Writing Desire: The Love Letters of Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams

This dissertation analyzes the intimate relationship produced by and reflected in the written correspondence between Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams, arguably the largest correspondence of its kind in North America. Frieda Fraser was a professor of microbiology at the University of Toronto and Edith Williams was one of the first female veterinarians in Canada. Their correspondence was written from 1924 to 1927 and then intermittently from 1933 to 1943. This dissertation contends that Frieda’s and Edith’s correspondence was a place wherein the women created a self-defined sexual description that was in dialogue with cultural discourses that denoted the meaning of the modern lesbian. Frieda and Edith referred to themselves as “devoted women,” their designation of a sexual subjectivity that marked their differentiation from these discourses. Edith and Frieda arrived upon a unique notion of romantic devotion, shaped alongside an awareness of contemporary depictions of the lesbian in literature, in science, and in the theatre. This dissertation analyzes how two middle-class Canadian women came to live their lives as “devoted women” within a culture that did not recognize, nor mirror their sexual identities. Affected by modernism, Edith’s and Frieda’s letter-writing produced, enhanced, and helped the women define their desire for one another. Moreover, the women’s devoted relationship benefitted their medical careers and their medical careers benefitted their partnership. In relation to family and profession this dissertation asks to what degree was discretion employed in order to preserve their relationship? In focusing on the correspondence, this dissertation is more than an exercise in “finding the lesbians” in Canadian history: it asks “how did the lesbians find themselves?”