Ladies Almanack

Natalie Clifford Barney to Richard Aldington trying to persuade him to publish Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack, 1928.

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Winifred Ashton, known as Clemence Dane, was an English novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

She taught at an all girls' school after the first World War where she started to write, taking the pseudonym Clemence Dane from the St Clement Danes Church in London. She experienced a huge success in the USA in both the film and theatre industries. Her first hit was with the play A Bill of Divorcement (1921) starring Katharine Cornell, which was then adapted to the big screen three separate times, including a 1932 film starring Katharine Hepburn. She co-wrote the screenplay for Anna Karenina (1935) starring Greta Garbo and won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Perfect Strangers (1945) starring Deborah Kerr.

She was also a renowned novelist with Regiment of Women (1914), which studied with lesbian undertones the life at a girls' school (and is said to have inspired Radclyffe Hall for the Well of Loneliness), and Broome Stages (1931) - chronicles of a tumultuous British theatrical dynasty over two hundred years.

Katharine Cornell was an American actress, producer and writer. She is considred to be one of the greatest American actresses of theatre, and is most remembered for her role as English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1931 Broadway production called The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Katharine Cornell was born in 1893 to a wealthy and prominent family. She moved to New York to pursue an acting career in 1915 after the death of her mother. Cornell's first major Broadway role was in Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement (1921). She also produced various plays through her association with the Actor's Theatre - including Romeo and Juliet (1934) and St. Joan (1936). During the war, she contribued to the American Theatre Wing for War Relief.

"The most exciting lovers are the lovers that we don't talk about." - Katharine Cornell tells a fan in A.R. Gurney’s The Grand Manner.

In 1921, she married fellow producer and director Guthrie McClintic. She was a lesbian, he was gay, and their marriage was lavender. She had relationships with actress and playwright Nancy Hamilton, actress Tallulah Bankhead and poet Mercedes de Acosta among others.

Barbara Gittings was one of the earliest lesbian activists in America. In 1958, she founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian organization created in 1955 in the United States by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. She became editor of "The Ladder," the official magazine of the DOB, from 1963 to 1966. She decided to add the subtitle "A Lesbian Review" to the magazine and to replace the drawings on the cover with photographs of actual lesbians  (often taken by her life partner Kay “Tobin” Lahusen (1930-2021), whom she had met in 1961 at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in NYC).

In the 1960s, she helped organize the first picket lines to protest the refusal of the United States government, then the country's largest employer, to hire homosexuals. In the 1970s, she was deeply involved with the American Library Association, serving on a group called the "Task Force on Gay Liberation" to promote positive literature about homosexuality in library collections. In 1972, she participated in a movement to have homosexuality removed from the list of mental illnesses by the American Psychiatric Association.

Cha-U-Kao was a French entertainer, cabaret dancer and clowness who performed at the infamous cabaret Moulin Rouge and the Nouveau Cirque (a Parisian circus) in the 1890s.

Her stage name is a word play on the cancan dance 'Le Chahut' and the chaos created on stage. Her clown costume consisted of a characteristic black and yellow outfit and her hair of a singular updo. Her real name, as well as birth and death dates, are unknown. French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec often depicted her in his work. She is sometimes sketched with her partner in his portfolio called Elles. Indeed Cha-U-Kao was openly lesbian and her partner could have been Gabrielle the Dancer, another performer and model for Toulouse-Lautrec.

Marcel Moore, née Suzanne Malherbe, was a French author, illustrator, actress, set designer, and photographer. She was born in Nantes, France, where she met her lifelong partner, Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob), during their childhood. Marcel Moore studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. From 1913, she began publishing illustrated articles on fashion in the regional newspaper "Le Phare de la Loire", which was edited by Cahun's father, Maurice Schwob. Moore joined Claude Cahun in Paris in 1920. The two began collaborating on artistic projects that reflected the avant-garde movements of the interwar period. Suzanne Malherbe illustrated the poems in Claude Cahun's collection "Vues et visions" (1919) and the ten collage plates of "Aveux non avenus" (1930) based on photographs by Claude Cahun.

