by Seth Koven
104. See Gladys Mary Wauchope, The Story of a Woman Physician (Baltimore, 1963), 26. Wauchope, six years younger than Lester, also attended St. Leonard’s in Scotland and lived in Loughton. She worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment member in Braeside Hospital during the war.
105. On the care, treatment and rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, see Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain,” The American Historical Review 99:4 (October 1994): 1167–1202; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, 1996); Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester, 2005); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, 2001).
106. In a typescript autobiographical fragment, Muriel wrote that “our deep sorrow was shot through and through with joy. He would not be harried either into killing human beings, God’s German children or having to face a public tribunal, a dread and paralyzing process, trying to prove that one’s conscience fitted in to a category.” Muriel Lester, “K.H.”, Typescript Autobiography, 2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
107. See Nadja Durbach, “Class, Gender and the Conscientious Objector to Vaccination, 1898–1907,” Journal of British Studies 41:1 (January 2002): 58–83.
108. See D. R. Pugh, “English Nonconformity, Education and Passive Resistance 1903–6,” History of Education 19:4 (1990): 355–70. On Lester, see “Petty Session, March 9th,” Essex County Chronicle, March 16, 1906, 7.
109. Muriel appears not to have published anything about either Platten or Hobhouse’s imprisonment. She did, however, offer a poignant portrait of an East London barber and Christian missionary who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. Muriel noted that confinement in prison led conscientious objectors to be “unable to marshal their thoughts properly; through enforced silence they lose the power of expressing themselves….” See Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure (Nashville, 1937), 54.
110. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 72.
111. “What Parents Think,” undated newspaper clipping, Notebook of news clippings about Platten and conscientious objectors in Loughton, Benjamin Platten Papers, Loughton Library, Loughton; hereafter cited as Platten News Clippings.
112. Handwritten copy of application for complete exemption, Local Tribunal, Loughton, February 26, 1916. All of Platten’s correspondence with military officials and tribunals are preserved in the Benjamin Platten Papers, Loughton Library, Loughton.
113. See “Conscience and Objectors, By a Loughton Fighter,” undated newspaper clipping, Platten News Clippings. The Plattens created a scrapbook of news articles about his case as well as discussions of conscientious objectors in the local Essex press.
114. See Rosa Hobhouse, ed., Towards Harmony: A Century of Letters by Stephen Hobhouse, Fifth Series, To His Wife (From Prison), unpublished typescript, Library of the Society of Friends.
115. Mrs. Hobhouse retained copies of these letters and responses to them. See Papers of Margaret Potter Hobhouse, ALH/27, Hobhouse Papers, Hadspen, Somerset. I thank Niall Hobhouse and staff at Hadspen for their hospitality in allowing me to stay there while consulting the papers of Margaret Potter Hobhouse, Stephen Hobhouse, and Rosa Waugh Hobhouse.
116. On the history of conscientious objection and the Hobhouses, see Seth Koven, “Mrs. Henry Hobhouse Goes to War: Conscience and Christian Radicalism in WWI Britain,” R K Webb Lecture, November 6, 2008, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, access via YouTube. For a powerful account of the way the war divided families including the Hobhouses, see Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston, 2011). See also Peter Brock, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Transformation to the Second World War (Toronto, 2006), chap. 17. For most contemporaries, conscientious objectors had nothing in common with the soldier hero. On the soldier hero in Victorian and early 20th century culture, see Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994).
117. On the concept of “informal English” to describe the prose of working-class authors, see Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale, John Pearman, 1819–1908 (New York, 1988), esp. 20–24.
118. Gertrude Stein, “Do Let Us Go Away, A Play” (1918) reprinted in Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays, introduction by Cyrena N. Pondrom (Madison, WI, 1993), 216, 218; Nellie Dowell Letters, c. 1916, Bishopsgate.
119. See Doris Cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Nashville, 2005), 32. Stein coined the phrase “auditory consciousness” to describe the relationship between her listening and writing in 1896.
120. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1937), 91.
121. Nellie Dowell Letters, February 14, 1912, Bishopsgate.
122. Nellie Dowell Letters, July 1, 1912, Bishopsgate.
123. Nellie Dowell Letters, November 13, [1910], Bishopsgate.
124. Ibid.
125. On the role of aggression within women’s benevolent gift economy and friendships, see Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian England (Oxford, 2012).
126. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, c. 1916, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
127. This phrase comes from Nellie’s letter to Muriel, July 1, 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
128. On “overwork” as a sanctioned explanation for “shattered nerves,” see Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves (New York, 1991).
129. Nellie Dowell Letters, February 14, 1912, Bishopsgate.
130. On the female invalid as a figure of bourgeois culture, see Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2004). Nellie’s experience suggests that at least some laboring people experienced “invalidism” even if they could not afford to participate in the full consumer economy catering to afflicted middle-and upper-class men and women.
131. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. [autumn 1916], Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
132. Nellie Dowell Letters, November 13, n.d. [1910], Bisphopsgate.
133. Nellie Dowell Letters, March 24, 1912, Bishopsgate.
134. Nellie Dowell Letters, n.d., Bishipsgate.
135. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d.[late 1922], Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
136. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, November 13 [1910] and February 14, 1912, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
137. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argued that middle-class women’s passionate “romantic friendships” often complemented their marriages to men while occupying a continuum from the non-sexual to the fully sexual. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29. See also Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), pts. 2 and 3.
138. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago, 2006), xxv–xxvii, 7, 88. “Intimate friends” often used familial metaphors to describe their relationship: mother/daughter, husband/wife and sisterly. Vicinus identifies “gifts, letters and long private conversations” as the repertoire of gestures and acts that led women from friendship into “intimate friendship.”
139. See Sharon Marcus’s persuasive critique of the continuum model in Between Women, Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007), 10–12, 32, 54. See also Liz Stanley’s insightful intervention about female friendship and the relationship of sexology to women’s own understanding of their sexual selves. Liz Stanley, “Epistemological Issues in Researching Lesbian History: The Case of “Romantic Friendship,” in Hilary Hinds, Ann Phoenix and Jackie Stacey, eds., Working Out: New Directions for Women’s Studies (London, 2004), 161–72.
140. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. [November 1910],
Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
141. It seems very likely Muriel encountered such relationships in her exploration of Christian mystical traditions. See Cornelia Wilde, Friendship, Love and Letters: Ideals and Practices of Seraphic Friendship in Seventeenth-Century England (Heidelberg, Germany, 2012); See also Frances Harris’s gorgeous and penetrating study of opposite sex “seraphic friendship,” Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford, 2002).
142. Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge, 2008), 154.
143. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
144. On this dynamic in a cross-age dynamic, see Martha Vicinus, “Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870–1920,” Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984): 600–622.
145. See Jeffrey Weeks’s path-breaking work on homosexual community and identity in Britain that established the essential parameters of this debate, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977) and Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981).
146. Inspired by Foucault’s “knowledge is power” paradigm, scholars have generated a vast literature about what people know about sex and how they produce sexual knowledge about themselves and others. The timing of the invention of sexual categories such as homosexual and lesbian, along with their dissemination and meaning across class, gender, space, and place have been hotly debated. For some scholars, identities can’t exist without the vocabulary and categories that go with them. Put simply, women who had sex with other women can’t be lesbians until the category lesbian existed. Men who had sex with other men can’t be homosexuals, until the category homosexual existed. This position is most closely connected to the work of David Halperin. See One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990).
147. See Laura Doan’s essential Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York, 2001). Richard Dellamora notes that Radclyffe Hall, the exemplary lesbian of British public culture in the twentieth century, nonetheless eschewed the word “lesbian” in favor of Sapphic culture, sexual inversion, and Christian-inspired language of “cross-gendered” female-female desire. Hall cultivated what Dellamora calls “vernacular Christian mysticism,” which spiritualized her “cousinage” model of female friends, blood relatives, and sexual intimates. See Richard Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing (Philadelphia, 2011), see esp. preface, and chaps.1, 3, and 8.
148. Such lexical tracking is now possible because of massive digitized databases of periodicals and newspapers. Built in 1874, The Lesbian was scrapped in 1903. A new Lesbian plied the seas from 1923–1940. By 1920, the word “Lesbian” appeared in British print in relation to female homosexuality on the Parisian stage. See “The Post-War Theatre in Paris,” Saturday Review, September 25, 1920, 256. The heroine of a play was described as “coquettishly Lesbian in her proclivities.”
149. Mateship among laboring women remains unexplored by historians, in part because extant sources are so scarce. I touch on it briefly in Slumming, 218
150. According to Lee Edelman, “queerness” rejects the “viability of the social” and the “substantiability of identity”—and thus the future orientation of liberal social politics. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, 2004); see also Laura Doan’s critique of gay and lesbian historiography, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago, 2013). Doan combines archival research into women’s lives like that of visitor to Kingsley Hall in 1925, Violet Douglas-Pennant, with a searching methodological critique of the limits of “queerness” as an identity. She proposes queerness as a way of thinking about and doing history that “disturbs” and frustrates the desire to make claims about identity; such an approach embraces the fragmentary nature of queer archives as a methodological incitement.
151. For a strong statement of this position, see Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago, 2007).
152. For a critique of gay and lesbian identity politics and “queerness as being,” see Matt Houlbrook, “Thinking Queer: The Social and the Sexual in Interwar Britain,” in Brian Lewis, ed., British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester, 2013).
