Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (9 page)

Feminists as Sexual Freaks

Masculine appearance, especially among working-class women, figured heavily in the early definitions of the female invert. A typical description was one by Krafft-Ebing in 1888: “She had coarse male features, a rough and rather deep voice, and with the exception of the bosom and female contour of the pelvis, looked more like a man in women’s clothing than like a woman.”
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But as the late nineteenth-century feminist movement grew in strength and in its potential to overthrow the old sex roles, it was not too long before feminism itself was also equated with sexual inversion and many women of the middle class came to be suspected of that anomaly, since as feminists they acted in ways inappropriate to their gender, desiring to get an education, for example, or to work in a challenging, lucrative profession.

It was the European sexologists who were the first to connect sexual inversion and feminism. Havelock Ellis stated in his chapter “Sexual Inversion Among Women” in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
that female homosexuality was increasing because of feminism, which taught women to be independent and to disdain marriage. Ellis, as a congenitalist who believed that homosexuality was hereditary, hastened to add that the women’s movement could not directly cause sexual inversion unless one had the potential for it to begin with, but the movement definitely “developed the germs of it” in those who were that way inclined; and in other women it caused a “spurious imitation” of homosexuality.
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Like the leading English and German sexologists, the French sexologist Julien Chevalier, in his 1893 work
Inversion sexuelle,
suggested that homosexuality was congenital and that the lesbian was born with “organic elements” of the male; but despite that conviction he also observed that the number of lesbians had grown over the last decades because women were getting educations, demanding careers, emancipating themselves from male tutelage, “making men of themselves” by cultivating masculine sports, and becoming politically active. All of this “male emulation,” according to him, resulted in female sexual inversion.
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American sexologists followed the lead of the Europeans. Frequently their goal also seemed to be to discredit both the women’s movement and love between women by equating them with masculine drives and thus freakishness. They were ready to wage war on any form of women’s bonding, which now, in the context of feminism, seemed threatening to the preservation of old-fashioned femininity. Dr. James Weir, in an article for the
American Naturalist
(1895), observed that the so-called New Women, and especially their foremost advocates, were really atavistic—throwbacks to the “primitive era” of matriarchy and therefore, by Weir’s logic, degenerate. He managed to work the famous case of Alice Mitchell, a woman who murdered the woman she loved, into his connection between lesbianism and feminism. The modern feminist, he said, “is as much the victim of psychic atavism as was Alice Mitchell who slew Freda Ward.” And just as Mitchell was recognized to be a viragint, so has “every woman who has been at all prominent in advancing the cause of equal rights … given evidence of masculo-femininity (viraginity), or has shown, conclusively, that she was the victim of psycho-sexual aberrancy.” Weir implied that simply promoting feminist goals—agitating for “rights” that had been strictly masculine prerogatives, bonding with other women—was in itself good evidence that a woman was “abnormal,” “degenerate,” and a “viragint.”
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The term “viragint” appears to have been taken from the American translation of Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis,
in which “viragincy” is an advanced class of female inversion, measured according to masculinity. It served a double purpose in America, to describe both the feminist and the lesbian—and, of course, to connect the two, as the psychiatrist, William Lee Howard, did in a 1901 novel,
The Perverts,
about a degenerate Ph.D. feminist:

The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence, the viragint who would sit in the public highways and lift up her pseudo-virile voice, proclaiming her sole right to decide questions of war or religion, or the value of celibacy and the curse of woman’s impurity, and that disgusting anti-social being, the female sexual pervert, are simply different degrees of the same class—degenerates.

In his article “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,” the same author, a staunch congenitalist, explains that these feminist-viragint-lesbians—all “unsightly and abnormal beings”—are victims of poor mating. They must have had feminist mothers who neglected their maternal instincts and dainty feminine characteristics, preferred the laboratory to the nursery, and engaged in political campaigns. Thus they reproduced these mental and physical monstrosities. Howard is, however, optimistic about the future. Soon “disgusted Nature, no longer tolerant of the woman who would be a man,” will allow all such types to “shrink unto death,” he affirms.
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Howard had the assurance of the Darwinists behind him in his conviction that society and nature had evolved for the better in doing away with matriarchy and establishing patriarchy. Whatever was, at that point in time, had to be superior to what had preceded it. Nature would thus see to it that feminists and lesbians, Amazonian throw-backs in Howard’s view, would go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird.

The early sexologists, who have been considered so brave for daring to write about sex at all in the sexually inhibited nineteenth century, were, in important ways, not much more imaginative or flexible regarding sex and sex roles than the conservative masses around them. Despite the occasional lip service to feminism such as Ellis paid, they clearly believed that there were men’s roles and women’s roles, and if any woman wanted to diverge from what was appropriate it could only be because she had a congenital anomaly (a degeneracy, most sexologists believed) that made her an invert. A top item on their hidden agenda, whether they were conscious of it or not, finally came to be to discourage feminism and maintain traditional sex roles by connecting the women’s movement to sexual abnormality.

The Attack on “Romantic Friendship”

It was still possible in the early twentieth century for some women to vow great love for each other, sleep together, see themselves as life mates, perhaps even make love, and yet have no idea that their relationship was what the sexologists were now considering “inverted” and “abnormal.” Such naivete was possible for women who came out of the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic friendship and were steeped in its literature.
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Even had they been exposed to the writings of the sexologists, which were by now being slowly disseminated in America, they might have been unable to recognize themselves and their relationships in those medical descriptions. Their innocence became increasingly difficult to maintain, however, as the twentieth century progressed.

