Photo by Clementina Lady Hawarden (ca. 1860). Print from Joan E. Biren Slideshow.

Finding asexual stories that predate the popular claim of the term as a distinct identity is troublesome. In addition to the evolving nature of language, cultural expectations around sex, sexuality and relationships are ever-changing. Translating our modern understanding of these topics directly into the historical record is impossible. However, embracing a broader, queer sensibility in historical analysis reveals that regardless of terminology and cultural differences, people whose experiences of sexuality and gender differ from popular norms have long found community with each other. These communities have played host to emphatic debate, mutual aid networks, and committed relationships both romantic and platonic that offered their members needed reprieve from oppressive societal norms.

Photo by Alice Austen (1891). Print from Joan E. Biren Slideshow.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, feminist and woman-led networks straddled the Atlantic, providing support and community to an increasingly liberationary cohort of women pursuing education, work, discussion, and sexual freedom (Sicherman, 1984). From 1974 to 1982, Joan E. Biren preserved several photographs of women who moved through these networks as part of her travelling slideshow depicting lesbian and feminist history; these slides, archived in our collection, date as far back as 1860. These communities included women in both straight and same-sex partnerships, closeted women, and single women who did not romantically partner.

It is important to note that these were predominantly white women of Anglo-Saxon descent and middle-to-upper-middle-class upbringing, whose background allowed them to access education and opportunities unavailable to other women of their time. Their race and status permitted them a greater degree of social mobility than racialized and working-class women. As such, these sources are only a small insight into queer feminist history -- but an important one, as discussions in our recent history carry echoes of these women’s stories.

Alice Hamilton at twenty-four, the year she graduated from medical school (1893). From Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters by Barbara Sicherman (1984).

One such woman is Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), an acclaimed Harvard-educated doctor, workers' safety advocate, and educator (Sicherman, 1984). Hamilton and her sisters were part of a branching community of educated women who never married, often cohabitated, and supported each others’ studies and activism. Unlike her sisters Edith and Margaret, who both took female partners, Alice was single her entire life (Sicherman, 1984). She justified her celibacy as necessary so that she could fully dedicate herself to her work, often expressing confusion and worry over her sisters’ relationships (Hamilton, qtd. By Sicherman, p. 196-197). Her personal letters demonstrate that these networks had space for both romantic and platonic relationships; Alice Hamilton found fulfillment in her relationships and work without romantic or sexual partnership. Her story asks us to consider interpretations of historical queer spaces beyond the traditional lesbian and gay paradigms, showing the diversity of the historical queer experience.

Kathlyn Oliver (1912), The Freewoman 1(15), p. 290.

Sex and sexuality was often hotly debated within these feminist circles. One such debate is preserved in the 1912 editions of the London feminist periodical The Freewoman, where “A New Subscriber” and a woman named Kathlyn Oliver exchanged several letters to the editor. In disputing Oliver’s previous letter, “A New Subscriber” noted the prevalence of what she terms “sexually anaesthetic” women, who hold no interest in sex, while arguing that these women are the exception to a much more sexually active “normal” population (Correspondence: The Chastity of Continence?, 1912, p. 270). Understandably, Oliver took issue with the suggestion that she was abnormal: in her rebuttal, she insisted that she had harboured sexual desire in her life, albeit only after forming a strong romantic attraction (Correspondence: Chastity and Normality, 1912, p. 290). This passage evokes the modern definition of demisexuality; likewise, Oliver’s need to defend her experience to her peers is echoed by later asexual voices.