Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (19 page)

That immense shift in middle-class women’s expectations may account, at least in part, for the observation by a sexologist who researched lesbianism in the mid-1930s that “the bravado of talk [about lesbianism] among female college students, which was in evidence ten to fifteen years ago, seems to have measurably abated, and with this diminution, the experimentation seems to have lessened, or proved little rewarding.”
³
Few middle-class women who wanted to maintain the status into which they had been born could afford to
live
as lesbians in the 1930s. Lesbian “bravado” became extremely difficult largely for economic reasons, although women who married might adjust their lives to a bisexual compromise.

Even by the end of the 1920s there had been considerable clamor from conservatives who felt that working women were eroding the American family. With the advent of the depression, the working woman had still fewer defenders. Work for wages once more came to be considered by many not a human right, such as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists had fought to establish, but a privilege connected to gender. Anti-feminists wanted to turn back the clock to a simpler, prefeminist era. As one essayist for the
American Mercury
observed nostalgically in the mid-1930s: “We would all be happier if we could return to the philosophy of my grandmother’s day,” when a woman “took it for granted that she must content herself with the best lot provided by her husband.” Working women came to be the scapegoat for the poor economy that left 25 percent of the labor force unemployed at the height of the depression. Norman Cousins’ solution, rash and simplistic as it was, reflected a general view: “There are approximately ten million people out of work in the United States today,” Cousins pointed out. “There are also ten million or more women, married or single, who are job holders. Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.”
⁴

Middle-class women who aspired to careers rather than mere subsistence came under particular attack. The dean of Barnard College told a class of the early 1930s that each woman must ask herself if it was really
necessary
for her to be employed. If not, the dean said, “perhaps the greatest service that you can render to the community … is to have the courage to refuse to work for gain.” If patriotism could not be appealed to in order to discourage women from seeking careers, some anti-feminists determined to appeal to the womb. A 1932 article in a women’s magazine mawkishly suggested that successful career women hid “a longing that hurt like a wound,” especially when they saw other women’s babies and bent above a crib, listening “to the heavy sleeping breath that rhythmed from rosy lips.”
⁵
It is clear that even before the post-World War II years, society believed that women had to get out of the labor force to make way for men: the feminine mystique that Betty Friedan identified as a phenomenon of the ’50s was already in effect in the ’30s; World War II brought only a brief hiatus.

Of course there was little honest admission (outside of Cousins’ article) that females should be bumped from jobs because it was thought that men needed the work more than women did. Instead, just as had already happened around the turn of the century and was to happen again two decades later, it was suddenly discovered that work defeminized a woman. According to their surveys, 1930s women’s magazines and their readers were in agreement that if a woman held an important professional position she would lose her womanly qualities. While such a “danger” would be laughable for many women today, “well-brought-up” women of the ’30s, who were too far removed from the pioneering excitement of the early twentieth century and yet not far enough removed from Victorianism, did not take such a dilemma lightly. As the title of one article subtitled “A Feminist Discovers Her Home”) suggested, even those who had been active in the women’s movement in the 1920s were saying, “You May Have My Job.”
⁶
Surely many women who wavered between a lesbian lifestyle and heterosexual marriage must have chosen the latter during the 1930s, since practical considerations and the temper of the times alone would have rendered marriage infinitely more comfortable.

However, some women, who in other times, such as the economically and socially freer 1980s, might have opted to live as lesbians, arranged their lives a half century earlier so that they could have both the security of marriage and the joy of their homoaffectional inclinations. To the world, and perhaps even to their husbands, they appeared to be simply heterosexual married women. To other lesbians—and more often to only one particular woman—they were homosexual. In George Henry’s extensive study (see below), begun in 1935, of “socially well-adjusted,” mostly middle-class “sex variants,” both black and white, the researcher found that a large number of the women he interviewed were married to men even while conducting lesbian affairs.
⁷
Some women who married and also had lesbian relationships were genuinely bisexual. Many others married because they could see no other viable choice in their day.

Sometimes a marriage was nothing more than a front to permit a woman to function as a lesbian and not be persecuted. M.K., who was an untenured professor at Mills College during the 1930s, tells of having contacted a distant cousin, a gay man, who lived in Washington and implored him to come to California so that she could present him as her fiance before her tenure review came up. She even permitted colleagues to throw a wedding shower for her (although she never went through with the marriage, since she learned that the administration’s suspicion of her homosexuality was irrevocable and she would not be given tenure).
⁸
There are no statistics that reveal the incidence of front marriages between lesbians and gay men, but it is plausible to believe they were not uncommon when homosexual life was as stigmatized and difficult as it was in the 1930s.

However, other women who loved women were in marriages that were not merely fronts—sometimes because they had no way to support themselves alone, sometimes because they could not conceive of abandoning the security and respectability of that socially condoned institution, sometimes because they were truly bisexual. The 1930s diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a middle-class black woman, reveals the existence of an active black bisexual network among prominent “club women” who had husbands but managed to enjoy lesbian liaisons as well as a cameraderie with one another over their shared secrets. Dunbar-Nelson herself felt that she had to practice some discretion in front of her husband, who nevertheless knew she was bisexual. His occasional rages over her lesbian affairs did not stop her from preserving for posterity her love poems about lesbian passion and seduction with lines such as “I had not thought to ope that secret room,” and “You did not need to creep into my heart/ The way you did. You could have smiled/ And knowing what you did, have kept apart/ From all my inner soul./ But you beguiled/ Deliberately.”
⁹