In 1937, they left Paris to settle on the Channel Island of Jersey, which was invaded by the German army in 1940. Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun immediately joined the resistance. They worked to discourage, destabilize, and demobilize the German troops by making them believe that there were one or more traitors among them. Between 1940 and 1944, they wrote nearly 6,000 leaflets, posters, and manifestos (Moore spoke German) signed by a mysterious "nameless soldier" who criticized the war and the Nazi leadership. They distributed them by placing them in cigarette paper cartons, match boxes, and so on and placed them in German cars when and where they could. They managed to make the Germans believe that there was a genuine, widespread rebellion within their ranks.

Moore and Cahun were denounced and arrested in July 1944. They were imprisoned and sentenced to death and forced labor (which led them to humorously ask their judge which sentence they should serve first). They spent several months in prison, in very difficult conditions, which profoundly affected Claude Cahun's health, and were released on May 8, 1945.

Amelie Posse, or Amelie Posse-Brázdová, was a Swedish author, known for her work against anti-nazism.

She was born to the Posse aristocratic family, and a granddaughter of Sweden's Prime Minister Arvid Posse and poet Gunnar Wennerberg. Her mother was the singer Gunhild Wennerberg. She was married twice, also divorced twice, and went on to live with her second husband in Italy and in his homeland, Czechia (then Czechoslovakia), where the Gestapo ordered her arrest. Back in Sweden, she started to write books, many of which were autobiographical.

She founded the anti-nazi resistance group called Tisdagsklubben (Tuesday Club) when Germany invaded Norway in 1940. Very little is known or accessible about her personal life, but research conducted on Polish artist Het Kwiatkowska revealed that both women were in relationship together.

Ellen Gates Starr was a US American activist and social reformer.

In 1889, she founded Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, with her lover Jane Addams, located in working class and poor neighbourhoods. It served as a centre for social reform and as a community of university women whose main purpose was to provide social and educational opportunities for working class children and people, many of whom were recent European immigrants.

She took part of campaigns to reform child labour laws and workers' rights. She was a member of the Women's Trade Union League and as such helped organise a number of strikes.

Nancy Hamilton was an American actress, playwright, lyricist, director and producer. She was educated at Smith College and the Sorbonne in Paris. At Smith, Hamilton was active in the theater and was president of the school's Dramatic Association her senior year. After a period of amateur acting and producing in Pittsburgh and Montclair, New Jersey, she moved to New York City in 1932. Her initial venture into New York theater was as the understudy to Katharine Hepburn in « The Warrior's Husband ». She made her Broadway debut in 1934 in « New Faces », appearing in the show and writing many of the lyrics. When it closed, she turned to play writing. She worked in the New York theater from 1932 to 1954. She notably wrote lyrics for three successful Broadway revues plays, radio scripts for comic actress, and published articles and poems in newspapers and magazines. She is perhaps best known as the lyricist for the popular song "How High the Moon ».

In 1945, she spent six months with the American Theater Wing War Players touring the battle areas of France, Italy, Belgium, and Netherlands. In 1955, Hamilton won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the film ''Helen Keller in Her Story'' (1954), becoming the first woman to win that award. Hamilton was the lifelong partner of actress Katharine Cornell and was also romantically involved with Katharine Hepburn.

Charlotte Cushman was an American stage actress. During her childhood, she received a musical education and developed a voice of remarkable compass and richness, with a full contralto register. Her father died when she was thirteen, forcing her to find ways to support her family. So she left school and became an opera singer.

After a promising start, she lost her voice and had to retrain in the theater. She performed in Boston, then New Orleans and New York. In 1839, her younger sister also became an actress and the two sisters became famous for playing "Romeo and Juliet" together, with Charlotte playing Romeo and Susan playing Juliet.

