youre dysport and I shall you tell a full good sport (DIMEV3795 and 2274), in Greene, Early English Carols, 249–53. For more on the textual history of these poems, which survive in four manuscripts, see Rossell Hope Robbins, “Good Gossips Reunited,” British Museum Quarterly 27, no. 1/2 (1963): 12–15.
- John Skelton, The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge (DIMEV 5126), in The Complete English Poems of John Skelton, rev. ed., ed. John Scattergood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 186–200; R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, SS 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1:42–56. Two related texts featuring alewife poem conventions include Henry Watson’s translation of The Gospelles of Dystaves (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510) and the anonymously translated The Fyftene Joyes of Maryage (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1507). Phillips discusses these texts, which are both translated from Middle French sources, in Transforming Talk, 147–202.
- In his index of misogynist literature until 1568, Francis Lee Utley notes that 250 of 400 pieces date from 1500 to 1568, as literary antifeminism gathered steam over the course of the fifteenth century before peaking at the turn of the sixteenth. Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1944; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 64.
- Tricia A. McElroy, “The Uses of Genre and Gender in The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis,” in Premodern Scotland, Literature and Governance 1420–1587: Essays for Sally Mapstone, ed. Joanna Martin and Emily Wingfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 198–210. A new edition of the Dialogue is forthcoming in McElroy’s volume of Scottish satirical literature for the Scottish Text Society.
- Samuel Rowlands, Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (London: W. White, 1602); A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, All Met to be Merry (London: W. Jaggard for John Deane, 1609); Fowre Wittie Gossips Disposed to be Merry (London: Printed for H. G., 1632); The Gossips Feast: or, a merry meeting of women kinde each other greeting (London: Printed for Thomas Lambert, 1635–36?); The Seven Merry Wives of London: or, the Gossips’ Complaint (London: Printed for J. Blare, 1664–1703?); The Merry Gossips Vindication (London: Printed for P. Brooksby, 1672–96?); and The Gossips Meeting, or the Merry Market-Women of Taunton (London: Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke, 1674).
- Gilote e Johane, in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript: Volume 2, ed. Susanna Fein with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), 156–73. I am grateful to Susanna Fein and David Raybin for bringing this poem to my attention.
- The Old French-English Dictionary (henceforth OFED), ed. Alan Hindley, Frederick W. Langley, and Brian J. Levy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), s.v. “conseil” (n.).
- James A. Galloway, “Driven by Drink? Ale Consumption and the Agrarian Economy of the London Region, c. 1300–1400,” in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), 87–100.
- Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “Drink Work,” in Working Women in English Society 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 140–81.
- Elizabeth Ewan, “‘For Whatever Ales Ye’: Women as Producers and Consumers in Late Medieval Scottish Towns,” in Women in Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1750, ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen Meikle (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 125–35; also Ewan, “Mons Meg and Merchant Meg: Women in Later Medieval Edinburgh,” in Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c. 1050–c. 1650: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson, ed. David Ditchburn and Terry Brotherstone (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 131–42, esp. 136–38, 141–42.
- Middle English Dictionary (henceforth MED), s.v. “tale” (n.), 1(a), 1(d), 3(d).
- William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, rev. ed., ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), III.131; on “tail” as a genital term, see MED, s.v. “tail” (n.), 1b(c).
- MED, s.v. “flok” (n.[1]), 2(a) and 2(b). On the homosocial valences of “felawe” for men, see Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 31–36.
- MED, s.v. “fain” (adj.), 1(a) and 2(a).
- Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 177–78.
- MED, s.v. “techen” (v.), 5a(e) and 6(b).
- Dunbar, Twa Cummaris (DIMEV 4495), in Bawcutt, William Dunbar, 1:180–81.
- D O S T, s.v. “tene” (v.).
- Cryste crosse me spede (DIMEV 986) (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1534?), now at Princeton University’s Firestone Library (STC 14546.5); indexed in William A. Ringler Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558 (London: Mansell, 1988), no. 1741. This text was also copied from print to manuscript in the seventeenth century in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.e.97, 207–13.
- The A. B. C. of Aristotle (DIMEV 6654), in Early English Meals and Manners, ed. Fred-erick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, OS 32 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1868), 260–61.
- MED, s.v. “aboute(n” (adv.), 2(a), 5(d).
- MED, s.v. “kinrede” (n.), 1(a), 2.
- D O S T, s.v. “cummer” (n.[2]).
- OFED, s.v. “comere.”
- Gail McMurray Gibson, “Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 7–24.
- Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 181; Phillips, Transforming Talk, 143.
