“I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.”
– Natalie Barney
Natalie Barney was an influential modernist lesbian who perused Parisian lesbian circles and took many female lovers. Like many lesbians of the time, Natalie Barney migrated from America to Paris, where boundary-pushing art and sexual expression were comparatively more welcome.
Natalie was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876, and died in Paris, 1972, at the ripe old age of 95. Her outlook, work, and overall vibe is associated with France, where she’s canonized as an artistic – and lifestyle – legend. She’s almost completely unknown in the U.S.
Natalie was unapologetic in her disobedience to patriarchal systems and ideologies. While she was a playwright, poet and novelist, the artistic conventions of modernism, such as the rejection of strict rules on narrative and form, are expressed best in the way Natalie Barney simply just lived her life.
Growing up with a violent, alcoholic father, inspired Natalie to live an independent, rebellious life. Diana Souhami states, in No Modernism Without Lesbians, that “defying him was an essential component of Natalie’s freedom.” Natalie’s life was lived as an anti-patriarchal demonstration. She wrote, “I neither like nor dislike men, I resent them for having done so much evil to women. They are our political adversaries.”
Natalie’s feminist status was cemented when she travelled Europe with her mother as a teenager. She saw the way women were treated so badly and rejected the belief that a woman’s only purpose was to be a wife and mother. “The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating,” she said.
Natalie Barney went where desire led her in feminist rebellion. One way she rejected the social narratives women were expected to conform to at the time was by refusing monogamy and marriage, solely sleeping with women – sometimes more than one at once – and making the bold decision to honor and follow through with her appetite for all things sensual.
“Love has always been the main business of my life.”
– Natalie Barney
Natalie led a lustful life that honoured her personal cravings of all kinds. It could be said that her ample wealth led her to feelings of entitlement. She had financial power and, like many others who do, viewed the people around her as devices at her disposal, to achieve her host of changeable, often sexual, predilections. Because Natalie believed “the finest life” is “spent creating oneself,” she leant into very individualistic mentalities.
Natalie Barney was what we refer to today as a “fuck boi” and she was hot. Many women fell in love with Natalie but she prioritised her own shifting pleasures at the expense of those women’s feelings. Love was a game to her. Natalie’s quoted as saying “One is unfaithful to those one loves so that their charm will not become mere habit.” Stirring her own wavering, fleeting taste for the women around her, including through unfaithfulness – indicating her partners didn’t agree to non-monogamy – demonstrates how the pendulum of desire had perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction for Natalie, steadying at “selfish.”
Despite the questionably shameless unfaithfulness, Natalie Barney’s openly sexual nature is admirable, especially for the time. She advocated for the fact that women and girls are just as sexual as men are, but we didn’t – and don’t – always have the privilege to publicly express it without ridicule and, potentially, violence.
A woman of Natalie Barney’s era disclosing her sexual appetite in the way she did is simply unheard of. Many lesbians at the time, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, were reasonably very private about their romantic and sex lives. Virgil Thomson said, “The two things you never asked Gertrude, ever, were about her being a lesbian and what her writing meant.” Perhaps this is because both were clearly linked: Gertrude wrote many love letters to Alice B. Toklas.
Natalie Barney, on the other hand, made it her mission to publicly express evidence of female desire and sexuality. She wrote that when she was a child, at bath-time, “the water that I made shoot between my legs from the beak of a swan gave me the most intense sensation.” It was sexual epiphanies like these that led Natalie to a courageously uninhibited adult sex life.
Unlike the “sex positive” movement of today, Natalie’s bold sexuality didn’t exist to conveniently perform exactly what men wanted from women. In fact, it was the opposite. It’s true that Natalie Barney left a lot of heartbroken women in her wake, which isn’t cool, but that was perhaps the territory for a modernist lesbian set on demonstrating how women – naturally – are just as capable of ruthless, changeable, independent desire as men.
“Why should I bother to explain myself to you who do not understand – or to you who do?”
– Natalie Barney