Charlotte Cushman had numerous lesbian affairs, with Rosalie Sully, daughter of painter Thomas Sully, author Anne Hampton Brewster, and author and actress Matilda Hays. Cushman and Hays had a ten-year affair. They became known for dressing alike, and in Europe were publicly known as a couple. In 1852, Charlotte Cushman retired and settled with Matilda Hays in Rome. They began living in an American expatriate community there, made up mostly of the many lesbian artists and sculptors of the time. During their affair, and after their separation, Charlotte Cushman had romantic relationships with other women, such as sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Emma Stebbins and author Emma Crow.

Martha May Eliot was born into a prominent Boston family. She became a physician in 1918 and showed an early interest in social medicine, which takes into account the social context and health conditions of a population, as opposed to a medical practice based solely on human biology.

Martha May Eliot worked for the Children's Bureau, a national agency established in 1912 to improve the health and welfare of American children, for over 25 years and helped establish government programs that implemented her ideas about social medicine. With Edwards A. Park, Eliot worked on rickets, a nutritional deficiency that affects bone growth and creates bow legs. Their research established that public health measures (vitamin D dietary supplementation) could prevent the early onset of rickets. During World War II, Martha May Eliot administered the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care program, which served the families of 1.5 million American soldiers. After the war, she held influential positions in both the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). From 1949 to 1951, she worked as an assistant director for WHO in Geneva. 

Victorine Meurent was a French painter and model for painters. She was born in Paris into a family of artisans. In 1860, at the age of sixteen, she began modeling in the studio of Thomas Couture and she may have studied art at his atelier for women. Victorine Meurent modeled for many painters, but her image is closely associated with the work of Édouard Manet, for whom she modeled from 1862 to 1873. She appears in several famous paintings, such as "A Young Lady in 1866" (also known as "Woman with a Parrot"), Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe ("The Luncheon on the Grass",1863), and "Olympia" (1863).

In 1875, she enrolled at the Académie Julian and became a painter herself. Her works were selected six times at the prestigious Paris Salon (the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts) and she joined the « Société des Artistes Français » in 1903. Only four of Victorine Meurent's paintings survive; the others have unfortunately been lost. Victorine Meurent was openly lesbian. She spent the last twenty years of her life with her partner, pianist Marie Dufour, in their house in Colombes, near Paris.

Catalina de Erauso was a Spanish nun from the Basque country who fled the convent to travel around Spain and the Americas, as a soldier and colon. She assumed masculine names at this time - Pedro de Orive, Alonso Díaz, Francisco de Loyola and later, Antonio de Erauso. She is known as la Monja Alférez in Spanish, The Ensign Nun or The Nun Lieutenant.

Alongside her sisters, Catalina de Erauso was sent to the Dominican convent of San Sebastián el Antiguo, where her mother's cousin held the position of prioress. At 15 years old and refusing to take vows, she decided to escape during morning prayer after having been detained in a cell several times and being beaten by one of the nuns. So as not to get caught, she cut her hair, assumed a male identity and began a life as a fugitive. She travelled around Spain, working for different patrons (interestingly some of which were cousins of her mother, but were seemingly ignorant of her true identity, a recurring theme in her telling of her life), until she embarked in 1603 on the Holy Monday, to America.

She travelled around South America, from Venezuela and Colombia to Peru, where she worked as a Llama driver. She had the habit of fighting, and was imprisoned several times. She is said to have shot her uncle and killed a man with whom she had a dispute. She enrolled as a soldier in 1619 and with her army swept through the lands and property of many Native American people who were massacred. She was promoted within the military ranks and her "exploits" were recognised, but her talent for getting into trouble sent her back to Spain, where she met the Pope who officially granted her the right to live as man. Eventually, she returned to New Spain and settled in Mexico.

Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, also known as Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux, was an Anglo-French poet, novelist and literary critic. During her childhood, her family moved to London to join the growing community of artists there. The family home became a central location for painters and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Robinson was educated at University College, London, devoting herself chiefly to the study of Greek literature.

In 1878, she published her first collection of poems, « A Handful of Honeysuckle », which was a resounding success. For the next decade, she published a book of poetry almost every year, as well as her only novel, « Arden ». In 1880, Robinson met the English writer Vernon Lee during a trip to Italy. The two women began a romantic relationship that lasted eight years, during which they traveled between England, France, and Italy.