- Anderson, James Carmichaell Collection, no. 429. David Calderwood’s History of the Kirk of Scotland (1659) features a scene in which the devil sings these words to a mostly female group of witches, again tying the term cummar to witchcraft: “Playing to them upon a trumpe, [the devil] said, ‘Cummer, goe ye before; cummer, goe yee,’ and so they daunced.” David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland Volume 5: 1589–1599, ed. Rev. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh: Printed for the Wodrow Society, 1844), 216.
- D O S T, s.v. “red(e” v., 1.
- John Hamilton, A facile traictise, contenand, first: ane infallible reul to discerne trew from fals religion (Louvain: Laurence Kellam, 1600), 48.
- Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 1983), xi.
- Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 82.
- Dunbar’s Wedo uses this pairing to illustrate how she taught her friends how to control their husbands: “Than said I to my cummaris in counsall about, / ‘Se how I cabeld yone cout with a kene brydill’” [Then I said to my council of cummars, / “See how I secured that colt with a sharp bridle”] (353–54). See also Dunbar, Twa Cummaris, line 21, and “counsell” in I shall you tell a full good sport, line 82.
- W. Nelson Francis, ed., The Book of Vices and Virtues, Early English Text Society, OS 217 (London: Oxford University Press for Early English Text Society, 1968), 54. A Myrour to Lewede Men and Wymmen similarly claims that “taverne may be cleped the develes scole,” in Venetia Nelson, ed., A Myrour to Lewede Men and Wymmen: A Prose Version of the ‘Speculum vitae ,’ Middle English Texts 14 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), 210.
- David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh: Canon-gate, 1989).
- Lyndsay’s women address each other as “cummar” during the alehouse beatings in lines 1364 and 1365.
- “Cummer” also appears during this exchange in lines 1380 and 1392.
- P. R., The Lamentatioun of Lady Scotland, compylit by hir self, speiking in maner of ane Epistle, in the Moneth of Marche, the year of God 1572 (St. Andrews: Robert Lekpreuik, 1572), in Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. James Craunston, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Wil-liam Blackwood and Sons, 1890–93), 2:226–39.
- “Cummers” additionally occurs in lines 322, 328, 329.
- I shall you tell a full good sport, line 124.
- Now shall youe her a tale for youre dysport, line 1; Cryste crosse me spede, line 1.
- Karma Lochrie, “Preface,” in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), xiii–xviii, at xiii.
- I shall you tell a full good sport, lines 40–45, 118–19.
- See the final stanzas of Now shall youe her a tale fore youre dysport, where the women forsake their domestic “werke” to pass out drunkenly instead.
- Karma Lochrie, “Between Women,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70–88, at 79–81.
- John Gower, Confessio Amantis: Volume 2, ed. Russell A. Peck and trans. Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), IV.479; Lochrie, “Between Women,” 82.
- I am indebted to Steven Kruger for first suggesting this connection to me and encouraging me to read Joan Nestle, and to Colby Gordon for suggesting additional readings.
- For a useful overview of scholarship on lesbian bar culture, see Kelly Hankin, The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), esp. ix–xxv.
- Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 82–83.
- Last Call at Maud’s, dir. Paris Poirier (Frameline, 1993).
- Kristen Wong, “The Curious Disappearance of the Lesbian Bar,” The Story Exchange, June 28, 2019.
- Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters; Wack, “Women, Work, and Plays.”
- Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, 20th anniv. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 29.
- Boyd, Wide-Open Town, 101.
- Janet Kahn and Patricia A. Gozemba, “In and around the Lighthouse: Working-Class Lesbian Bar Culture in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 90–106. See also Rochella Thorpe, “The Changing Face of Lesbian Bars in Detroit, 1938–1965,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 165–81; Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 26–28, 92–113. Audre Lorde traces how New York City’s lesbian bar culture was the only place to find queer community in the 1950s and critiques its overwhelming whiteness and racism in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1982), 186–87, 220–26. Thorpe likewise highlights the Detroit lesbian bar scene’s racism and discusses the importance of house parties for African American lesbians in “‘A House Where Queers Go’: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975,” in Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, ed. Ellen Lewin (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 40–61.
- Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), xliv.
- Gallo, Different Daughters, 3–6.
- Gallo, Different Daughters, 4, 7.
- Gallo, Different Daughters, 10.
- For more on this nostalgia associated with lesbian-produced film documentary portrayals of lesbian bars, see Hankin, The Girls in the Back Room, 114–56.
- Sarah Marloff, “The Rise and Fall of America’s Lesbian Bars,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 21, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/rise-and-fall-americas-lesbian-bars-180976801/; “The Lesbian Bar Project,” https://www.lesbianbarproject.com/ (accessed May 13, 2021).
- I shall you tell a full good sport and Now shall youe her a tale fore youre dysport both feature women who face abusive husbands when they return home from the alehouse.
Chapter 8 (157-176) from Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, edited by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala (Ohio State University Press, 07.11.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.