Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torrès (All Editions)

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Women's Barracks holds a founding place in the history of lesbian publishing. Tereska Torrès based it on her own service with the Free French women's forces in wartime London, and her husband, the novelist Meyer Levin, translated it into English. Fawcett's Gold Medal imprint issued it in 1950 as a paperback original with a first printing of 200,000 copies, and historians credit it as the first American paperback original to become a bestseller. It sold more than two million copies in its first five years and some four million in the United States over its life, and it was translated into more than a dozen languages.

Its success shaped everything that followed. Gold Medal had marketed the book to men, but it found a large audience of women, and the publisher went looking for more novels on the theme, beginning with Vin Packer's Spring Fire in 1952. Literary historians date the golden age of lesbian pulp, the hundreds of titles published between 1950 and the end of the 1960s, from its appearance, and Baryè Phillips's original cover, with two women at its centre gazing at each other, is regarded as a classic image of lesbian fiction.

The book also became a target. Representative Ezekiel Gathings built the 1952 hearings of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials around paperbacks like it, with Women's Barracks as a leading example of literature said to promote moral degeneracy, and it was cited again in the report of a Canadian Senate committee on indecent literature. The publicity only prompted more printings: Fawcett reprinted it eleven times between 1950 and 1958. Torrès herself rejected the label of lesbian novel, pointing out that only one and a half of her five main characters could be counted as lesbian, and she never allowed it to be published in France. The Feminist Press later returned it to print, and its reputation as the first lesbian pulp has outlived her objections.