The Sewing Circle: Sapphic Icons of Early Hollywood

While a sewing circle is commonly defined as “a social meeting of women who congregate to sew and talk together,” some women in early Hollywood co-opted this term to denote sapphic inclinations. Initiated by early silent film producer and actor Alla Nazimova, who openly identified as bisexual, her “sewing circle” was a space open and welcoming to many women. We adopt the term for this series to highlight figures long considered icons by women who love women. Throughout the decades, queer people have identified with or felt shaped or validated by the personae of these figures at a time when representation was scarce. As Richard Dyer’s classic study of movie stars Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (1986) notes, “audiences cannot make media images mean anything they want to, but they can select from the complexity of the image the meanings and feelings, the variations, inflections and contradictions, that work for them.”