Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie (with Indigo Dunphy-Smith)

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's special guest is the researcher and museum worker Indigo Dunphy-Smith, who is bringing her expertise to the case of Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, two Edinburghian school teachers who found themselves embroiled in a sex scandal and court case in the early years of the 19th century. Their legal woes followed accusations by a pupil about sapphic goings-on at their small private school, and raised issues regarding attitudes to sex, race and colonialism in late Georgian era Scotland. Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays, our monthly subscriber-only show for conversations about contemporary queer culture and advice segments from your favorite Gagony Guncles. ----more---- SOURCES: Clerk, John, The notorious Drumsheugh Case of 1810: Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie v. Lady Cumming Gordon of Altyre, The Signet Library, Roughead Collection R343.1 H865 Singh, Frances B, Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: The Life of Jane Cumming, NED-New edition, Boydell & Brewer, 2020 Rupp, Leila J, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women, Beacon Press, 2009 Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801, HarperCollins, 1993 Faderman, Lillian, Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired “The Children’s Hour”, Columbia University Press, 1983 Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, William Morrow & Co, 1981 National Records of Scotland, Burgh Register of Sasines for Edinburgh B22/4/31 Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrienn, distributed under a Creative Commons license. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:20.4	My name's Hugh Lemmy.
0:21.2	I'm a writer and author. And today I'm joined by a very special guest, Indigo Dunphy Smith.
0:27.6	Indigo has been working in heritage across Australia and Scotland for the past eight years.
0:31.9	And she's recently begun delivering papers and workshops on how to tell queer stories through
0:36.0	museum collections. So very similar to the sort of work
0:38.9	we're doing here on a podcast. She's most recently spoken at the VNA Kensington about her work
0:43.3	with the National Trust Scotland. Welcome Indigo. Hello. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you so much for
0:48.5	joining us. So who are we talking about on today's show? So today I'll be talking about an early 19th century Scottish
0:55.2	legal case in which two teachers sued the grandmother of one of their students. And this student
1:00.5	had accused them of being in a sexual relationship. So the teachers in question were Jane
1:05.4	Perry and Mary Ann Woods and the student who accused them was 16-year-old Jane Cumming and her
1:10.7	grandmother was Lady Helen
1:12.1	Cumming Gordon. And Jane's accusation resulted in the school being forced to close,
1:17.2	leading the teachers with no income, damaged professional and social reputations. And they then
1:23.1	sued Jane's grandmother, her legal guardian for defamation, seeking 10,000 pounds worth of damages,
1:29.2	which is just under a million pounds in today's money. Wow. So real school for scandal stuff,
1:33.9	you know, like sexual scandal, but then also the legal case and yeah, exciting, exciting stuff.
1:39.1	Yeah, absolutely. So the story features 18th century definitions of tribing, orientalism, family members taking
1:46.1	other family members to court, there's some public shaming, disinheritants, teachers having,
1:51.2	well, teachers being accused of having sex in the same bed as their student, boyerism,
1:56.1	as well as some good old fashioned homophobia and racism.
	...

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