Mary Fields, born a slave in 1832, often wore men’s clothes as a stagecoach driver. (From Black Lesbians by J. R. Roberts, Naiad Press, 1981; reprinted by permission.)
Ralph Kerwinieo, nee Cora Anderson, an American Indian woman: “The world is made by man—for man alone.” (From The Day Book, 1914; courtesy of Jonathan Ned Katz.)
Doctor Bernard Talmey observed in 1904 that the American public’s innocence regarding lesbianism resulted in dubbing women’s intimate attachments with each other “mere friendship.” (Courtesy of the Found Images Collection, Lesbian Herstory Archives/ L.H.E.F., Inc.)
Songwriter George Hannah observed of World War I that Uncle Sam: “Packed up all the men and sent ’em on to France,/Sent ’em over there the Germans to hunt, Left the women at home to try out all their new stunts.” (Courtesy of the Found Images Collection, Lesbian Herstory ArchivesL.H.E.F., Inc.)
Women Physical Education majors at the University of Texas held private “drag” proms in the 1930s. (Courtesy of Olivia Sawyers.)
New York, 1940s. Middleclass minority lesbian styles were diverse. (© Cathy Cade, A Lesbian Photo Album, 1987. Reprinted by permission.)
San Francisco, circa 1944. A private lesbian party. (Courtesy of the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Los Angeles.)
A San Francisco “gay girls” bar during World War II. (Courtesy of the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Los Angeles.)
WAC Sergeant Johnnie Phelps during World War II. General Eisenhower told her to “forget the order” to ferret out the lesbians in her battalion. (Courtesy of Johnnie Phelps.)
On military bases during the 1950s informers were planted on women’s softball teams, since lesbians were thought to be attracted to athletics. (Courtesy of Betty Jetter.)
Beverly Shaw sang “songs tailored to your taste” at elegant lesbian bars in the 1950s. (Courtesy of the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Los Angeles.)
Frankie, a 1950s butch. (Courtesy of Frankie Hucklenbroich.)
The pulps of the 1950s and ’60s were full of “odd girls” and “twilight lovers.” (Courtesy of Ballantine Books, Inc.)
Barbara Gittings in a pre-Stonewall lesbian and gay rights demonstration in front of Independence Hall, Philadelphia. (Courtesy of Nancy Tucker.)
Wastelands and Oases: The 1930s
Lydia to her fiance on leaving a women’s school:
These bunches of women living together, falling in love with each other because they haven’t anyone else to fall in love with! It’s obscene! Oh, take me away!
—Marion Patton,
Dance on the Tortoise, 1930
I feel confident she is in love with me just as much as I am with her. She is concerned about me and so thoughtful…. My sex life has never caused me any regrets. I’m very much richer by it. I feel it has stimulated me and my imagination and increased my creative powers.
—32-year-old woman interviewed in 1935
for George Henry’s Sex Variants
Perhaps if the move toward greater sexual freedom that was barely begun in the 1920s had not been interrupted by the depression, erotic love between women might have been somewhat less stigmatized in public opinion in the 1930s and a lesbian subculture might have developed more rapidly. Instead, whatever fears were generated about love between women in the 1920s were magnified in the uncertainty of the next decade as the economic situation became dismal and Americans were faced with problems of survival. This aborted liberality, together with the narrowing of economic possibilities, necessarily affected a woman’s freedom to live and love as she chose.
While more and more women continued to be made aware of the sexual potential in female same-sex relationships—through the great notoriety of The Well of Loneliness and the many works it influenced in the 1930s, through the continued popularity and proliferation of psychoanalytic ideas, and through a persistently though slowly growing lesbian subculture—to live as a lesbian in the 1930s was not a choice for the fainthearted. Not only would a woman have considerable difficulty in supporting herself, but also she would have to brave the increasing hostility toward independent females that intensified in the midst of the depression, and the continued spread of medical opinion regarding the abnormality of love between women. On top of all that, she would need a great spirit of adventure if she hoped to seek out a still-fledgling and well-hidden subculture, or a great self-sufficiency if she could not find it. For all these reasons, few women who loved other women were willing to identify themselves as lesbian in the 1930s. They often married and were largely cut off from other women—imprisoned in their husbands’ homes, where they could choose to renounce their longings or engage only in surreptitious lesbian affairs.
Kinder, Ktiche, Kirche and the “Bisexual” Compromise
Among middleclass women the depression was the great hindrance to a more rapid development of lesbian lifestyles, primarily because it squelched for them the possibility of permanently committing themselves to same-sex relationships. Such arrangements demanded above all that they have some degree of financial independence so that they did not have to marry in order to survive, and financial independence became more problematic for them in the 1930s. It was not that fewer women worked—in fact, the number of working women increased slightly during that decade. It was rather that in tight economic times they were discouraged from competing against men for better paying jobs and most women had to settle for low-salaried, menial jobs that demanded a second income for a modicum of comfort and made the legal permanence of marriage attractive.
Poor women who loved other women had never been led to believe that they might expect more rewarding or remunerative work. Though the depression rendered some of them jobless and homeless, they sometimes managed to make the best of a bad situation. For example, statistics gathered in 1933 estimated that about 150,000 women were wandering around the country as hoboes or “sisters of the road,” as they were called by male hoboes. For young working-class lesbians without work, hobo life could be an adventure. It permitted them to wear pants, as they usually could not back home, and to indulge a passion for wanderlust and excitement that was permitted only to men in easier times. Life on the road also gave them a protective camouflage. They could hitch up with another woman, ostensibly for safety and company, but in reality because they were a lesbian couple, and they could see the world together. Depression historians have suggested that such working-class lesbian couples were not uncommon in the hobo population during the 1930s. The most detailed eyewitness account of lesbian hoboes during the depression is that of a woman who was herself a hobo, Box-Car Bertha, who reported in her autobiography that lesbians on the road usually traveled in small groups and had little difficulty getting rides or obtaining food. She attributes a surprising liberality to motorists, which seems somewhat doubtful considering the general attitudes toward lesbianism that were rampant in America by this time. Bertha claims that “the majority of automobilists” who gave lesbians a ride were not only generous with them but would not think of molesting them physically or verbally: “They sensed [the women] were queer and made very little effort to become familiar.”1
The hobo lesbians’ middleclass counterparts, who came of age hoping to enjoy the expanded opportunities the earlier decades of the century had seemed to promise, were perhaps less cavalier about the new economic developments. They must often have felt because of the depression that they had to compromise their same-sex affections through a heterosexual marriage if they found a husband who would rescue them from the ignominy of working in a shop or as a lowly office clerk. Such jobs were available to females during the 1930s, since women could be hired for a fraction of men’s salaries. The “careers,” however, which had been giving middleclass women the professional status that so many early feminists had fought for, were now more likely to be reserved for men who “had a family to support.”2
That immense shift in middleclass 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 middleclass 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. Antifeminists 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
Middleclass 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 antifeminists 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 middleclass “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 middleclass 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 middleclass 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.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 13