Emilienne d’Alençon, born Émilienne André, was a famous French courtesan. She was born into a very modest background in the working-class Montmartre district. After attempting a theatrical career at the age of 15, she made her stage debut in 1889 in a music-hall show where she appeared scantily clad in a parody of a circus act in which she "tamed" a dozen rabbits.

Within a few years, Emilienne d’Alençon had become one of the most famous courtesans in Paris. These women, called "demi-mondaines" or "cocottes," had wealthy clients (aristocrats, politicians, ambassadors, bankers...), and traded their services for exorbitant sums. They were true celebrities, whose every move was commented on in the press. Their photographs were printed on postcards that circulated throughout Paris, and to maintain their notoriety, they performed in music-hall shows that freely blended circus, operetta, dance, pantomime, and eroticism.

Émilienne d'Alençon was nicknamed one of the "Three Graces" of the Belle Époque, along with Liane de Pougy and Caroline Otero. She performed in all the major cabarets of her time. She had countless lesbian affairs, notably with the dancer Louise Weber, known as “La Goulue”, the courtesan Liane de Pougy, poet Renée Vivien, and dancer Julia Seale.

Lana Tuner was an American film actress. Her career spanned over five decades and her fame culminated in the mid-1940s, when she was one of the highest-paid actresses, and one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's biggest stars.

Born into a working-class family that relocated in California, she was discovered by a talent scout and given small roles. She quicky rose to the status of leading lady appearing in films such as the film noir Johnny Eager (1941), the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941), the horror Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the romantic war drama Somewhere I'll Find You (1942). Her role in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) was critically acclaimed and her popularity continued through the 1950s, in dramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award's Best Actress.

In a fit of rage, Ava Gardner's husband, Frank Sinatra publically screamed that his wife was involved in a lesbian affair with Lana Turner. Although both actresses denied the rising rumours for decades, Gardner finally admitted in the last interview she gave that this had been true.

Lana turner gave the majority of her 1.7 billion estate to her maid and companion of 45 years, Carmen Lopez Cruz.

Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, was a lesbian. She came out at the age of 13 to her mother who accepted the news well and said she regarded Cheryl's partner, Jocelyn "Josh" LeRoy, as a second daughter. As a teenager, Cheryl Crane stabbed to death Lana Turner's highly publicised lover and renowned gangster, Johnny Stompanato, in a domestic abuse struggle during which she defended her mother. It was ruled as justifiable homicide because the man had been killed in self-defense. Crane published her autobiography in 1988 entitled Detour - a Hollywood Tragedy - My Life With Lana Turner, My Mother, in which she discusses the incident, and her second memoir in 2008, titled Lana - The Memories, the Myths, the Movies, which focuses on her mother.

Louisa D'Andelot Carpenter was an American equestrian and philanthropist, heiress of the Du Pont family who had made a fortune in the gunpowder business.

She was also a sportswoman and aviator, one of the first female pilots in the country. As a very active and social woman, Carpenter hosted numerous gatherings with many artists, celebrities and socialites at the different historical homes she inherited or bought - among which Strand Millas in Mountchanin (Delaware), Fairlee Manor Camp House in Fairlee (Maryland) and Shell House near Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. Her circle of friends, acquaintances and lovers included Evelyn Eugenia Bankhead and her younger sister Tallulah Bankhead, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Louise Brooks, Marion Carstairs, Noël Coward, Greta Garbo and Milly Monti.

In 1929, Louise D'Andelot Carpenter met Broadway actress and singer Libby Holman at an international horse show in Manhattan. Quickly, they became lovers, even through Libby Holman's wedding in 1931 to aviator Zachary Smith Reynolds. Only months later, the man was found dead after a drunken house party in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Holman, then pregnant with her husband's son, was immediately indicted for his murder. Louisa shielded her from the press, bailed her out of jail and raised her child as her own. In 1932, the charges against Holman were all dropped and the two women lived together with their children - Holman's son and the girl Carpenter adopted under her name when their son was about 18 months old.