Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (23 page)

General Eisenhower: Forget the order.

—
Bunny MacCulloch interview with Johnnie Phelps, 1982

“Now, my dear,” Dr. Knox said, “your disease has gotten completely out of control. We scientists know, of course, that it’s a highly pleasurable experience to take someone’s penis or vagina into your mouth
—
it’s pleasurable and enjoyable. Everyone knows that. But after you’ve taken a thousand pleasurable penises or vaginas into your mouth and had a thousand people take your pleasurable penis or vagina into their mouth, what have you accomplished? What do you have to show for it? Do you have a wife or children or a husband or a home or a trip to Europe? Do you have a bridge club to show for it? No! You have only a thousand pleasurable experiences to show for it. Do you see how you’re missing the meaning of life? How sordid and depraved are these clandestine sexual escapades in parks and restrooms? I ask you.”

“But sir, but sir,” said Edward, “I’m a woman. I don’t have sexual escapades in parks and restrooms. I don’t have a thousand lovers. I have
one
lover.”

“Yes, yes.” Dr. Knox flicked the ashes from his cigar on to the floor. “Stick to the subject, my dear.”

—
Judy Grahn, “Edward the Dyke”

If there is one major point to be made in a social history such as this one, it is that perceptions of emotional or social desires, formations of sexual categories, and attitudes concerning “mental health” are constantly shifting—not through the discovery of objectively conceived truths, as we generally assume, but rather through social forces that have little to do with the
essentiality
of emotions or sex or mental health. Affectional preferences, ambitions, and even sexual experiences that are within the realm of the socially acceptable during one era may be considered sick or dangerous or antisocial during another—and in a brief space of time attitudes may shift once again, and yet again.

The period of World War II and the years immediately after illustrate such astonishingly rapid shifts. Lesbians were, as has just been seen, considered monstrosities in the 1930s—an era when America needed fewer workers and more women who would seek contentment making individual men happy, so that social anger could be personally mitigated instead of spilling over into social revolt. In this context, the lesbian (a woman who needed to work and had no interest in making a man happy) was an anti-social being. During the war years that followed, when women had to learn to do without men, who were being sent off to fight and maybe die for their country, and when female labor—in the factories, in the military, everywhere—was vital to the functioning of America, female independence and love between women were understood and undisturbed and even protected. After the war, when the surviving men returned to their jobs and the homes that women needed to make for them so that the country could return to “normalcy,” love between women and female independence were suddenly nothing but manifestations of illness, and a woman who dared to proclaim herself a lesbian was considered a borderline psychotic. Nothing need have changed in the quality of the woman’s desires for her to have metamorphosed socially from a monster to a hero to a sicko.

Because World War II created a need for great amounts of womanpower, popular wisdom about woman’s place being in the home or the defeminizing effects of work was suddenly silenced as patriotic women took their places in the civilian and military work forces. A Fleischmann’s yeast advertisement featuring an attractive woman in military uniform on a motorcycle illustrated the change in social attitude, declaring: “This is No Time to be Frail! … The dainty days are done for the duration.”
¹
Young women who might have been locked in their husbands’ homes in the previous decade were now frequently thrown together in all-female worlds. Just as intense love between women often emerged in female institutions such as women’s colleges and women’s prisons, it was bound to emerge in factories and military units. This time, with the background of sexual sophistication that had been developing in America over the previous decades, love between women led to the establishment of a much larger, unique subculture of lesbians such as could not have occurred at any previous time in history.

Armies of Lovers

Less than a third of a million women served in the military during the war, but many of them were lovers of other women. For those who already identified themselves as lesbians, military service, with its opportunities to meet other women and to engage in work and adventure that were ordinarily denied them, was especially appealing. For many others who had not identified themselves as lesbians before the war, the all female environment of the women’s branches of the armed services, offering as it did the novel emotional excitement of working with competent, independent women, made lesbianism an attractive option. The “firm public impression” during the war years that a women’s corps was “the ideal breeding ground for lesbians” had considerable basis in fact.
²
And even women who were not in the military now had opportunities in civilian life (where they filled men’s places in heavy industry and other occupational areas from which they had been excluded before the war) to meet other women and to form attachments that might have been unthinkable during the 1930s.

Women had served in the military and war-related industries during World War I, though on a much smaller scale than in World War II. However, the greatest reason that the First World War was not as crucial in creating a lesbian subculture as the Second was not simply that fewer women were brought together in the war effort, but rather that the consciousness of lesbianism was not as rife during 1917–1919 as it was to become in the Freudian-saturated ’20s and after, and fewer women could begin to conceive of it as a lifestyle. Passionate attachments could still be “explained away” in pre-1920s America. Many women who were not devoted to careers might have assumed that once the Great War was over, their romantic friendship or devoted companionship might continue, but of course they would be obliged to marry a man, just as most women always had been. While World War I may have clarified for some few women their option to live as lesbians, World War II brought such clarification to many more.

Those hostile to love between women in this century have not been entirely wrong in claiming that the wars encouraged lesbianism because they caused men to leave women to fend for themselves. The truth, however, is less simplistic than their analysis would suggest. As tragic as they were, both wars made women taste independence. Ironically, war permitted some of them to know for the first time the joy of being paid for their efforts. World War II in particular brought great numbers of females of all classes into a society of women where they were able not only to expand friendships but to learn to appreciate other females as serious, self-sufficient human beings. It took them away from restrictive family relations and cast them into new environments where they might redefine a narrow morality they may have accepted unquestioningly and forge for themselves a more personalized set of values.

