SOURCE: Fleche, Anne. “The Lesbian Rule: Lillian Hellman and the Measures of Realism.” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (spring 1996): 16-30.

In the following essay, Fleche explores the representation of lesbianism in language in The Children's Hour.

Lesbian rule: a mason's rule made of lead, which could be bent to fit the curves of a moulding; hence fig., A principle of judgement that is pliant and accommodating. (Very common in 17thc., but app. not always correctly understood.)

OED

Politics is deployed as the final measuring stick for assessing the present utility, and thus the final relevance, of theories of gay identity.¹

The invisible lesbian has posed difficulties for writers of queer history and criticism, in part just because she's a woman. We have seen, for example, how historian John Boswell accounted for the relative absence of women in his classic study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Women, he explained, mostly didn't...