MARCIA M. GALLO, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement

Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, which won the 2006 Lambda Book Award, is the first book-length exploration of the history, achievements, and underlying tensions of one of North America's most influential lesbian organizations.Marcia M. Gallo's interviews with former group members and extensive use of archival records provide a fascinating portrait of the group's rise and fall.Formed in San Francisco in 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis (pronounced "Bill-EE-tis") (DOB) became an internationally renowned lesbian rights organ ization in the pre-Stonewall era.The group's name was a sly reference to the eponymous lesbian poet in Pierre Lou's Songs of Bilitis, and was chosen on the assumption that only other lesbians would understand it.The DOB was created as a social club by four couples; the organization was intended to provide a safe space for women who were tired of both police harassment and the scrutiny of tourists found in San Francisco's bar scene.However, in a move that would create the first of many internal schisms, founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon pushed the DOB to become a politically oriented "homophile" organization in 1956.The group grew slowly but steadily, thanks largely to the newsletter The Ladder; within two years there were local chap ters in New York, Los Angeles, and other urban centres.In 1960, the DOB began sponsoring biennial conventions on issues of importance to gays and lesbians, and these events (which featured mostly sympathetic religious, medical, and legal authorities as guest speakers) garnered a fair amount of media attention.Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the DOB's goals were explicitly assimilationist: members were expected to follow a dress code, and the group strove to promote lesbians as respectable, upstanding citizens yearning for greater inclusion in mainstream society.This strategy came under increasing attack toward the end of the 1960s and the beginning of 1970s, when the confrontational tactics of more radical groups like the Gay Liberation Front made the DOB seem timid and staid by comparison.However, as Gallo illustrates, those subsequent organizations owe a debt to the efforts of groups like the DOB, who faced great risks for their candor in earlier and more conservative times.A major structural reorganization in 1968, loss of The Ladder in 1972, ceaseless infighting, and a growing genera tion gap eventually brought about the DOB's demise, though some local chap ters managed to continue into the early 1990s.Different Daughters keeps issues of race, class, and gender at the fore front.While initially it is somewhat unsettling to read the ethnicity and class background of almost every person introduced, such designations do help the reader understand the group's significance within the larger social context of

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