For aficionados of lesbian literature, Jeannette Howard Foster is beloved, as the author of the 1956 book, Sex Variant Women in Literature. In this wonderful and historically significant book, Foster both cited and analyzed 2,500 years of lesbian love in literature ranging from Sappho to Radclyffe Hall, including along the way writers as diverse as Ovid, Swinburne, and Verlaine. In fact, according to the new biography by Joanne Passet, Howard evaluated “an amazing 324 titles” including examples from “English, American, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese literature, with the emphasis on works in English, French, and German, the languages she read fluently.” Howard dedicated over two decades of her life to the completion of Sex Variant Women in Literature, and she published the book at the age of sixty with her own money and using her own name through the vanity publisher, Vantage Press. Sex Variant Woman gives Jeanette Howard Foster the benefit of a well-researched, thorough, and engaging biography.
Born to a middle class family in Oak Park, IL in 1895, Foster’s “sexual variance” was evident to her and her family from a young age. As an undergraduate at Rockford College, a woman’s college ninety miles northwest of Chicago, Foster was able to find an environment in which she could thrive. Women’s colleges continued to provide an important space for Foster personally and intellectually in her early life. Foster was among the first women to earn a PhD in library science from the University of Chicago and served as a librarian to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Education. Throughout her life, she read and researched lesbianism and sexual variance in science and literature. Foster’s evolutions from a woman with passionate friendships at her women’s college to the lead librarian for Alfred Kinsey at his sex research institute and finally to a beloved lesbian literary icon are traced by Passet with clarity.