Christine Smallwood has an interesting review in Salon.com of Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks – the first lesbian pulp novel. I can’t claim to be an expert on the genre, and I haven’t read Torres’ book. Nevertheless, I found this review, intriguingly titled “Sapphic Soldiers”, fascinating.

Women’s Barracks is a 1950s (somewhat) fictional “frank autobiography of a French girl soldier” and for sure contains some girl-on-girl action (although I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was described as in the 1950s)

Torres isn’t shy about discussing “strange caresses” or “small pointed breasts,”

But Smallwood points out that the book is much more than this,

She doesn’t just record what women do with each other, but what they say to each other: how they relate as lovers and friends, allies and enemies; how they think about the “real Lesbians” and the “normal women … who play at such games”; how they admire, disregard and sleep with men; how they cope with liberated spirits and unwanted pregnancies. Torres gives readers both pulpy lesbian lust and an honest story about real women…

However, I was interested as much for this review’s discussion of the differences between American and French views of sexuality as for its description of the novel itself. As Smallwood notes

An American congressional committee on “current pornographic materials” examined it as an example of perversion, but publishers were able to avoid censorship by arguing that it actually taught “moral lessons” about the “problem” of lesbianism. A Canadian court, on the other hand, concluded after two days of deliberations that it didn’t educate, but encouraged girls to go down that wayward path, and ruled it obscene.

At the same time, Torres comments that

I remember first of all the book came out in America when I was still in Paris. I was overwhelmed by the idea that they had published 200,000 copies of it. I couldn’t believe it. And I went to see this man at Fawcett. Nobody said “lesbian” to me, nobody mentioned it. All I knew is that they all said it was terribly shocking, and I didn’t know why they said that. I thought I had written a very innocent book. I thought, these Americans, they are easily shocked.

I enjoyed this review very much and appreciated the way it encouraged readers to think about the different ways in which American and French societies view sexuality today, as well as in the 1950s. By extension, I expect I’ll give Women’s Barracks a shot, for the same reason and also because it sounds like an interesting mix of fact and fiction.

As a side comment, I thought “Sapphic Soldiers” was a great title, perhaps surpassed only by slate.com‘s recent “Terry McMillan: Waiting to Excel”.