"Shattering the Silence: Jeannette Howard Foster and the Writing of Sex Variant Women in Literature"
Joanne Passet, PhD

Jeannette Howard Foster (1895-1981) was raised in Illinois and gained a PhD at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. For four years in the 1950s she managed the collections of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, where she worked with Alfred Kinsey. Eventually she left to publish her own work. In In 1956, she produced Sex Variant Women in Literature, a bibliographic essay that discusses literary accounts of lesbian love from the ancient Greeks though modern times. In the book received a 1974 ALA Stonewall Book Award, and today is considered one of the most important works about lesbian literature.