Married woman who had lesbian liaisons appeared in numerous novels and short stories of the 1930s, such as Sheila Donisthorpe’s
Loveliest of Friends
(1931), William Carlos Williams’ “The Knife of the Times” (1932), Dorothy Parker’s “Glory in the Daytime” (1934), and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sea Change” (1938). Surviving correspondence and biographies corroborate the fiction. Not only middle-class women but some upper-class women also—even those from the “best families” in America—were married while they engaged in lesbian affairs, as had been widely revealed during the 1934 custody trial of Gloria Vanderbilt, whose mother was accused of having an affair with the Marchioness Nadeja Milford-Haven, as well as the recently published correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt.
¹⁰

Eleanor Roosevelt’s well-documented affair with journalist Lorena Hickok was in progress when FDR was inaugurated in 1933. At the ceremony Eleanor wore a sapphire ring that Lorena had given her. It was their relationship that was uppermost in her mind during that historically momentous inauguration:

All day I’ve thought of you … Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love me or I wouldn’t be wearing it!

The affair continued through a good part of Eleanor’s early years in the White House, from where she wrote endearments to Lorena during their separations, such as:

Goodnight, dear one. I want to put my arms around you & kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall.

Oh! dear one, it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about & long for.

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight and take you in my arms.
¹¹

It is not known if FDR understood the nature of their relationship, but the rest of the world thought of them as good friends and little suspected that they were also lovers. Obviously women from those families did not need to worry about depression economics like some of their socially inferior sisters, but heterosexual marriage permitted them to maintain a position in their society that would have been problematic had they chosen to live openly as lesbians. The somber, worried decade of the 1930s discouraged such nonconformity on any social level, demanding that whatever explorations and small advances had been made for lesbianism as an open lifestyle in the ’20s be put on ice until the times changed. For most women who loved other women, a “bisexual” compromise was the best they could manage.

The View from the Outside

Such bisexual compromises were seldom publicly acknowledged. Had their undeniable frequency (see Katharine Bement Davis’ statistics, p. 46) been more widely admitted, it would have been much more difficult to stigmatize love between women to the extent that the 1930s did. But silence prevailed. That secrecy meant, among other things, that it was impossible for women who saw themselves as “lesbian” to construct their own public definitions of what that label meant, since they were intimidated into speechlessness by the prevalent notion that feelings such as theirs were “queer” and “unusual.” Since they could not speak out to correct those images, the public definitions of them continued to be formulated by those on the outside.

There was some diversity in those definitions: while images of monstrosities and decadence were often associated with lesbianism in the 1930s, other attitudes, particularly those promulgated by “liberal” doctors, seemed to encourage some enlightenment in the public view. Such enlightenment, however, was largely based on a conception of the lesbian as a pathetic creature who was cut off from the rest of womankind by her rare abnormality and who deserved no more punishment than was already visited on her by her unfortunate condition. Those doctors tended to argue that the notion of the homosexual as a criminal was “unscientific” and that homosexuals could be productive human beings. But the underlying ambivalence in their pleas for homosexuals generally bled through in statements such as that of psychiatrist Victor Robinson, who wrote in an introductory note to a lesbian autobiography in the 1930s: “That charming women should be lesbians is not a crime, it is simply a pity. It is not a question of ethics, but of endocrines.” Lesbians were merely helpless victims of nature’s freakish pranks, and the best thing that could be done for them was to finds ways to eradicate their “affliction.”
¹²

Not only was the extent of lesbianism and bisexuality hidden often by heterosexual marriage and complicitously ignored on all social levels, but also, through the prevalent view of love between women as an affliction, it was totally forgotten that female same-sex love in the form of romantic friendship had so recently (only a few decades earlier) been considered normal. Since few women now were willing to proclaim their love for other women, when medical doctors of the 1930s expressed their determination to prevent homosexuality through “education” and treatment they went largely unchallenged. Homosexuals, the doctors said, “remained at an immature level of social adjustment” and could not hope to achieve maturity as long as they were homosexual. Who of the many women who had experienced love for other women in the 1930s could dare step forward to contradict them? Individually locked into their secret as most women who loved other women were, how could they have argued against “curing” love between women by psychotherapy or doses of hormones? How could they have responded other than with silence about their own experiences when they read in mid-1930s newspapers that women who were “suffering from masculine psychological states” (that is, who loved other women) were being “cured” by removing one of their adrenal glands and that such treatments, as a front page article in the
New York Times
revealed in 1935, could correct “overfunctioning” that caused some women to have an “aversion to marriage”?
¹³

The unexamined contention that the female who loved other females was someone other than the “normal” woman was thus reinforced. Her otherness was depicted sometimes as sickness, sometimes as immorality, only very seldom as consonant with soundness and decency—and always as a rare “condition.” The contradictory notions of lesbianism as both immoral and sick were especially common in the literature aimed at a broad reading public. With the American publication of
The Well of Loneliness
at the end of the 1920s, there was suddenly a great interest in the lesbian as a sexual freak, and the floodgates opened. Each year saw the production of new novels that were even clearer than Radclyffe Hall’s book had been in their treatment of lesbian sexuality. Obviously the public had a taste for such fare, which, unlike Hall’s work, often did not even pretend to the kind of sympathy characteristic of the medical tracts, and instead presented lesbians as vampires and carnivorous flowers. The sensationalistic lesbian pulps of the 1950s had their forerunners in the 1930s in books such as Sheila Donisthorpe’s
Loveliest of Friends
(1931), which described lesbians as