During the eighteenth century, British doctors and theorists commonly identified a woman who desired other women by reference to
her possession of an enlarged, ostensibly phallic clitoris. Alternately, knowledgeable women
of that time understood that the Greek poet Sappho, who expressed erotic sentiments
for the women of Lesbos during the seventh century BCE, had bolstered the cultural dynamics for the creation of late-modern lesbian sexuality, and called one another Sapphists. The contemporary historian Susan S. Lanser defines the emerging subjectivity of the sapphist as the enthralled female companion or lover who dressed, spoke, or conducted themselves in a provocatively masculine manner. The English novelist and translator Matilda Hays (1820–1897), who went by
the names “Max” and “Mathew” among friends, lived in a publicly open relationship with her partner, the actor Charlotte Cushman, for more than a decade. She is shown here dressed in
a distinctive ensemble that joined a skirt
with a tailored shirt, tie, and jacket, a look that her Victorian contemporaries regarded as defiantly androgynous.

Southworth & Hawes, Charlotte Cushman and Matilda Hays, photographic daguerreotype, ca. 1855. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Sources: Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801, 1994. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. Lanser, Susan S. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.