"Women's Barracks" by Tereska Torres (Gold Medal 1950/Feminist Press 2005)

Women’s Barracks is dated.

But what do we mean when we call a book “dated”? The label suggests some sort of change in reception or perception, but I think it is more than just a value judgment. It is also saying that something is so tied to the time period in which it was created that it can’t be fully understood or appreciated outside of that context. Rather, for better or for worse, the time period says more about the work than the work says about the time. In my opinion, this is the case with Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks, originally published by Gold Medal books in 1950 and reprinted by CUNY’s Feminist Press in 2005 as part of their Women Write Pulp series.

Reading it in now, at first there didn’t seem to be much beyond the racy-for-its-time factor: the hetero- and homosexual lives of women involved in the Free French Forces during World War II. Like a gossipy diarist, the first-person narrator recounts the amorous adventures of the women she lived and worked with. Despite the wartime setting, the story is rather soapy, with most of the novel taken up with introspective observations that drag on with too much detail and too little action. “Show, don’t tell,” might be a cliché, but it would have improved Women’s Barracks considerably. We’re told so much about the characters, but little of it actually happens. The effect is a largely un-engaging narrative.

However, the CUNY reprint includes an interview with Torres by Joan Schenkar and an afterward by Judith Mayne. These additions made me see the book in a different light, and I wish I had read them before attempting the book on its own. Schenkar and Mayne detail the story behind Women’s Barracks, its relation to Torres’ own work with the Free French Forces (the book isn’t quite an “autobiography” but it is grounded in her own experience), as well as its publishing history. Despite whatever suspicions we may have about Gold Medal’s own prurient interest in the book, Torres claims that the sexual nature of the story was of her own doing, and she didn’t receive any pressure to “spice” it up. The book was not only highly controversial when it came out (even attracting the negative attention of a congressional committee) but also influential. As Ann Bannon (author of Odd Girl Out) remembered, “Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks showed me a writer who didn’t just write about women in uniform. She made me realize what they might have been doing with each other in their off hours and it took my breath away.”

Jay Walz wrote an article on the controversy, “Publisher Defends Lurid Paper Books,” which was published in The New York Times on Dec. 2, 1952. Walz summarized the defense to the Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials made by Ralph Daigh, the editorial director of Fawcett Publications (who owned Gold Medal). As paraphrased by Walz, books like Women’s Barracks “went no further in sensuality and misdeed than did Homer, Plato and Shakespeare.” Daigh also saw the books as “reflecting the life and times of this generation. Such books should be published and made freely available.” Only three years into its existence, Daigh reported 43,149,063 total Gold Medal paperbacks sold—a high number that surely displeased those shocked and repelled by their offerings. The committee counsel, H. Ralph Burton, even went so far as to say that Women’s Barracks “contain[ed] passages he could not quote in a public hearing.” Other articles of the time report that Torres' book was even investigated in Canada.

Schenkar and Mayne make a convincing argument for the book’s cultural importance in that, as the first lesbian paperback for Gold Medal, it would pave the way for Vin Packer, Valerie Taylor, Ann Bannon, and many others. This background info doesn’t make it a better novel, but it does help put the book, and more importantly its time, in perspective.

"The Girls in 3-B" by Valerie Taylor (Gold Medal, 1959/Feminist Press, 2003)

Annice, Barby, and Pat are The Girls in 3-B, three young women straight out of high school who leave their small home-town and move to Chicago. Sharing an apartment, they hope to find work and to escape their parents, their peers, and their past. In short—they want to grow up. While Gold Medal originally marketed Valerie Taylor’s novel in 1959 as lurid exploitation (three girls undressing on the cover was their obvious selling strategy), the book is actually a sincere and perceptive coming of age story that holds up quite well half a century later.

As Lisa Walker points out in her Afterward to the book (which was reprinted in 2003 by CUNY’s Feminist Press as part of their series “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp”), Taylor’s ambitions are actually at odds with both the pervasive, conservative mores of the time, and even subverts the advertising politics of Gold Medal. Not all of the girls are as naïve as they seem—one of them is fleeing sexual abuse at home, while the others are not demonized for their own sexual awakenings—nor does Taylor give in to the promises of the cover art. Readers looking for licentious pleasures should look elsewhere. Taylor doesn’t put The Girls in 3-B on display for cheap thrills or voyeuristic fantasies. Instead, these three young women are struggling with economic independence and sexual identity in the era before Women’s Lib. There are certain concessions to the time period (which is to be expected) but, more importantly, the book questions the expectations demanded by 1950s America and shows that the young generation was challenging the norms.

Valerie Taylor herself was a political activist her whole life and was involved with many civil rights and feminist organizations. At least one battle she won on the page was the positive portrayal of a lesbian couple, something that was not possible nine years earlier in Tereksa Torres’ Women’s Barracks (1950) or even seven years prior in Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), both of which were also published by Gold Medal. Now that the book is back in print (with the same cover art, no less, though it is reversed), we can now appreciate The Girls in 3-B for strides forward that it, and its author, were able to achieve.

Here are some quotes from the book:

“The city spread for miles, vast and impersonal. A huge honeycomb of buildings intersected with streets, alleys, parks. A human body was nothing, a small fragile thing capable of being hidden in a sewer or a broom closet. Both of them their human helplessness, pitted against the uncaring monster that was Chicago.”

“The cold wind, blowing through her thin dress and forcing itself upon her abstraction, was like a knife. But she walked on, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk, ignoring traffic when she came to a crossing, half-blind and wholly deaf with shock and anger.”