Promotional Information

Explores the links between the emergence of lesbian and proto-lesbian identities at the turn of the century and the discourses of sentimentality, mass culture, and modernism

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "Single White Female”: The Sexual Politics of Spinsterhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks
2. "Trying All Kinds”: Louisa May Alcott’s Pedagogic Erotics
3. "Scouting for Girls”: Reading and Recruitment in the Early Twentieth Century
4. "Excreate a No Sense”: The Erotic Currency of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
5. The M Multiplying: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Pleasures of Influence, Part I
6. Influence and Invitation: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Pleasures of Influence, Part II
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Kathryn R. Kent is Assistant Professor of English at Williams College.

Reviews

"In the pages of American women's literature, lesbians are made, not born. Kathryn R. Kent expertly surveys the many creative acts of instruction, imitation, and invention among women that ultimately make modern lesbian identity more than just a product of medical discourse. At the heart of all these narratives of self-fashioning lies a central paradox: girls can only freely invent themselves by imitating someone else. Kent brilliantly profiles both sides of these mimetic couples (mothers and daughters, teachers and students, lovers and friends), demonstrating in the end that imitation is inevitably a two-way street."-Diana Fuss, author of Identification Papers "Making Girls into Women illuminates the shift into the modern that so much of the work in lesbian/gay studies assumes is crucial, but, beyond reference to the medical model, makes little effort to analyze or explain." Julie Abraham, author of Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories