This is my favorite historical find so far, because it so perfectly mixes together racism, classism, heterosexism, misogyny, and by implication, ableism, cissexism, monosexism, xenophobia, basically everything you can think of. This is the rightful place for anti-ace sentiment: hand in hand with all other forms of bigotry.
From “Feminism,” by Correa Moylan Walsh, 1917:
(anything in bold is my own emphasis, not hers)“…Women’s concern with the concerns of men is contrary to the nature of things, and the nature of things will prevail. The principle of the survival of the fit women, in the order of nature, means also the passing away of the unfit women – the ‘elimination of the wayward.‘
“The women who act the parts of men will not perform the function of women: they will not leave offspring. Their progeny will die out. Only the progeny of the women who remain women will abound. Thus feminism, in all its elements, is doomed.
“It would seem to be a law of progress that advancing civislisation tends to produce asexual women – female Urnings, as well as males of the same type. As the old customs compel these also to marry and to reproduce their kind, their numbers increase, till at last the old customs are broken down. Then the opening of men’s professions to women, and the liberation of women from women’s duties, acts as a safety-valve.
“The asexual women behave like sexless men, enter men’s professions, support themselves, do not marry, or at all events produce next to no children and – both they and their male similars, who likewise refrain from marriage – die out.
“Then, the field being cleared of such creatures, the remaining women, produced from mothers and fathers who had the normal sex-instincts of men and women, will be such themselves, and will of themselves retire from competition with men, who in their turn will be virile, and the world will continue on its usual course.
“If this were all, we might be willing to wait for the automatic clearing, when its predestined time comes. But this is not all, and here comes in the second reason why, in particular, woman suffrage cannot last.
“The clearing itself is an evil that will weaken many a nation or race, and endanger its existence in the competition with other nations or races in the portentous times that are coming. Feminism, begun among the asexual, is spreading to those with normal sexual instincts, who, in a false imitation of the others, repress them.
“The virile men and feminine women of the upper or leading classes or races are likewise affected by the anti-child-bearing mania, and their progeny also will die off, leaving the world in the hands of inferior classes or races. The decline of civilisation will then be accomplished, and the usual course of things must begin again from a low plane.”
Did you ever know you had so much POWER?!
From dictionary.com:
urning /ˈɜːnɪŋ/noun
1.a rare word for (esp a male) homosexual
Word OriginC20: from German, from Urania (Aphrodite); compare uranism“But she doesn’t mean aces, she means lesbians!” She means the whole assembly of women who don’t fit into the normal societal roles of marrying men, having babies, and staying out of politics and the workplace.
She does not care whether it comes from liking women as well, liking women exclusively, having no sex drive, having no relationship drive, being trans, or anything else of the sort. Does not give a fig. The entire kit and caboodle is queer in her eyes, whether she uses that word or not.
It’s only our modern, identity-politics-driven, label-driven selves that see differences here. To them, we all have the same problem.
That dictionary definition doesn’t really do “Urning” full justice, though.
As it indicates, the name comes from Aphrodite Urania, who was made from Uranus’s testicles – feminine made from masculine. See, in 1869, gender and sexuality were inextricably linked as far as anyone was concerned. In fact, there was a whole taxonomy.
- Urning – A person of male body but feminine psyche, attracted to men. Occasionally used to refer to the entire group.
- Urningin – A person of feminine body but masculine psyche, attracted to women.
- Dioning/Dionin – The straight equivalents.
- Uranodioning/in – Masculine and feminine bisexuals.
- Zwitter – lit. “hybrid.” Intersexed.
Notice a pattern? This covers basically everybody that aphobes agree is validly and acceptably “queer.” Urning, as an umbrella term, is effectively synonymous with “queer.”
Which brings us back to the quoted article, explicitly placing asexual women under the “Urning” umbrella. In 1917. Aphobes, you may begin eating your words.
This is fucking amazing thank you so much!!!!
I feel like people will flip from “You’ve never been a part of this community and outsiders have never thought you were,” to “but they didn’t use the word QUEER, feel free to reclaim ‘Urning’ all you want.”
This would be hair-splitting at its worst. People rarely use slang like that in writing, with the exception of casual writing like letters. They were using “queer” casually to explicitly mean this same group of people by 1894, but they left very few written records of it.
Demanding that aces/aros come up with some kind of written proof that they were explicitly called “queer” this far back, instead of that they were considered queer, would be a real douche move. Especially when the folks making these demands don’t even do superficial google searches themselves.
(What happened in 1894? According to this Autostraddle piece, John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry in Scotland, had a son named Francis who “was the private secretary to Archibald Primose, aka Lord Rosebery, and it was rumored that the two were romantically involved.
“After Francis died mysteriously, Douglas wrote a letter to his other son, Lord Alfred Douglas, denouncing “Snob Queers like Rosebery” and blaming said snob queers for Francis’s death. Alfred may not have agreed with his dad, as he was busy receiving sexy letters from the one and only Oscar Wilde. Douglas found out about that, too, and would later threaten to out Rosebery unless Rosebery vigorously prosecuted Wilde for sodomy; the rest is history.”
Also, that piece claims, or at least quotes people as claiming, that they only ever knew of heteros using this term, never of any of us using it for ourselves; but it seems to me that its examples from the society columns can only have come from us using it for ourselves.
There’s also this fascinating manuscript from 1940 called, I am not making this up, “MILLIONS OF QUEERS: OUR HOMO AMERICA.” so… that… i don’t even… what??? It’s by Allen Bernstein, a gay Jewish soldier who two years earlier had written a memoir called “A Pervert Talks Back.”
So yeah anyway I guess my point is that very little has changed in the past 150 years and it is kind of fucking with my head.)
Also worthy of note:
* The word Urning predates even the term “homosexual". It and the other words above were coined in 1862 by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who (according to Wikipedia), “is seen today as the pioneer of the modern gay rights movement.”
* Urning, and derivations like “Uranian”, were used in English for many years. Even Oscar Wilde wrote, “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.“* The word “homosexual” does not, as is frequently stated, come from the DSM and the medicalization and demonization of homosexuality. Both “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were coined in 1868 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, who was either gay or bi and whose gay best friend killed himself. Kertbeny dedicated his life, after that, to writing EXTENSIVELY about gay rights.
* He might also have been the first person to erase bisexuality in favor of fighting purely for gay rights. IIRC, the word “bisexual” would continue to mean “two genders” for… quite some decades.
* I can’t there’s too much information aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa it is too gooooooooodHonestly my #1 takeaway from this post is the bUrning desire [I went there] to adopt Urning because damn am I in love with that term.
I’m totally derailing this but.. I think I would scream if the q community reclaimed yet another word from the philhellenic era x_x I guess at least this one is only ripping off mythology instead of geographic locations.
nobody ever thought aces were “lgbt” before now! never never ever
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