Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide

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For Pride Month, the hosts talk about queer physicians Sara Josephine Baker and Louise Pearce and their polyamorous relationship with novelist Ida A. R. Wylie. They also discuss the Heterdoxy, a feminist club in Greenwich Village, and the importance of queer community.

Show Notes

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America by Lillian Faderman

Fighting for Life by Sara Josephine Baker

My Life With George, an unconventional autobiography by Ida A. R. Wylie

Historical dictionary of women’s education in the United States

“The Lavendar Lens: Lesbianism in the United States 1870-1969” by Audrey Hampshire

Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912-1940 by Judith Schwarz

Transcript

Transcription by Julia Pass

Rebecca:         Welcome to episode 32 of the Lady Science podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna:  I'm Anna Reser, cofounder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.

Leila:   I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.

Rebecca:         And I am Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.

Rebecca:         And it's June, which means it's Pride Month, though I think that we've also all agreed to rebrand this Wrath Month with everything happening in the world. But for now, on the podcast, it's Pride Month. And Lady Science, like in previous years, we wanna turn our attention to queer people in the history of science.

Rebecca:         And so on the website we're running our third annual Queer Science Series, and we've got some essays planned for that, so keep an eye on the website. Currently we have one up that is about heteronormativity in zoos that's really fascinating. So just keep an eye on ladyscience.com to see what else we have coming up. And today on the show we're going to be talking about queer physicians Sara Josephine Baker and Louise Pearce and the importance of queer community.

Anna:  So you may remember last year on the show for Pride, we talked about romantic partnerships between women in the context of the 19th century, particularly the long-term partnership between physicians Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier. Many women who wanted to build lives and families together in the 19th century were able to do so because of this idea of the romantic friendship between women, and it was a really common idea. And so even though women in romantic friendships couldn't obtain a recognized marriage under the state, they found other ways to express their commitment to each other. And these informal marriages were often personally fulfilling and enriching and sometimes professionally beneficial.

Anna:  But in the 20th century, ideas about romantic friendship began to change as love between women became pathologized. So in late 19th-century Europe a group of middle-class medical men, our old pals—

Rebecca:         Did something terrible happen in history? Was it the middle-class medical men? I think it was.

Anna:  A group of middle-class medical men called sexologists began studying what they called the female sexual invert, which is just women who had intimate relationships with other women. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Lillian Faderman says that sexologists studied these relationships first in the lower classes because they found it much easier to acknowledge this degeneracy in the class beneath them than in women of their own class or of higher classes. But middle-class women, with their new college educations and their incomes, were gaining just a little too much independence for the liking of these middle-class medical men, these sexologists, so they too soon became objects of study for sexologists.

Leila:   Now it might be surprising to you to learn that most male scientists of the 19th century cloaked their cultural beliefs about women in science, and they weren't really science. It wasn't really that scientific. I know that that's shocking. Basing their science in the theory of evolution, sexologists argued that people who did not contribute to the natural propagation of the human species through biological reproduction were in some way degenerate.

Leila:   Faderman writes, quote, "White middle-class European values and behaviors that reflected the background of those scientists came to be seen as scientifically normal and healthy. Those who did not conform were abnormal." End quote. And middle-class women who chose education, career, and relationships with other women over traditional heterosexual marriage threatened the, quote, "natural order of things" and were then considered abnormal according to science.

Leila:   In this way sexuality fell under the purview of the scientist, not just the moralist, and sexologists developed medical models to study what many would have considered to be a moral or ethical issue. And it is through these medical models, Faderman argues, that science came to uphold and define values and mores just as much or more than religion.

Leila:   I think it's just so funny that they had to build medical models to basically just hide their fear that they were becoming irrelevant to women. Like, "Look, you don't have to rely on me for income now. You don't need me for a marriage anymore. What do I do?"

Rebecca:         Yeah. I do feel like it's significant that earlier on, when it was rare and kind of harmless and quirky because fewer women could sort of be in these sort of independent, middle-class relationships, then it was fine because everyone is allowed one weird aunt. But when it becomes more than—I don't know. That's a weird way of putting it. But you know what? If you have a certain amount of just people who are eccentric but rich, then that's fine, but when it feels like, "Oh, no, the social order is starting to break down," then they have to medicalize, scienticize. It becomes dangerous. It becomes like, "Oh, no. What if they actually don't need us?"

