Letter: Lesbians and women's issues
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Sir: In her review of Sally Cline's award-winning new book Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying (14 October), Polly Toynbee takes issue with an idea that at the moment of death men and women might not be equal. It is an idea entirely her own. She has misread the book's argument, which suggests that it is the lead- up to death, the responses to terminal illness and the experiences of bereavement that are different for women and men.
Ms Toynbee's second distortion is in suggesting that the major focus of the book is on lesbians and that their inclusion is unwarranted. The book in fact focuses on the experiences and responses of dying women, bereaved women and women carers, who include mothers, daughters, widows and partnerless women from many different cultures and classes, whose sexuality may be heterosexual, bisexual, celibate or lesbian.
More critical is her penultimate sentence:
Nothing wrong with lesbians, it is just that they have no place in studies about women per se. The issues are utterly different.
Lesbians, like female heterosexuals, are women and therefore patently have a place in studies about women. Had Ms Toynbee written: "Nothing wrong with blacks ..." the evident racism would, one hopes, have prevented her review from appearing.
Yours faithfully,
Richard Beswick
Editorial Director
Little Brown
London, WC2
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments