Cold War Femme by Robert J. Corber

In his bestselling The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (1965), Jess Stearn announced that most lesbians looked no different from other women: some were sex symbols, some were married to unsuspecting husbands. Robert J. Corber argues that The Grapevine exemplified a homophobic Cold War discourse that cast the femme as an invisible threat to the nation, fed by fears that college-educated women would reject marriage and motherhood and weaken the American family against totalitarianism. Where early twentieth-century homophobia defined the lesbian as a masculine woman, the Cold War reconceived her as a woman attracted to other women. Corber traces this shift through Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s, including All About Eve, The Children's Hour and Marnie, and through the careers of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Doris Day.