Leila:   Yeah. Yeah. I think this idea of it being studied first in women of the working class first is really interesting because with middle-class women who could have a career and have a pretty stable income without a man, it was a lot easier for them to have these romantic friendships where they could live with another woman and it could seem fine. But for working-class women who kind of relied on marriage to a man for financial purposes didn't really even have the same access to having a relationship with a woman. I think that's an interesting distinction to make, which these men aren't even considering.

Anna:  Yeah. And I think the sort of scientific enforcement of what many people would have considered a moral issue is an important thing to keep in mind, the way that science in this period is kind of being enlisted to do this kind of moral policing and reinforce traditional structures of heteronormative society and that we could just develop whole new fields of science and specialties to make sure everything stays the way we want to reinforce the status quo.

Rebecca:         I mean, people like to think that they are rational beings in the modern—now that we have decided in the world that rationality has a height of moral value, really, that we all wanna think we're rational people, but people are not rational people. So they have to come up with some kind of system for explaining a discomfort that might be irrational. Not in the sense that it doesn't come from anywhere, but in the sense of it being not based in hard fact, I guess.

Rebecca:         People who don't like queer people will still trot out "Well, what is the point of LGBT people if they can't have kids?" Though that's even gotten kind of old-fashioned, and of course the newest version of this is "Well, but it's biology, so obviously trans people are misguided because sex is biology." And then people who study gender are like, "Actually, it doesn't work that way." Except for the ones that then do because they wanna hold on to that idea. Yeah.

Leila:   I like how science is not political and has nothing to do with religion until it absolutely does, and that's the only time you wanna enlist science, is to reinforce your shitty political or religious or moral worldview.

Rebecca:         Right. Right. Or just that you had an icky feeling about something for no particular reason.

Anna:  And so you developed an entire subdiscipline and set of scientific laws to explain why you feel weird about stuff.

Leila:   Okay. That is the 19th-century middle-class medical man in a nutshell.

Rebecca:         It's true, 100%. Yeah. But even as sexologists in Europe were clutching their pearls about women's new-won freedoms and devising reasons to take them away, middle-class career women in America weren't really slowing down. So at first they continued to embrace intimate relationships with other women, but gradually the ideas of European sexologists did make their way across the Atlantic, and by the 1920s many in America had adopted this new perspective on same-sex relationships.

Rebecca:         I just wanna put a side note, and this is one of those things I think that is not true but we all just sort of assume is true, which is that all the freaky liberals come from Europe and all of the prudes are in America. And this is a gross simplification of everything, but I just think it's really interesting that in this story you could in some way see it as the reverse. But in any case, this was the changing world that Sara Josephine Baker found herself in.

Rebecca:         So let's have a little bit about, talking a little bit about, Baker's professional life. As a young woman, she had planned to go to Vassar, but then both the male breadwinners in her family died, her brother first and her father a few months later, so that's horrifying. Though it also, in a very practical way, I think gets back to what Leila was saying about the significance for these women's colleges and women's communities of having some kind of source of income.

Rebecca:         But so Baker took what was left of the family estate and instead went to medical school at the women's medical college at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in hopes of providing for her surviving mother and sister. And this women's medical college will sound familiar to those of you who listened to last year's Pride episode. Baker was part of the generation of women physicians that followed the Blackwells. In fact, Baker trained under Emily Blackwell in New York, and Baker was one of the last women physicians to receive an MD from the college, which was ultimately subsumed by just the infirmary.

Rebecca:         In her autobiography Fighting for Life, Baker said that Emily, quote, "inspired us all with the vital feeling that we were still on trial and that for women who meant to be physicians, no educational standards could be too high. It was a real advantage to have trained under that tradition." I'm sure it was amazing, but that just sounds exhausting. I mean, I'm sure it was really necessary. Don't get me wrong.

Leila:   She also trained, I think, with Mary Putnam Jacobi. Could you imagine having to train under that first generation of women that really had to fight for absolutely everything and that they always had to be better and smarter and always on point and have to be trained under that?

Rebecca:         Seriously. Talk about "Back in my day." But it did seem that Baker took Blackwell's message to heart. In 1908 Baker was appointed director of the Bureau of Child Hygiene with the New York City Health Department, and her standards for how the department functioned were high and strict. She spearheaded novel preventative public health measures focused on expanding health care for mothers, infants, and children in low-income tenement neighborhoods.

Rebecca:         Within just three years of starting her public health program, infant mortality fell by 40%, which is insane. That's just a wild number to me, 40%. By the time she retired from the bureau in 1923, press reports estimated that her programs prevented the death of nearly 90,000 infants and served as models for public health programs in major cities all over the country.

Anna:  Sometime between the end of World War I and 1920, Baker met the Australian-British novelist and screenwriter Ida Wylie. Wylie had recently moved to New York and published her novel Towards Morning. Baker had read the novel and wanted to meet Wylie, but in her autobiography My Life with George, Wylie actually described this first meeting as a bit of a chilly one.

Anna:  She wrote, quote, "Unfortunately I had no idea who Baker was or that she had occupied a unique position in the medical world and New York's civil life. I had never heard of a baby death rate and certainly did not know what she had done to it, so that my opening gambit, 'Are you still practicing, Dr. Baker?' produced a noticeable chill." Let that be a lesson to you writers with your sharp tongues.

Leila:   And, I mean, to Wylie's credit, she had kind of just arrived in New York at the time, and so she wouldn't, I guess, have known about Baker as if she had been living in the US or in New York this whole time.

Anna:  I just love it.

Rebecca:         Yeah. It's delightfully awkward.

Anna:  So Baker and Wylie did meet again, and all was forgiven. It's unclear how long after this it was that they moved in together, but they did, and I really like the sort of breezy way that Wylie describes how this happened, as the most natural thing in the world. Quote, "We drifted into sharing a New York apartment together." And I love that. And they would live together until Baker's death over 20 years later.

Anna:  Most accounts of their relationship come from Wylie. Before Baker died, she destroyed all of her personal papers and correspondence, so we don't really have any of her feelings about this except in her autobiography. Baker mentions Wylie but never refers to their partnership or that they shared a home together. But from what we've been able to find out about the relationship, everyone in their social circle recognized them as a couple, and there's even one account from one of Wylie's friends calling Baker her, quote, "elderly American girlfriend."

Leila:   Eventually another physician, Louise Pearce, moved into Baker's and Wylie's New York apartment, too. Pearce was a pathologist who helped develop a treatment for African sleeping sickness, and though she is less well known to the public than Baker, she was a highly regarded and decorated medical scientist. In 1913 Pearce took a position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, where she would later meet Baker and Wylie.

Leila:   And after Baker retired from the bureau, she remained active in public health, and she served on a buncha committees and served with the League of Nations and shit. She did a lotta stuff. But she did start to dedicate more and more time to domestic life.

Leila:   Pearce, who was still much more active in medicine, needed to relocate for her work, so they all three of them moved together. Wylie says, quote, "When Louise Pearce moved with her department of the Rockefeller Institute to Princeton, we decided to go with her. Jo Baker, except for a dozen or so committees, had retired from public life and was not unwilling to prove that she could manage a house just as efficiently as she ran the Bureau of Child Hygiene. She proved it." End quote.

Rebecca:         Amazing.

Leila:   And all this stuff that I read about Jo Baker outside of Wylie's autobiography, that's true, probably. So around Princeton, Wylie said there were rumors that the three of them were called, quote, "The Girls." And she says, quote, "If this is so, I now know too much about American terminology to be flattered. There may have been other designations mercifully concealed from us. Three professional women, two of them eminent in their respective medical fields, and living amicably and even gaily together is an odd phenomenon, especially in a university town given over mainly to male talent." End quote.

Leila:   Wylie describes scenes of their life together, including some super funny moments where Baker and Pearce exasperatedly tease Wylie about her reliance on patent medicines that don't work and diagnosing herself with diseases she doesn't have. And I know we have to take autobiographies with a grain of salt, but by all of Wylie's accounts, the three of them built a happy life together. She says, quote, "We are all three quite reasonably happy and, I hope, not too unreasonably pleased with ourselves.

Rebecca:         It's so great. That's so great. Yeah. You get that many queer women together, and one of them is gonna have weird, woo-ey health beliefs. Just sayin'. Anyway, the three of them lived together in their New Jersey house until each of them died, Baker first and then Pearce and Wylie, who died only three months apart. Judith Schwarz says that Wylie later dedicated two novels to Pearce and that the faculty at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, where Pearce was president, referred to them as, quote, "special friends."

Leila:   We've heard that one before.