153. Hera Cook suggests that physical intimacy and proximity sometimes, but not necessarily, led to genital contact and pleasure between women. She argues that physical affection between women—“embracing, kissing, sitting close together, and sharing the same bed at night”—was fairly common. Women “who identified as lesbians” “gradually moved to genital sexual activity with women … suggesting that they, like many heterosexual women, did not initially identify their genitals as sources of pleasure.” See Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford, 2004), 177.
154. Lester, It Occurred to Me, 83.
155. She, like so many other members of the British Left, uncritically accepted E. B. Morel’s racist attack on the sexual mores of black French African troops who purportedly engaged in mass rape of German women in the occupied Rhine at the end of World War I.
156. See Muriel Lester, “Draft Autobiographical Accounts,” Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
157. See Spencer Cecil Carpenter, The Biography of Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, Bishop of London, 1901–1939 (London, 1949), 77. See Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London, 1933), esp. chap. 6; on Flora Major’s mourning of her fallen soldier, see Sybil Oldfield, Spinsters of This Parish: The Life and Times of F.M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks (London, 1984).
158. I develop this argument about celibacy in Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004), chap. 4.
159. William Cecil Dampier-Whetham and Catherine Durning Whetham, The Family and the Nation, A Study in Natural Inheritance and Social Responsibility (London, 1909), 195–99. See also Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York, 2001), 59.
160. See Alison Falby, “Maude Royden’s Sacramental Theology of Sex and Love,” Anglican and Episcopal History, 79: 2 (June 2010); see also Marcus Collins’ insightful discussion of Royden and Christian sexual ethics in interwar Britain in Modern Love: Personal Relationships in Twentieth-Century Britain (Newark DE, 2003).
161. Agnes Maude Royden, Sex and Common-Sense (1921), 6, 25–27. On Royden, see Sue Morgan’s excellent, “Sex and Common-Sense: Maude Royden, Religion and Modern Sexuality,” Journal of British Studies 52 (2013): 153–78. Pacifist feminist Helena Swanwick critiqued sexual repression as unhealthy for women as part of her analysis of the costs and consequences of war on women’s lives. See Helena Swanwick, War in Its Effect on Women (London, 1916), 21.
162. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), 49.
163. In her unpublished memoir, Royden recalled being asked whether she thought “all talk of sublimation as a panacea for frustrated sex feeling was not ‘all bunk.’ ” “No, I don’t think it is” was her response. Few were able to entirely sublimate sexual feelings. For those who did sublimate sexual feelings, “life can be full and satisfying.” See Maude Royden, “Bid Me Discourse,” 7/AMR, Box 224, Agnes Maude Royden Papers, Women’s Library (now transferred to BLPES).
164. On the interwar interpretations of the category “spinster” and feminist reworkings of “repression” by Stella Browne, Mary Scharlieb, Esther Harding, Maude Royden, Winifred Holtby and others, see Alison Oram, “Repressed and thwarted, or bearer of the new world? The Spinster in Interwar Feminist Discourses, Women’s History Review, 1:3 (1992): 413–33. See also Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender, and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (New York, 2000), chap. 6.
165. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” reprinte
d in Andrew McNeille, ed., The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925–1928 (London, 1984), 162
166. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d. (1916), Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
167. See “Monastic Life For Penny A Night,” November 9, 1928, (London) Evening News; and “Social Centre Like a Monastery,” September 13, 1928, (London) Daily Chronicle. My thanks to Kate Imy for suggesting this line of argument.
168. For a fascinating analysis of the rivalries among disciples of another charismatic, post–World War I, heterodox female religious leader, see Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God (London, 2011).
169. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, November 1910, Nellie Dowell Letters, Bishopsgate.
170. This formulation is indebted to Martha Vicinus’s foundational essay, “Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships, 1870–1920,” Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984): 600–622.
171. On their relationship see Naomi Lloyd’s fine study, “Evangelicalism and the Making of Same-Sex Desire: the Life and Writings of Constance Maynard,” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2011. See also Pauline Phipps, “Faith, Desire and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard’s Atonement,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18:2 (2009): 265–86.
172. Constance Maynard, unpublished autobiography, pt. 5, chap. 35 (1879), 374, Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary, University.
173. Maynard, unpublished autobiography, pt. 4, chap. 31 (1877), 237. Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary University.
174. Vera Brittain to Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, July 30, 1963, Box 4, Orange Folder, Rosa Hobhouse Papers, Hadpsen, Somerset.
175. Elizabeth Barrett to Julia Martin, October 22, 1842 in Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, eds., The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 6 (Winfield, KS, 1988), 117. My thanks to Beverly Taylor for alerting me to Barrett’s letter.
176. Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, Canto II, X, line 14; Canto I, I, line 1.
177. Here, I borrow from Maria Tomboukou’s use of Foucault in analyzing letters between women. See Maria Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self, A Foucauldian Perspective (London, 2003), 166–73.