This is the article that Donoghue references with respect to possible evidence of 18th century women in Amsterdam having meeting places for engaging in same-sex activities. The evidence is fairly tenuous but at least indicates that there may have been clusters of women who came together around this shared interest. But in considering the women discussed in this article one needs to keep in mind the nature of the record. When you’re looking at evidence for sexual behavior from trial records, one is necessarily going to be considering the lives of people who have done something they’ve been put on trial for. And in the way of the world, the question of who gets put on trial for transgressive sexual behavior is not neutral with respect to things like class and occupation. All of these women were poor, had marginal roles in society, and had a history of socially disruptive behavior.
Van der Meer comes to a tentative conclusion that there was a tradition of sex between women that was strongly associated with socially disruptive behaviors (e.g., drunkenness) and with prostitution. But I think he fails to consider the extent to which most women whose lives were detailed in court records had similar backgrounds, even when the offenses didn’t involve same-sex activities. These records certainly indicate that there was a general awareness of the possibilities (and techniques) of sex between women, and that people of that time don’t seem to have considered homosexual acts to require a specific and restricted interest in women as partners. But I don’t think that this set of data necessarily gives us an accurate picture of all sexual possibilities between women in that time and place, any more than the theories of late 19th century physicians about their homosexual patients did. A "respectable" middle-class woman who did not engage in public drunkenness or brawling wasn't going to end up in a court record discussing her sex life regardless of what went on in her bed. So a thoery of the development of lesbian identity in the Netherlands that looks narrowly at the evidence of trial records is going to come up with flawed conclusions.
But the larger historical picture is made up of small, specific individual topics like this. Then to see the whole, we need to put them together and take a few steps back.
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