Rebecca:         Even after Baker died, Pearce continued to wear a charm bracelet that Baker had given her. The charm was in the shape of New Jersey and had a jewel embedded where their home was located, which is the cutest thing in the world. Pearce and Wylie were later buried next to each other.

Rebecca:         So most sources say that Baker and Wylie were the main couple and Pearce was merely their, quote, "roommate." But I think that there is room to say that this was a polyamorous relationship. When we look at queer relationships in the past, it's important that we don't look at them just through a nuclear family lens, and it's important to recognize that queer people weren't just trying to have relationships that mirrored traditionally heteronormative family structures. There were and are many ways that queer people lived their relationships and built their families.

Leila:   I think that there's this tendency of not just historians, but I just think people in general who try to kind of find queer people in the past—you know like in tabloids where it's like, "Celebrities, they live just like us"? I think there's a bit of a tendency to do that with queer people in the past and be like, "Look, they lived just like us." It was two moms and a baby, that there's still a tendency for there to be two parents and a child, or that that's the thing that people naturally want to have even if they're gay. And that's not necessarily true. They might want that and that's cool, but they also might not want that.

Rebecca:         Yeah. Yeah. It's true. And I think that it's difficult to underestimate the "Well, we're not doing things in any—we're already breaking all of the rules, so let's just figure out what we wanna do." The power of that, I think, and especially in ways that were, I imagine, if not innocuous—there was nothing weirder about three women living together than there was about two women living together, frankly.

Rebecca:         And, yeah, the ability to take advantage of that. Clearly all of them were in different professional and stages in their life, and you can imagine all of them contributing differently. And, yeah, I don't know. There's something about this relationship that certainly reminds me of poly relationships, people I know who are in poly relationships that take tons of different forms, not all of which are necessarily "All three of them are all in a romantic and sexual relationship simultaneously all the time," but they can still be a family unit.

Leila:   Mm-hmm. From what I've read about how their family unit kinda functioned was that they all helped each other in different ways. They served different functions. Like when Jo Baker retired and Louise was still practicing really regularly that she shifted into the more support role in the domestic space, but also during this time, Jo Baker started writing her autobiography. And it's pretty much agreed that Ida Wylie helped her, as the novelist and the writer, helped her write and craft that autobiography.

Leila:   So they all kind of served different but complementary purposes in their family unit, which I think is really nice. And I think that is how when you live with somebody through the kind of roles that you naturally fall into. And it seems like the three of them did just that.

Anna:  Yeah. When I was reading through the script earlier, I just got really hung up on this charm bracelet, which is extremely sweet. But also the way that historians, it's like they grudgingly admit that Baker and Wylie were the main couple, but they're like, "Well, that other one was just a roommate." And the material history of a token like that, any 19th century or early 20th century historian who saw that between a heterosexual couple would understand the meaning of that. But somehow it's just too far of a stretch for a lotta people.

Anna:  And I think it's interesting, the way that depending on historians' biases or areas of their practice that are underdeveloped or maybe even their prejudices or ideological commitments, but what counts as evidence of a certain type of relationship between people and how we classify different things. So I just was thinking about this little object that's at the heart of this story and how it gets interpreted and how you would be able to—the charm is in the spot where their house is. I know.

Leila:   A couple of sources that I saw that suggested that the main couple started with Baker and Wylie, and then when Baker died, Wylie shifted her emotional energies to Pearce. Even admitting if there was something going on with Pearce, that it had to happen in some sort of order.

Rebecca:         We can accept queerness and maybe serial monogamy. And it's like even obviously the two people would become more important to each other because now there were just two of them, but that doesn't mean that there wasn't a preexisting relationship. They all moved to Princeton together. They got up and moved.

Leila:   It didn't seem like one of those instances where the wife dies and then the husband marries the best friend or something like that. It didn't seem like one of those.

Rebecca:         And, yeah, as we've noted, this nontraditional relationship feels very modern and maybe even a little odd, considering the growing homophobic views towards women in same-sex relationships during the time period. Yeah. Just I go back to my point about how it's like, well, if it's gonna already be terrible for two women to be in a relationship, then why not? How much more terrible is it gonna be for there to be three women? I don't know.

Rebecca:         Anyway, while they were living in New York City, Baker, Wylie, and Pearce were part of a radical feminist club where nontraditional relationships were common and supported. And this club was called the Heterodoxy of Greenwich Village, which is great.

