Book challenge: 43-44

[mothwing]

Only a couple of weeks to go for my six final books, but the daily one-hour commute to the university and back is really doing wonders for that challenge.

I found some very interesting books on lesbians in the library, although most of the more recent stuff is permanently out for some reason.

44.       

Ganz normale Mütter: lesbische Frauen und ihre Kinder, Birgit Sasse. (Completely normal mothers: lesbian women and their children).
Very interesting, if sadly not very scientific book on lesbian women and their children, the effects such unusual parents have on children, and the experiences of the mothers. The results were fairly predictable - if children grow up in lesbian households from the beginning, they end up as happy as children from families with parents of opposite sex, and if children first grow up in "normal" households they have difficulties accepting the new partner of their mother, which is mostly down to the fact that their beloved parents split up rather than down to the same-sex orientation of the mother. One or two of the children the author interviewed did say it might be nicer if their mother had another man, as it would make it easier to explain their household to their peer group. Those two were teenagers, and all of the younger and all of the older children were comparatively happy with their lot, although most of them did not like the fact that their parents had split up in the first place. Most of the problems the children reported arose from the divorce more than the new partner, and the troubles within the new family constellations mostly from quarrels between the exes rather than the new orientation.
Interesting was that even children who were happy with their two mothers dislike or disliked the term "lesbian" initially when assigned to their mothers as they thought it was an insult and something bad, even though their life at home would have suggested something else entirely, and continue to avoid the term.
She also referenced a study conducted for Psychology Today in the early eighties without saying which and whose it was which showed that children who grow up with same-sex parents are as healthy as children who grow up with opposite-sex parents. I want to read that study.

43.       

Lesbische Identität in der Adoleszenz, Karin Kolbe (Lesbian Identity in Adolescence).
A doctoral thesis. I could have cried. It was published 1989, the author references a lot of texts from the early seventies, and many of the statements are still true. The dissertation included a study on the subjectivity and identity of women based on a questionnaire, and she got her sample through a "snow-ball-system", which means that most of her subjects were organised in societies and organisations to promote same-sex rights, introducing a - in my opinion - hefty bias not uncommon in those studies, especially from the eighties and nineties. Most of the women were very happy with their lesbian identity and had always seen it a very positive part of their identity, most of them lived in the city, most of them were raised in fairly liberal families - all a very good basis for being happy with parts of an identity that are not considered the norm, anyway.
The only really interesting difference was the class difference - lesbians from lower class backgrounds had a tendency to be less happy with their lesbian identity than lesbians from the middle- and upper classes, which she says is down to the greater importance traditional female roles have in those. Other sources on the realisation of masculinity in relation to class show similar things. Hee.