All of this occurred not long after Freud,
The Well of Loneliness,
and the term “lesbian” became household words, in effect. For many women the coalescence of these various happenings meant that their lives were much more open to lesbian possibilities than they could have been earlier. Since World War II also brought large numbers of women to big cities, where an inchoate lesbian consciousness had been forming, finally relatively large lesbian communities could be created.
³

For some young women, their war-related experiences helped them define amorphous feelings that they had been struggling with and for which they had no word and no concept, terms such as “romantic friendship” or “smashing” being by now nonexistent. Young females in earlier eras might have explained their attractions with just those words, but by the 1940s such feelings were clearly seen as lesbian, and many women could and did learn to apply that term to their emotions during the war. Mildred, who lived in upstate New York during World War II, remembers that the summer she was sixteen she had volunteered to harvest crops with the Women’s Land Army. After she noticed two of the Land Army women acting amorously with each other, another woman told her, “It’s called lesbianism. There’s really nothing wrong with it.” Mildred says, “For the first time I had a name for myself.”
⁴
She was far from alone among those young females who accepted that name for themselves as an “explanation” of their emotions. Having gone into military service during the war, where they were thrown together in comradeship, day and night, with large groups of females who had varying degrees of knowledge and experience, they found not only that the war
fostered
love between women, but that such love was “lesbianism.”

Critics of the proposed establishment of military service for females in the early 1940s compared women who would be interested in enlisting to “the naked Amazons … and the queer damozels of the isle of Lesbos,” as a
Miami News
writer phrased it in 1942. In those hostile assertions there was more than a glimmer of truth.
⁵
Naturally women who were outside the pale of stereotypical femininity, who saw themselves as autonomous beings, and who loved the company of other females would have been most likely in the first place to volunteer; but many more women learned to love and admire women while in the military during those trying and heroic times. Although most women probably joined assuming they were heterosexual or not having thought much about their sexual orientation, once they enlisted the military was to them like a poor woman’s Vassar or Bryn Mawr. Like females in the women’s colleges that only the privileged few attended in earlier decades, many now found themselves in an environment where women worked together in pursuits they could consider important, and where they could become heroes to one another without the constant distraction of male measuring sticks. It is not surprising that many of them discovered through their military experiences that they wanted to be lesbians. And there was not much to discourage them.

Although females had served with distinction in military support positions during World War I, their units were disbanded and they were not allowed back into the military until World War II was well under way. In Spring 1942, the Army created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC; the word “Auxiliary” was dropped the following year). At the beginning of the war, in 1941, the military had concerns about homosexual males. Any man who had what were called “homosexual tendencies” was subject to court-martial. As the war progressed, however, and the need for personnel grew, not only were women taken into the military but policy toward homosexuality became more and more lenient. If homosexual behavior called attention to itself the individual might quietly be given a “blue discharge,” which was neither honorable nor dishonorable; but in general, the military tried to ignore homosexuality.
⁶

In 1942 and ’43 when women volunteered for the Army they were routinely asked questions during the psychological exam about dating and their attitudes toward men, but it would have taken flagrant homosexual responses to have gotten them disqualified. And while effeminacy in a male might have alerted military psychologists to the possibility of his homosexuality, what was perceived of as masculinity in a female enlistee would not have rendered her undesirable, because the military especially needed women who wanted to do work that was traditionally masculine.
⁷

The WAAC even warned officers not to set out to expose or punish lesbian behavior. In a printed series of Sex Hygiene lectures, officers were specifically told that the circumstances of war and a young woman’s removal from familiar surroundings could easily promote “more consciousness of sex and more difficulties concerning it.” The lectures suggested that the officers should be sympathetic to close friendships that might crop up between women under wartime conditions. The officers were also alerted that such intimacies may even “eventually take some form of sexual expression,” but they were told that they must never play games of hide-and-seek in an attempt to discover lesbianism or indulge in witch-hunting and they must approach the situation with an attitude of generosity and tolerance. They were to take action against lesbianism “only in so far as its manifestations undermine the efficiency of the individual concerned and the stability of the group.” Discharge was to be used only as a last resort in cases that were universally demoralizing. The officers were specifically cautioned that “any officer bringing an unjust or unprovable charge against a woman in this regard will be severely reprimanded.”
⁸
The military could not afford to lose womanpower at the height of a war, and as WAC sergeant Johnnie Phelps pointed out to General Eisenhower (see epigraph quotation), women who were in love with other women did not cost the military time and money because of venereal disease or pregnancy.

The Sex Hygiene lectures recommended to officers that if they believed that two women who were romantically involved with each other created a disruptive influence in a unit, they might be administratively split, but they should not be discharged. Mary, who joined the WAC in 1943, tells of such a case in her company. A woman sergeant had “fallen deeply in love” with a nurse, a first lieutenant who had quarters off base. According to Mary, “the commanding officer was hard on the sergeant and she really restricted her. When the sergeant was caught off base the nurse was reassigned. Then the commanding officer succeeded in doing everything to keep the sergeant from getting reassigned.” But the commanding officer had learned to be subtle enough not to articulate any concern about lesbianism or to reveal her determination to put a stop to a lesbian affair.
⁹