Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (62 page)

44
. Ann Cheney,
Millay in Greenwich Village
(University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1975), p. 16; Elizabeth Atkins,
Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 37–38. Atkins was the first to suggest that while
The Lamp and the Bell
purports to be set in the ancient kingdom of Fiori, it is really Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson that Millay is describing.
Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay,
ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), pp. 92, 84–85.

45
. “Virgin” quoted in Humphrey, p. 224. “Fonder of women” quoted in Emily Hahn,
Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemians in America
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 241.

46
. Millay on psychoanalysis in Cheyney, p. 65. Millay on Eugen Boissevain, her husband, in Jean Gould,
The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), p. 189.

47
. See, e.g., “The Button” and “The Tigress” in Floyd Dell,
Love in Greenwich Village
(New York: George H. Duran, 1926). Ellen Kay Trimberger points out that Dell was not alone among Greenwich Village men who in practice fell considerably short of their ideals concerning women’s freedom. Trimberger discusses Max Eastman and Hutchins Hapgood, who were leaders of Greenwich Village Bohemia, along with Dell, in “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1901–1925,” in Ann Snitow et al., eds.,
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 131–52. Hutchins Hapgood,
A Victorian in the Modern World
(New York: Harcourt, 1939), p. 320.

48
. Village gay areas cited in Churchill, p. 320; Ware, p. 237.

49
. Clarence P. Oberndorf, “Diverse Forms of Homosexuality,”
Urologic and Cutaneous Review
(1929), 33:518–23. A. A. Brill, “The Psychiatric Approach to Homosexuality,”
The Journal-Lancet
(April 15, 1935), 55:249–52.

50
. The 1925 team is Irene Case Sherman and Mandel Sherman (“The Factor of Parental Attachment in Homosexuality,”
Psychoanalytic Review
[1925] 13:34; other warnings in George W. Henry, M.D.,
Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns
(1941; reprint, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1960), p. 1025; Winifred Richmond,
The Adolescent Girl: A Book for Parents and Teachers
(New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 124–25.

51
. On the campaign for intercourse see Morton M. Hunt,
The Natural History of Love
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), pp. 344–45; William J. Fielding,
Sex and the Love Life
(1927; reprint, New York: Ribbon Books, 1930), pp. 120–21; Walter M. Gallican,
The Poison of Prudery: A Historical Survey
(Boston: Stratford, 1929), p. 135. “Flaming bright red” quotation in Lorine Pruette, “The Flapper,” in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds.,
The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Their Children
(1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971), p. 581. “Excess” quotation in Samuel D. Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds.,
Sex in Civilization
(Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishers, 1929), p. 416.

52
. “Outworn traditions” statement by Stella Browne, quoted in Sheila Jeffreys,
The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930
(London: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 117; see also Floyd Dell,
Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Non-Patriarchal Society
(1930; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 238. William Alger,
The Friendships of Women
(Boston: Roberts, 1868), p. 364.

53
. For a discussion of the effects of companionate marriage on views of lesbianism see Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies
(Fall 1979), 4(3):54~59. For examples of marriage manuals that promoted performance see Maria Stopes,
Married Love
(London: A. C. Fifield, 1918); Theodore H. van de Velde,
Ideal Marriage
(1926; reprint, New York: Covici Friede, 1930); Gilbert van Tassel Hamilton,
A Research in Marriage
(1929; reprint, New York: M. D. Lear, 1948); G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth Macgowan, “Physical Disabilities in Wives,” in Calverton and Schmalhausen, eds.,
Sex in Civilization;
Wilhelm Reich,
The Function of the Orgasm
(1926; reprint, New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942). Women’s “failure” is discussed in Dell,
Love in the Machine Age,
p. 239.

4. Wastelands and Oases

1
. Thomas Minehan,
Boy and Girl Tramps in America
(New York: Farrar, 1934); Callman Rawley, “A Glimpse of the Unattached Woman Transient in New Orleans,”
Family
(May 1934), 15:118; Susan Ware,
Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s
(Boston: Twayne, 1982), pp. 33–34; Box-Car Bertha, As Told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman,
Sister of the Road: An Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha
(1937; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 65–67.