Leila:   Doesn't that have a very super-secret, culty, underground feel to the name?

Rebecca:         Yes. I would read a book in which they all actually had powers and solved world problems or something like that.

Leila:   Oh, man. That's the next setting for our D&D Lady Science games.

Anna:  Just the gay Illuminati. Instead of controlling the world, they're just helping people and doing doctor shit. Gay doctor Illuminati.

Rebecca:         That sounds amazing. Honestly, they probably can run the world. They can control the world. That seems fine.

Anna:  Yeah. That's fine with me. You gotta cut this out, though, 'cause this is a good idea. So the Heterodoxy of Greenwich Village was founded by Marie Jenney Howe in 1912. And the members, who were known as the Heterodites, were intergenerational and diverse in their backgrounds, careers, and political ideologies, but what they all shared was a commitment to, quote, "not be orthodox in her opinion." They met biweekly for lunch and discussion at Polly's Restaurant in the Village, and their meetings have been compared to the women's consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and '70s.

Anna:  Baker and Pearce were not the only scientific women in the club. Leta Stetter Hollingworth was also a member. She was a trailblazing psychologist who specialized in the psychology of women and laid the groundwork for what would later be called feminist psychology in the 1970s. The Socialist settlement house founder and nurse Lillian Wald also had ties to the group through her relationship with member Helen Arthur, who was a theater agent and producer. And other artistic members in addition to Wylie and Arthur included Charlotte Perkins Gilman of Yellow Wallpaper fame. Maybe you've heard of her.

Anna:  The nonconformist nature of the Heterodites clearly extended to their romantic and sexual relationships as well. In her book Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy, Judith Schwarz details how members, both queer and not, flouted heteronormative patriarchal relationships in numerous ways, such as not taking her husband's name after marriage. Oh, the humanity. Getting divorces, having open relationships, having relationships with women, having sex with women. Augh. [Unclear 30:10].

Leila:   And I will say that this idea of not taking your husband's name after marriage is still a big deal 'cause I didn't do that, and that was something that we all had to talk about all the time for a while.

Rebecca:         That's one of those things where it's just like, you know what? I'm really glad I'm marrying a woman. Caitlin and I had that conversation briefly, and then we were like, "That name seems too long, and it seems like too much work to change everything. Let's just not do it. Maybe we'll do it later. I don't know."

Leila:   Honestly, it's a lot less paperwork when you don't.

Rebecca:         Yeah. Exactly. My sister-in-law, years after she got married and changed her name, she was like, "Oh, I finally got the bank to fix everything" or "Oh, I'm finally not getting mail with my maiden name on it." And it just, yeah, seems to be—

Leila:   Yeah. Not worth it. So some of you might be thinking, "Well, this is the Village, so of course this was all fine." But even though the Village was known for its unconventionalism and for breaking taboos, lesbianism wasn't taken very seriously even there. Certainly same-sex relationships between women were more accepted in the Village than elsewhere in the US, but according to Audrey Hampshire, quote, "The predominant attitude of men in Greenwich Village regarding lesbianism conformed to the majority of people in in American society during this time." End quote. Lillian Faderman also argues in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers that lesbianism was not accepted in the Village as a valid sexual, big air quotes, "choice."

Rebecca:         Wasn't that even true later in the '60s?

Leila:   Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca:         I feel like it's like there were little to no cis lesbians at Stonewall and all of that, and if I remember correctly, the beatniks made fun of queer women constantly.

Leila:   Yep. Yep. Well, and one of the things that I read, and we'll include links to all this stuff in the show notes so you can look at it yourself, too, is that one of the big ideas from sexologists and stuff that was permeating American thought was that women had to have sex with men to stay healthy, and so in addition to choosing relationships with women over men, not having sex with men was also detrimental to women's health and also threatened traditional marriage. So there was a lot of stuff going on there. And so because of that, in the Village, being bisexual as a woman was much more accepted because you were still having sex with men.

Rebecca:         Right. Right. Also I've read—this was either in Odd Girls or Twilight Lovers or in a book about the Harlem Renaissance, but there was a span of time in the '20s where basically being a straight-presenting rich white woman and going to bars in Harlem and making out with other straight-presenting rich white women was a thing. I remember reading that and going, "Oh, my God, nothing ever changes."

Leila:   So even in the Village the Heterodoxy was radical in its acceptance of women's same-sex relationships. In her research on the club, Schwarz found 24, quote, "women loving women" out of the 110 known members. And in last year's episode we talked a lot about how we could look to the letters of women in romantic friendships to understand the intimate nature of their relationship.

Leila:   But Judith Schwarz looks to the correspondence of other Heterodoxy members to show just how normalized these relationships were amongst the group. She writes, quote, "The lesbians of Heterodoxy were discussed in letters between club members, although never called lesbians, and acknowledged in addressing Christmas cards to the couple. Good wishes were sent to the other partner whenever anyone wrote to her lover." End quote. Which I thought is another interesting historical strategy to learn about these things, is looking at what other people were saying about them because in this case we don't have Baker's stuff, so this was kind of what's left.

Rebecca:         Yeah. Yeah. I think that kind of our contemporary age, in which we value, for good reasons and sometimes not good reasons, everything is an independent choice and that romantic relationships have a social aspect. And therefore how other people think of two people's relationship with each other or multiple people's relationship with each other is part of—not what makes the relationship real. That's a bad way of putting it, but it's part of what makes the relationship what it is, is where it exists in the social structure.

Rebecca:         It's not clear how long Baker, Wylie, and Pearce were members of the Heterodoxy, but Schwarz has identified them in the club's 1920 album, and it's likely that their membership ended when they moved from New York City to Princeton, where they were "the girls." God, the comment about "So I have learned that sometimes when Americans say 'girls,' they mean other things."

Leila:   I think it's interesting how they were part of this group in New York City and then were kind of taken out of that when they went to Princeton and kind of, like Wylie said, surrounded by male talent and people who identified them as something. Yeah. That is different than how, obviously, members of the Heterodoxy would have recognized them.

Rebecca:         Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Been there, got the T-shirt. It's also not clear what kind of marginalization, if any, that Baker and Pearce received from the medical and scientific community for their relationship. Like we said earlier, Baker destroyed her correspondence, and in her published autobiography, she made no overt reference to her relationships.

Rebecca:         But given their cultural context, what sexologists were theorizing about queerness, and the prevailing views about lesbians in the Village and beyond, the Heterodoxy provided a community and a network of women who supported, accepted, and normalized their, quote, "not orthodox relationship." Communities and networks like the Heterodoxy gave people like Baker and her partners space to build their lives and families on their own terms.

Rebecca:         Over the last several years, I think historians and society in general has started to recognize that queer people didn't spring from the ground after Stonewall and that they didn't always live traumatic, closeted lives. But I think we need to keep telling these stories and expanding our understanding of queer life in the past even more.

Rebecca:         I really like this point about sort of radical and queer community, and, Leila, your point about losing that when they moved to Princeton 'cause, frankly, when I was [unclear 38:04] that, and I just made a dark joke about it. But you can move, to example, to a small town in upstate New York that is quite liberal but where suddenly everyone knows that you are a queer couple all of the time. And that is different than living in a large city where there is a large queer community and there are places where everyone or almost everyone can be assumed to be queer and also there are more people, so people are less in each other's business.

Rebecca:         And I just think that, yeah, this is why queer community spaces and women's spaces and spaces dedicated to other minoritized groups are important regardless of the general liberalness of the larger community because there is something very supportive about a space where your thing that feels like not the default anywhere else is finally the default for a little bit.

Anna:  I just wanted to say thank you for not giving me any heartbreaking or heart-wrenching letters to read because I just am really fragile right now. I would not be able to get through it.

Leila:   You're welcome. Only the good stuff for this one. I was telling Anna earlier, Rebecca, that I actually cut out a whole section of this that I just decided to delete and not pursue because it wasn't sad, but it was deep critical thinking. And I was like, "I just don't think I can do it right now, and I don't think I should make others do it right now."

Rebecca:         But, yeah, I like that this is a happy story about people livin' their best lives.

Anna:  I like this queer doctor Illuminati very much. I just love them. You guys are great. You're doing great.

Leila:   Well, I like that. That is a great place to stop.

Leila:   If you liked our episode today, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. Questions about any of the segments today? Tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, and more, visit ladyscience.com.

Leila:   And we are an independent magazine, and as we constantly remind you, we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.

Rebecca:         Yay.

Image credit: Sara Josephine Baker (1922), Ida A. R. Wylie (ca. 1910), and Louise Pearce (unknown) (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)