Book Review: The Ladder
- alexanderrpreston7
- Oct 4, 2024
- 6 min read
Warnings: Brief discussions of sexual ideas and transphobia.
By Al Preston
“Our ideal image of woman is that housewife in the ads, looking lovingly at her box of detergent in her sparkling kitchen and have orgasms over the giant in her washing machine who gets her husband’s and children’s dirty shirt collars so clean.”
-The Ladder vol. 9 No. 5 page 9. February 1965
Wild, right? That is a direct quote from an issue of The Ladder.
Started in 1957 by the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian only organization from the early 1950s, The Ladder was a magazine by and for lesbians. The editors, contributors, and a vast majority of the readers were all lesbians talking about issues that affected their lives. Motherhood, marriage, finding each other; they had unique issues that the male dominated magazines like ONE, published at first by the Mattachine Society, did not address. Any attempt they made was unable to truly represent the struggles of lesbians.
I’ve read multiple issues of The Ladder for a variety of reasons. This review will show case a reading of The Ladder about a particular topic. Just to show how a lot of historians utilize sources like The Ladder. The last time I read it was to see what lesbians were saying about drag queens and people who, at the time, identified as ‘transexual’ or ‘transvestite’.
The Ladder ran through the beginning and end of second wave feminism. The philosophy of second wave feminism wave was influential to a lot of the folks who read and contributed to The Ladder. As implied, second wave feminism came about after the first wave, the first being over voting rights for women. Second wave was focused on equal rights for women. To put these large movements more generally.
Seeing as how the differences between the waves and if we’re currently in a fourth wave could easily be an entire post on it’s own, I’ll try to be brief but concise when explaining the difference between first and second wave feminism and why it matters.
First wave feminism was all about a woman’s right to vote. All they wanted was the ability to vote for politicians that they believed were fit to lead. They did not necessarily want men’s work or to be politicians themselves, although I’m sure a number of them did. At the time, they were more concerned with just achieving the right to vote.
Second wave feminism was focused on the concept of equality between the genders. They wanted to be able to have access to all of the benefits men had: better jobs and equal pay. Many second wave feminists were fighting for women to be more than homebodies and baby makers.
That was rather radical for the time, despite the fact that women had been apart of the workforce for some time. They were usually relegated to ‘womanly’ tasks only. Secretary work and support roles. Second wave feminists began to gain a rhetoric that anything deemed ‘womanly’ was bad and that they had a right to everything that men had which was fundamentally better than whatever a woman was allotted in society. All women in this movement are not all the same, however. Somet feminists wanted a genderless society. Others were running with the philosophy that women were superior to men in every way.
No group took on that idea more than radical lesbian feminists. As women who exclusively loved women, they considered themselves superior to even straight feminists because they had erased the need for a man entirely. As you can probably tell, they had some very intense opinions on transgender people and drag queens. Especially since many radical lesbian feminists were white and drag queens were majority people of color.
To really gage how lesbians were really feeling about transgender people, especially over time, The Ladder serves as a perfect case study. Since it ran from before second wave feminism’s official beginning in the 1960s until the 1970s where self-identified radical lesbian feminists took over the publication, we can see how lesbian opinions towards transgender people changed over time. Especially since nearly every entry into the magazine was from the readership.
Every issue of The Ladder had a ‘Readers Respond’ section as well, where readers could chime in on articles and writings from previous issues. I have seen entire arguments happen all within the ‘Readers Respond’ section.
These reasons are why I was reading The Ladder. To research how second wave lesbian feminists were thinking and treating transgender folks (as a note, I am using transgender as an umbrella term for people who were drag queens, drag kings, transsexual, or transvestite). As I read, I found that as second wave feminism got more popular, the harsher the attitudes the readers and contributors to The Ladder became towards transgender people.
In 1958, The Ladder featured articles from transwomen and welcoming their viewpoints and opinions. By 1970, contributors and readers alike were calling transwomen dangerous tools of men created to either replace women entirely or control women back into their homemaker positions.
Radical lesbian feminists wanted nothing to do with masculinity. The butch/femme dynamic that was popular among lesbians before the 1960s was under scrutiny as well. Transmen were considered pitiful women who had been fooled into thinking that they could gain the same rights as men by becoming one. To these feminists, transwomen were performing the traditional feminine roles in order to control them. These roles were the very things that they were fighting against.
Transwomen then wanted into women’s spaces? It was an attack on women! They were infiltrating their spaces and taking their secrets and plans back to men who would certainly foil them. No man would actually want to be a woman, they had their rights and brought those views into women’s spaces, taking over their organizations and ruining all of their efforts.
…That’s what they believed, at least. Today, in 2024, we know that’s not why people are transgender. We believe that men and women have a right to chose to be homemakers or bread winners. That anyone of whatever gender identity can like whatever makes them happy. It could even be argued that these feminists didn’t want a genderless society, they just wanted ‘masculinity’ rather than ‘femininity’.
The Ladder is an interesting show of how attitudes can change over time. A transwoman wrote in 1957 an article about how she loved womanly work. She loved dresses and makeup and traditionally feminine things. In the Readers Respond the following issue, lesbian were happy to read that because they felt the same. They liked being homemakers and mothers. They loved their dresses and didn’t want to do men’s work. However, they and the transwoman were not critical of the women who wanted the more masculine things in life.
By the 1970s, all talk about transwomen called them mentally ill men who were a threat to women. In the Readers Respond, women who had been in loving relationships with transgender women for years were leaving them because of the opinions published in The Ladder. Transgender people were no longer being published in any part of the magazine.
The Ladder was very influential to a lot of lesbians. It was a trend setter for ideals. While I haven’t read every issue back to front, I didn’t need to. Section titles were very useful for identifying what I actually wanted to read for the topic I was researching. The quote from the beginning of this article, for example. That article really captured how many radical lesbian feminists thought about femineity in general.
Most articles were well written and insightful into the minds of many lesbians. Despite how harsh some of them could be, they are all fascinating reads. There were other sections as well, book reviews of lesbian titles as well as prose and poetry from lesbians. The Ladder is a wonderful source of information for the time it was being published. Some of the stories within The Ladder are some of the earliest examples of queer literature with happy or hopeful endings. There are even conversations with doctors about how the medical field was trying to grapple with queerness.
It is very much worth the read. I accessed it through a digitizing project that I will link below. Some issues are missing, and some issues have missing pages, but it’s still worth the read.
Yorumlar