Perhaps the sexual possibilities of romantic friendship among middle-class women were overlooked by outside observers throughout much of nineteenth-century America because “illicit” sexuality in general was uncommon then (compared to earlier and later eras), judging at least from the birthrate of children born prior to the ninth month of marriage. During the Revolutionary era, for example, 33 percent of all first children were born before the ninth month of marriage. In Victorian America, between 1841 and 1880, only 12.6 percent of all first births were before the ninth month of marriage. If unmarried women, especially those of the “better classes,” appeared to be by and large inactive in terms of heterosexual relations, it was probably difficult to conceive of them being homosexually active. Popular wisdom had it that decent women were uninterested in genital sexuality and merely tolerated their marriage duties. As an 1869 book,
The Physiology of Women,
observed with conviction:

There can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is, in the majority of cases, in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all; and, even if roused (which in many instances it never can be), is very moderate compared with that of the male.

It could easily be believed that romantic friendship between two women was a “mental passion,” spiritual, uplifting, and nothing more.
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Lesbianism became a popular topic of exotic and erotic French novels by the mid nineteenth century and a subject of great interest to later nineteenth-century European sexologists, but in America it was quite ignored almost to the end of the century. The
Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office
lists only one article on lesbians between 1740 and 1895. However, soon after that point sexological writings began to fascinate American medical men tremendously. The second series of the same catalogue lists almost 100 books and 566 articles between 1896 and 1916 on women’s sexual “perversions,” “inversions,” and “disorders.”
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Turn-of-the-century American writers on lesbianism generally acknowledged the influence of the European sexologists while extending their observations to the American scene. For example, a 1902 article titled “Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion” observed that it was women’s colleges that were “the great breeding ground” of lesbianism. These discussions were often very explicit about the dangers of female friendships that had hitherto seemed perfectly innocent. A medical work that appeared at the beginning of the century alerted doctors that when young girls are thrown together they manifest

an increasing affection by the usual tokens. They kiss each other fondly on every occasion. They embrace each other with mutual satisfaction. It is most natural, in the interchange of visits, for them to sleep together. They learn the pleasure of direct contact, and in the course of their fondling they resort to cunni-linguistic practices…. After this the normal sex act fails to satisfy [them].

But even romantic friendship that clearly had no sexual manifestations was now coming to be classified as homosexual. Medical writers began to comment on “numerous phases of
inversion
where men are passionately attached to men, and women to women,
without the slightest desire for sexual intercourse.
[Italics are mine.]”
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American doctors were now genuinely disturbed that the public was still naive about what had recently become so apparent to the medical men. Bernard Talmey, for example, in his 1904 treatise
Woman,
insisted that homosexuality in females had never been made a legal offense only because of “the ignorance of the law-making power of the existence of this anomaly. The layman generally does not even surmise its existence.” Because of such ignorance, he concluded, women’s intimate attachments with each other are considered often erroneously as “mere friendship.” They are fostered by parents and guardians and are “praised and commended” rather than suspected of being “of a homosexual origin,” as they often are. Some doctors believed they were doing a public service in attempting to close the gap in knowledge as quickly as possible. However, since their writings were for the most part “scientific” it was only very gradually that they began to filter through to popular awareness. Early twentieth-century popular magazine fiction in America continued to treat intense love between women as innocent and often ennobling romantic friendships.”
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Thus lacking the concept, two women in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century might still live in a relationship that would certainly be defined as lesbian today and yet have no awareness of themselves as lesbians. If their relationship was genital they could have felt the same guilt over it that their contemporaries might have experienced over masturbation—it was sexual pleasure without the excuse of inescapable marital duties—but they would not necessarily have felt themselves abnormal. In 1914 psychoanalysts were still noting that “homosexual women are often not acquainted with their condition.”
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Yet there were a few indications of a change in public consciousness as early as the late nineteenth century in America. In contrast to William Alger’s 1868 view of romantic friendships bringing to women “freshness, stimulant charm, noble truths and aspirations,” an 1895 work,
Side Talks with Girls,
warns the young female that it is dangerous for her to have “a girl-sweetheart” because if she wastes her love on another female she will not have any to give “Prince Charming when he comes to claim his bride.” A couple of decades later, advice books of that nature were somewhat more explicit about the possibilities of sex between females, although the word “lesbian” or “invert” was never used. In fact, a 1914 book,
Ten Sex Talks to Girls,
which like its 1895 predecessor was aimed at adolescents and post-adolescents, specifically classified sexual relations between females with masturbation, which, the author admonished, “when practiced by one girl is harmful enough, but when practised between girls … is a most pernicious habit which should be vigorously fought against.” This author was quite explicit in his warning to girls to avoid just those manifestations of romantic friendship that were accepted and even encouraged a few decades earlier, such as hugging and exchanging intimacies. Parents were especially alerted to be suspicious of their daughters’ attachments. Articles such as a 1913 piece in
Harper’s Bazaar
titled “Your Daughter: What Are Her Friendships?” and signed “by a College Graduate” informed parents that most college friendships were innocent, but a tenth of them (how that figure is arrived at is never made clear) were morally degenerate and caused guilt and unhappiness because they were “not legitimate.”
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