Daughters of Bilitis
Daughters of Bilitis, an organization launched 21 September 1955 in San Francisco, and in its earliest years sustained through the energy and money of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. DOB sought to improve the status of lesbians through public education and to provide them with a social alternative to bars. In the 1950s and 1960s, DOB joined with the predominantly male Mattachine Society and ONE magazine as the standard-bearers of the "homophile" movement, a precursor to the gay liberation movement. DOB established chapters in four large cities, but its membership always remained low. Beset by political divisions, the national organization dissolved in 1970; its monthly publication, The Ladder, folded in 1972. DOB took its name from Pierre Lou!e's 1894 erotic poem cycle Songs of Bilitis.
Bibliography
D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friend-ship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
Marotta, Toby. The Politics of Homosexuality. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
—Cynthia R. Poe