2
.  Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, D.C.: 1975), pp. 126 ff. Alice Kessler-Harris,
Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States
(New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 259–60, 263, 270–71. The number of women librarians, nurses, and social workers decreased only slightly or held steady during the decade of the depression, but there was a dramatic decrease in the number of women teachers, administrators, professors, clergywomen, etc. Women also made considerably less than men in identical professions. For example, in 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953, female teacher $1,394; Male social workers averaged $1,718, female social workers $1,442. According to an AAUW survey during the depression, 80 percent of the female respondents said they received less pay than men for equal work. A 1931 study also found that the percentage of female unemployment was highest in the higher income professions, with a considerable drop between 1929 and 1931. American Women’s Association,
The Trained Woman and the Economic Crisis: Employment and Unemployment Among a Selected Group of Business and Professional Women in New York City
(New York: American Women’s Association, 1931); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein,
Woman’s Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 7; Ware, op. cit., pp. 69, 71–73

3
.  Robert Latou Dickinson, “The Gynecology of Homosexuality,” in George W. Henry,
Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns
(1941; reprint, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1960), p. 1070. Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten
[Youth and Sex: A Study of 1300 College Students
[New York: Harper, 1938], p. 118) also conclude, rather simplistically, that lesbianism in the 1930s was less prevalent among college women than it had been in the 1920s, “when a few campus leaders in several of the larger women’s colleges made it something of a fad.”

4
.  For late 1920s objections to working women see Henry R. Carey, “This Two-Headed Monster—The Family,”
Harpers
(January 1928), 15:162–71, and Anon. “A Case of Two Careers,”
Harpers
(January 1929), 17: 194–201. Quotations from the 1930s: Frank L. Hopkins, “Should Wives Work?,”
American Mercury
(December. 1936), 39:409–16; Norman Cousins, “Will Women Lose Their Jobs?,”
Current History and Forum
(September 1939), 41:14.

5
.  Barnard dean quoted in Edna McKnight, “Jobs—For Men Only? Shall We Send Women Workers Home?,”
Outlook and Independent,
September 2, 1931, p. 18+. Sarah Comstock, “Marriage or Career?,”
Good Housekeeping
(June 1932), 94:32–33 +.

6
.  “What Do the Women of America Think About Careers?”
Ladies Home Journal
(Nov. 1939), 56:12; Claire Howe, “Return of the Lady,”
New Outlook
(Oct. 1934), 164:34–37; Jane Allen, “You May Have My Job: A Feminist Discovers Her Home,”
Forum
(April 1932), 87:228–31.

7
.  Henry,
Sex Variants,
and George Henry, “Psychogenic Factors in Overt Homosexuality,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
(January 1937), 93(4):889–908.

8
.  Personal interview with M.K., age 79, San Francisco, October 22, 1988.

9
.  Gloria T. Hull,
Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 95–96, and
Give Us This Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson,
ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 25, 249–50, 359–63, 421–22.

10
. Sheila Donisthorpe,
Loveliest of Friends
(New York: Charles Kendall, 1931); William Carlos Williams, “The Knife of the Times,” in
Knife of the Times
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1932); Dorothy Parker, “Glory in the Daytime,” in
After Such Pleasure
(New York: Viking, 1934); Ernest Hemingway, “The Sea Change,” in
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
(New York: Collier, 1938). Barbara Goldsmith,
Little Gloria
—
Happy at Last
(New York: Knopf, 1980).

11
. Quoted in Doris Faber,
The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend
(New York: William Morrow, 1980), March 4, 1933 (p. no); December 5, 1933 (p. 152), January 27, 1934 (p. 161), September 1, 1934 (p. 176).

12
. Victor Robinson, introduction to Diana Frederics,
Diana: A Strange Autobiography
(New York: Dial, 1939), p. ix.

13
. Henry,
Sex Variants,
pp. 1023–27. “Surgery May Save Human Race from Extinction: Evolutionary Trend Toward Neuter Race May Be Checked by Gland Operation,”
Science News Letter,
May 19, 1934; “Women’s Personalities Changed by Adrenal Gland Operation,”
New York Times,
October 28, 1935, pp. 1 +.

14
. For an extensive bibliographic study of lesbian novels of the 1930s see Jeannette Foster,
Sex Variant Women in Literature
(1956; reprint, Baltimore, MD.: Diana Press, 1975), pp. 290–324. Donisthorpe, p. 234. For my discussion of nineteenth-century French decadent novels see
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present
(New York: William Morrow, 1981), pp. 254–94. There were a few early twentieth-century novels published outside of France in which lesbians were depicted as monsters, but such characterizations were relatively rare at that time, e.g., Clemence Dane,
Regiment of Women
(New York: Macmillan, 1917). Nineteen-thirties novels: Idabell Williams,
Hellcat
(1934; reprint, Dell 1952); Lois Lodge,
Love Like a Shadow
(New York: Phoenix, 1935); Lilyan Brock,
Queer Patterns
(New York: Greenberg, 1935); Helen Anderson,
Pity for Women
(New York: Doubleday, 1937).