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A review by tangleroot_eli
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present by Lillian Faderman
3.0
2.5 stars rounded up out of respect for the vastness of Faderman's research, even if I often disagreed with the conclusions she drew from that research.
I took a lot of long, angry notes about this book as I was reading it. In the end, it boils down to this: Surpassing is a commendably thorough work about a particular segment of (white, upper- and upper-middle-class, American and Western European) woman-woman relationships during a particular slice of history. However, Faderman's observations and conclusions are inescapably biased by her second-wave lesbian-separatist 1970s white feminism, with all the "color-blindness," biphobia, and incipient terfism that that entails.
Faderman writes in the introduction to the 1998 edition that she decided not to change anything, so that the book would stand not only as a work about history but also as a work of history. But I couldn't help but wish that she'd added some kind of notes, such as Starhawk did in the 10th and 20th anniversary editions of [b:The Spiral Dance|73869|The Spiral Dance A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess|Starhawk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348517478l/73869._SX50_.jpg|71468], to suggest where her views and conclusions had or hadn't changed. Having the framework of Faderman's "now" (even a now that's now 20 years out of date) might have helped me gel a little more with her framework of "then."
I took a lot of long, angry notes about this book as I was reading it. In the end, it boils down to this: Surpassing is a commendably thorough work about a particular segment of (white, upper- and upper-middle-class, American and Western European) woman-woman relationships during a particular slice of history. However, Faderman's observations and conclusions are inescapably biased by her second-wave lesbian-separatist 1970s white feminism, with all the "color-blindness," biphobia, and incipient terfism that that entails.
Faderman writes in the introduction to the 1998 edition that she decided not to change anything, so that the book would stand not only as a work about history but also as a work of history. But I couldn't help but wish that she'd added some kind of notes, such as Starhawk did in the 10th and 20th anniversary editions of [b:The Spiral Dance|73869|The Spiral Dance A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess|Starhawk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348517478l/73869._SX50_.jpg|71468], to suggest where her views and conclusions had or hadn't changed. Having the framework of Faderman's "now" (even a now that's now 20 years out of date) might have helped me gel a little more with her framework of "then."