WOMAN PLUS WOMAN: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism

by Dolores Klaich ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1974

One of the best books on the subject -- informative, non-didactic, written in precisely the right unhysterical tone to accomplish its goal of convincing skeptics that lesbians are just like everybody else -- almost. Interspersed with two perhaps overly ""up"" interviews (successful professional women whose incomes, intelligences and milieu are most untypical) is a fine history of lesbians both in literature (Sappho, the ""belle epoque"" Paris crowd of Colette, Natalie Barney, and Renee Vivien, and the post-war group of Stein, Romaine Brooks, and Radclyffe Hall) and the medical movement (villains Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and Frank Caprio who changed the popular notion that lesbianism was a sin to the equally dubious notion that it was a sickness). There is also a brief study of the modern psychological theories more in tune with the Women's and Gay Lib position that the disease, if any, is society's -- despite the fact that there is some fairly firm physiological evidence that hormones are at least a partial determinant of one's sexual proclivities. It is just too bad that this fine book is necessary in these supposedly enlightened times.

Pub Date: June 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION