u/ZeeepZoop

Hi guys!! I am currently working on a story centred around interclass suffragette/ female social reform in late 19th century England and need help naming two characters. The first is a volunteer nurse at a charity hospital and the second is her son who we see grow from a newborn to man over the course of the story.

If it helps, my other central characters are comfortably middle class women named Constance and Irene whom the woman and her son live with, and I would like the other names to fit this vibe, especially as they are very involved in raising the son and he is born while she is living with them.

Thomas is off limits as it has been used for another character!!

Thanks so much for your help, you have been great in the past!!!

I was born with a rare skeletal condition where some of my bones fused incorrectly before birth, and also have Ehlers Danlos syndrome which affects connective tissue. My whole life, I have struggled with physical weakness and hated looking so thin and getting cold easily because I couldn’t put on weight no matter what I did. I can’t exercise in many ways eg. run or gym, but I’ve always been able to swim and am lucky enough to have grown up in Australia where I got swimming lessons through school. The water is very helpful for my conditions as I can move without impact on my joints. Three years ago, I became a part time swim instructor and started swimming 1km most days after work mostly just to unwind from listening to kids talking and asking me questions for 6 hours solid ( I love working with my students but it would get so overwhelming having so many classes back to back and being around so much noise!!). I struggled with endurance initially and would be so weak and shaky when i got out but kept it up.

This year, I took the plunge (hehe) and got a pool membership so i can swim regularly even when i’m not working ( i only swim instruct between uni semesters, so for about four months total per year). I have swum 2-3 times a week consistently all year and have really really noticed a difference in my strength and stamina in the water, like now I can swim 2 km some days and still feel energetic!!! It is the best feeling and I love how calm and powerful I feel in the water.

My conditions make it so hard for me to gain weight and muscle but I have finally started to see broadening in my shoulders and more defined traps and muscles in my upper arms!! I love the way I look and feel the most confident I have ever been in my life! Today, I was wearing a sleeveless dress and my mum complimented me on my arms and seemed surprised as she hasn’t seen them in months ( it’s cold weather here in australia so i’ve been in long sleeves!) and they’ve got slightly bigger in that time. It was the first time anyone else has noticed and complimented me on the changes to my body and I just feel so happy and proud!

Why/ why not?

I’ve made a similar post before but am bringing it back in the light of research I’m currently doing.

I’m a lesbian who studies 19th century literature and am very involved in both historical and queer academia so have strong feelings on the topic! Though in the past historians 100% were responsible for a lot of queer erasure, eg. Victorian era interpretations of ancient Greek history and mythology, now the landscape has really shifted and most genuine historians are interrogating these assumptions made in the past and putting more effort into recognising diversity. Though they won’t always say ‘ these two people were 100% a couple’ and instead say ‘ they could be interpreted as couple’ it’s because, like any other analysis, you avoid making an assumption about a past situation you can’t 100% be sure of.

Additionally, the reason we now know about the sexualities or even existence of a lot of queer figures is due to historians. It isn’t like Shakespeare just materialised as a ghost in someone’s house and said ‘ hey, I’m bi,’ someone had to go back over his sonnets and find the pronouns that were posthumously changed and work out what that means, and that someone was a historian. Currently, there’s a strong field of modern historians looking back over figures, documents, events etc that were first analysed by historians in the past, with the view of correcting assumptions that were initially made. We have a much stronger understanding of gender and sexuality in the past due to this work.

In my view, the strongest example of what a modern historian does is Helena Whitbread with Anne Lister. Whitbread was a historian in the 1990s who ended up transcribing a section of Anne Lister’s journals with a focus on the social history of Halifax. As she went through Lister’s coded entries, she found references to same sex relationships which had been deliberately overlooked up until that point. Realising how important this was, Whitbread transcribed and published the full journals available to her at the time ( which has not been her initial intention, she carried out this project because she realised the value of the fact Anne Lister was a lesbian ), devoting years of her life to uncovering and giving us the information that gave Lister the title of the first modern lesbian.

Every day, when I go into google scholar and look for sources, analysis etc for my own writing, I am struck by how grateful I am by people like Whitbread who happened upon information about a queer figure by chance and realised the value in preserving and honouring it, so it is now easily accessible to people like me.

‘ Historians would call them besties’ jokes are kind of funny when used ironically by someone who knows the context of what historians do, but I feel we need to move past the default of assuming/ perpetuating the idea that all historians still operate as though it’s the 1940s. Most information we have about queer history comes from (surprise, surprise!) historians! I think in an age of anti intellectualism where so many people look down on academics like this as ‘wasting time’ ‘not having real jobs’ etc, the last thing we should be doing is perpetuating the myth that historians as a collective are inherently dense and/ or homophobic, when in reality, a lot of their work is so valuable to this community.

Yes, jokes are just light funnies but I think we’ve hit a point where we are mature enough to acknowledge that jokes reinforce a certain worldview or leave certain biases unquestioned. Humour isn’t some neutral field and absolutely perpetuates beliefs and values even subconsciously. The discussion of people’s views and opinions reveals a lot about the world they live in and what they subconsciously internalise, so I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to just dismiss anything with ‘it’s not that deep’.

Also, it makes me laugh that anecdotally, as a woman doing history which falls squarely under Arts degree, most people outside the LGBT community automatically assume I’m queer based on my area of study, whereas people in the LGBT community seem to assume someone in this field is out of touch from them. Like I have spent years fielding ‘ what are you going to do with your arts degree? shag other women?’ comments from extended family and then going online and reading ‘ all historians are straight’ type jokes.

I’m also currently writing a piece where I’m looking at artist/ academic/ companion/ Boston marriage dynamics and have really reflected how reductive it is to automatically assume all women who lived together like this were couples. Some absolutely were, we can tell from letters and journals that they adored each other, shared a bed, in some cases there is even clear evidence they had sex. However, some seem devoted to each other but there is no evidence of attraction between them and/ or evidence of opposite sex attraction they didn’t act on. I think it’s important to acknowledge that a portion of women in these dynamics were straight and gave up sexual and romantic prospects in favour of creative and intellectual freedom and the solidarity and support of other women with the same goal. It really speaks to how important these communities were in breaking women into academia and the public intellectual sphere that they encompassed women of all sexualities coexisting towards a shared goal of greater freedom ( the straight women pretty much always were aware of and supportive of queer contemporaries, if you look up the Irish wlw couple Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline Ffrench Mullen for instance, even their friends who were heterosexual and/ or married to men openly acknowledged the two as a domestic unit akin to being married even in the 1910s). I think a lot of the ‘they were all lesbians’ interpretations miss the intellectual community that these women were focused on, and it isn’t erasing queerness at all to say ‘ some of these women were same sex couples and some weren’t but they all clearly cared about each other as individuals and as part of a greater project of female liberation’.

I think it is more transgressive to acknowledge that straight women can, could and did choose to decentre men so completely in favour of personal freedom and sharing a community with queer women and that decentring men to focus on female solidarity and realising ones intellectual and creative potential isn’t something that just happens by the lucky byproduct of sapphic attraction, it is an active choice all women — straight or sapphic — can make. The cultural assumption all of these women were inherently attracted to each other has started to annoy me because it reflects the pervasiveness of the view all women are ruled by sexual and romantic urges and could only possibly form community based on them, rather than reasoned thought and decisions. It obviously isn’t disempowering to acknowledge same sex attraction absolutely existed in these circles and they were radical in that regard BUT implying it was the only factor that drew these women together ignores a) just how radical these circles were in that straight and queer people shared the same world and values at a generally conservative time, b) some women stay single because being in a romantic/ sexual relationship doesn’t serve her professional and creative direction, and c) these circles weren’t just about having sex and a good time, they had other socially transformative goals such as opposing fascism, supporting female suffrage, even seeking female political representation to achieve goals like social welfare ( again, look up Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline and their involvement public hospital and housing projects! Genuinely absolute icons!!)

Also, FYI, many of the short haired 19th- early 20th century “ butch baddies” you see in photos didn’t have short hair as an expression of queerness and we don’t even know their sexualities. In this time period, working class women sold their hair out of financial desperation, and it was also common for women’s’ heads to be shaved/ hair cut very short when they were ill with a fever. ‘ Broke Baddie Brain fever slay’ doesn’t have the same ring though! Short hair in a historical photo does not a lesbian make!

Obviously I haven’t made this post as a condemnation of people who make these jokes — I do in certain circles and contexts — or try to dictate what we can and can’t say, but just to encourage greater awareness that humour isn’t innocuous and history is a complicated field. If you disagree with me but can justify it ( beyond ‘ it’s not that deep’ or ‘ no, you’re just wrong’!), I’m still happy because it means you’ve thought about and considered the topic, which is really all I want. If you’ve made it to the end, thanks for reading, have a good day and hope you’re having an awesome pride!!! I love you all so much <3

I’ve made a similar post before but am bringing it back in the light of research I’m currently doing.

I’m a lesbian who studies 19th century literature and am very involved in both historical and queer academia so have strong feelings on the topic! Though in the past historians 100% were responsible for a lot of queer erasure, eg. Victorian era interpretations of ancient Greek history and mythology, now the landscape has really shifted and most genuine historians are interrogating these assumptions made in the past and putting more effort into recognising diversity. Though they won’t always say ‘ these two people were 100% a couple’ and instead say ‘ they could be interpreted as couple’ it’s because, like any other analysis, you avoid making an assumption about a past situation you can’t 100% be sure of.

Additionally, the reason we now know about the sexualities or even existence of a lot of queer figures is due to historians. It isn’t like Shakespeare just materialised as a ghost in someone’s house and said ‘ hey, I’m bi,’ someone had to go back over his sonnets and find the pronouns that were posthumously changed and work out what that means, and that someone was a historian. Currently, there’s a strong field of modern historians looking back over figures, documents, events etc that were first analysed by historians in the past, with the view of correcting assumptions that were initially made. We have a much stronger understanding of gender and sexuality in the past due to this work.

In my view, the strongest example of what a modern historian does is Helena Whitbread with Anne Lister. Whitbread was a historian in the 1990s who ended up transcribing a section of Anne Lister’s journals with a focus on the social history of Halifax. As she went through Lister’s coded entries, she found references to same sex relationships which had been deliberately overlooked up until that point. Realising how important this was, Whitbread transcribed and published the full journals available to her at the time ( which has not been her initial intention, she carried out this project because she realised the value of the fact Anne Lister was a lesbian ), devoting years of her life to uncovering and giving us the information that gave Lister the title of the first modern lesbian.

Every day, when I go into google scholar and look for sources, analysis etc for my own writing, I am struck by how grateful I am by people like Whitbread who happened upon information about a queer figure by chance and realised the value in preserving and honouring it, so it is now easily accessible to people like me.

‘ Historians would call them besties’ jokes are kind of funny when used ironically by someone who knows the context of what historians do, but I feel we need to move past the default of assuming/ perpetuating the idea that all historians still operate as though it’s the 1940s. Most information we have about queer history comes from (surprise, surprise!) historians! I think in an age of anti intellectualism where so many people look down on academics like this as ‘wasting time’ ‘not having real jobs’ etc, the last thing we should be doing is perpetuating the myth that historians as a collective are inherently dense and/ or homophobic, when in reality, a lot of their work is so valuable to this community.

Yes, jokes are just light funnies but I think we’ve hit a point where we are mature enough to acknowledge that jokes reinforce a certain worldview or leave certain biases unquestioned. Humour isn’t some neutral field and absolutely perpetuates beliefs and values even subconsciously. The discussion of people’s views and opinions reveals a lot about the world they live in and what they subconsciously internalise, so I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to just dismiss anything with ‘it’s not that deep’.

Also, it makes me laugh that anecdotally, as a woman doing history which falls squarely under Arts degree, most people outside the LGBT community automatically assume I’m queer based on my area of study, whereas people in the LGBT community seem to assume someone in this field is out of touch from them. Like I have spent years fielding ‘ what are you going to do with your arts degree? shag other women?’ comments from extended family and then going online and reading ‘ all historians are straight’ type jokes.

I’m also currently writing a piece where I’m looking at artist/ academic/ companion/ Boston marriage dynamics and have really reflected how reductive it is to automatically assume all women who lived together like this were couples. Some absolutely were, we can tell from letters and journals that they adored each other, shared a bed, in some cases there is even clear evidence they had sex. However, some seem devoted to each other but there is no evidence of attraction between them and/ or evidence of opposite sex attraction they didn’t act on. I think it’s important to acknowledge that a portion of women in these dynamics were straight and gave up sexual and romantic prospects in favour of creative and intellectual freedom and the solidarity and support of other women with the same goal. It really speaks to how important these communities were in breaking women into academia and the public intellectual sphere that they encompassed women of all sexualities coexisting towards a shared goal of greater freedom ( the straight women pretty much always were aware of and supportive of queer contemporaries, if you look up the Irish wlw couple Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline Ffrench Mullen for instance, even their friends who were heterosexual and/ or married to men openly acknowledged the two as a domestic unit akin to being married even in the 1910s). I think a lot of the ‘they were all lesbians’ interpretations miss the intellectual community that these women were focused on, and it isn’t erasing queerness at all to say ‘ some of these women were same sex couples and some weren’t but they all clearly cared about each other as individuals and as part of a greater project of female liberation’.

I think it is more transgressive to acknowledge that straight women can, could and did choose to decentre men so completely in favour of personal freedom and sharing a community with queer women and that decentring men to focus on female solidarity and realising ones intellectual and creative potential isn’t something that just happens by the lucky byproduct of sapphic attraction, it is an active choice all women — straight or sapphic — can make. The cultural assumption all of these women were inherently attracted to each other has started to annoy me because it reflects the pervasiveness of the view all women are ruled by sexual and romantic urges and could only possibly form community based on them, rather than reasoned thought and decisions. It obviously isn’t disempowering to acknowledge same sex attraction absolutely existed in these circles and they were radical in that regard BUT implying it was the only factor that drew these women together ignores a) just how radical these circles were in that straight and queer people shared the same world and values at a generally conservative time, b) some women stay single because being in a romantic/ sexual relationship doesn’t serve her professional and creative direction, and c) these circles weren’t just about having sex and a good time, they had other socially transformative goals such as opposing fascism, supporting female suffrage, even seeking female political representation to achieve goals like social welfare ( again, look up Dr Kathleen Lynn and Madeline and their involvement public hospital and housing projects! Genuinely absolute icons!!)

Also, FYI, many of the short haired 19th- early 20th century “ butch baddies” you see in photos didn’t have short hair as an expression of queerness and we don’t even know their sexualities. In this time period, working class women sold their hair out of financial desperation, and it was also common for women’s’ heads to be shaved/ hair cut very short when they were ill with a fever. ‘ Broke Baddie Brain fever slay’ doesn’t have the same ring though! Short hair in a historical photo does not a lesbian make!

Obviously I haven’t made this post as a condemnation of people who make these jokes — I do in certain circles and contexts — or try to dictate what we can and can’t say, but just to encourage greater awareness that humour isn’t innocuous and history is a complicated field. If you disagree with me but can justify it ( beyond ‘ it’s not that deep’ or ‘ no, you’re just wrong’!), I’m still happy because it means you’ve thought about and considered the topic, which is really all I want. If you’ve made it to the end, thanks for reading, have a good day and hope you’re having an awesome pride!!! I love you all so much <3

I’m not having a baby any time soon but I love all of these names ( and would want to use one in the hypothetical situation I have a daughter!) and was wondering what other people thought of them! I feel each one has a different energy!

Helena is pronounced Hel - Enna for me, I a Swedish woman called Helena pronounced Hel- Ay- nah but I’m English so wouldn’t go with that as I feel most people wouldn’t intuitively say it that way in the accent. How would you say Helena and Elena? I know there are multiple pronunciations for each :)

I was born with a congenital disorder that causes pretty major facial differences due to bone abnormalities, as well as ehlers danlos syndrome which causes problems with your muscles. Due to my skull, I had to see a speech therapist because my jaw was abnormally narrow so I struggled to make sounds that require putting the tongue behind the teeth at the roof of the mouth ( eg. “th”) because there was nowhere for the tongue to physically go until I had pretty extensive work done to widen my pallet when I was a teenager. I also struggled with basically all body coordination, and was very physically weak, had poor vision ( again, the skull abnormalities, I had to have multiple major eye and reconstructive surgeries), couldn’t throw and catch etc. I saw a range of different professionals but my speech and occupational therapists are the ones I’ll focus on in this story.

I have always been good academically, and did well at school as a child. However, because of my difficulties, both of these professionals talked to me like they automatically assumed I was stupid. For instance, I remember when I was about ten - eleven and starting to prepare for high school, both gave me a big talk where instead of asking IF I was struggling at school etc. they said “ You ARE struggling at school” as though it was a fact, which created weird dissonance because I was a straight A student ( aside from sport!). The worst, which I still vividly remember, was my occupational therapist saying that my slow handwriting speed reflected below average verbal processing, and she genuinely started to question if I could read, and acted like she thought I was lying when I showed her the copy of Jane Eyre I was part way through. Another banger was when I asked to look at some novelty erasers my speech therapist had on her desk and she handed me one and told me not to put it in my mouth. I cannot stress this enough, I had interactions like this with them pretty much every session for about two years.

I stopped seeing them in high school because my speech improved to a normal level overnight literally as soon as I had teeth removed from the roof of my mouth, and the OT specialised in younger kids and by the time I needed to move to a new one, I’d got to a point where I was staying physically strong and mobile with swimming lessons instead and had mastered all my fine motor skills anyway.

I genuinely did well at high school, and having always been very shy and insecure in primary school ( I was picked on for my appearance, speech and the fact I couldn’t throw a ball etc, I’m from Australia so lots of netball and cricket!!), I became a lot more confident when I got into public speaking and amateur theatre age 15 and won the state debate competition 2 years running. My teammates and I are still such close friends, and it was amazing to be able to stand up in front of people and be so focused on the debate I didn’t worry what they thought of my appearance, and know I was able to speak clearly and be understood. Like high school debate was probably the single biggest turning point for my self confidence.

I am now in my final year of uni, and have not thought about my experiences with childhood medical professionals in a long time. However, I am now in this weird place where I am doing very well grades wise, have won multiple achievement awards and am getting lots of opportunities eg mentoring and internships, but I have started to think of myself as so dumb and incompetent despite external success markers, and almost feel the awards, grades etc are undeserved/ are being given based on a false idea of my skills or because people feel sorry for me ( which is obviously bullshit, that’s not how the world works!). I’ve developed a fear that someone is going to “unmask me” by showing everyone how I don’t understand anything, am somehow faking my writing skills etc. Until about a year ago, I had never thought about myself like this and had always been very secure in my intelligence and achievements. It’s really started to come to a head when I write research papers because I always get good grades on them, but when I don’t feel I’m working hard enough, I have an inner voice tell me I’m lazy and don’t deserve to do well because I’m cruising through on natural intelligence but then I think I don’t even have that and it’s just dumb luck that I’ve got to this point. I sat there and asked myself one day why I don’t think I’m smart enough, and was really unpleasantly surprised when I IMMEDIATELY remembered how my childhood specialists spoke to me, particularly when they implied I couldn’t understand things or express an idea by writing or even make other people understand me in any way. It really unsettled me because i genuinely wonder how much they’ve impacted me without me realising it.

Disclaimer: I know it’s pretty normal to have imposter syndrome, struggle with self esteem especially coming up to a big change like graduating. However, I think being a kid and having adults undermine me when I said I could read well, was doing fine at school etc and then imply I was inarticulate and stupid genuinely has played a role in how I talk to myself/ see myself now. For the first time since I stopped seeing them, I have this deep anger towards my therapists, made even stronger by the fact I now work not one but two jobs with kids ( swim instructor and academic tutor) and I wouldn’t dream of speaking to my students anywhere even close to the way they spoke to me. I am not even saying this to try and make myself look superior, I just genuinely cannot imagine looking at a child and telling them they won’t ever be good at something/ telling them they’re naturally not good at things. The fact that someone voluntarily chose to work as a therapist for kids with medical conditions that already give them reason enough to be secure, and couldn’t speak to an 11 year old child without insulting them makes me genuinely livid to think about. The worst part is that I knew the things they said to me wasn’t true, even at the time, but I have now started to hear their negative view of me when I put myself down as an adult.

Part of me feels like it is quite good to have it resurface so I can process it, unpack how I feel etc rather than just shove it away and move on like I did the first time, but at the moment, I’m still at a stage where I’m feeling nothing but anger when I think about them. I don’t really know where to begin with working through this.