Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  38. For examples of recent historians who deny their subjects’ homosexuality see Wells; Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E. R.’s Friend (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Dobkin; Fowler; Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 182–83. See also Blanche Cook, “The Historical Denial of Lesbianism,” Radical History Review (1979), 20:60–65.

  2. A Worm in the Bud

  1. Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), pp. 120–21. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “Women, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture and Society (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 17–42.

  2. Margaret Otis, “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (June/July 1913), 8(2):1 13–16. In an article written fifteen years later, Charles Ford observed similar relations between black and white women in prison: “Homosexual Practices of Institutionalized Females,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychiatry (January/March 1929), 23:442–48.

  3. Figures cited in Joanne Meyerowitz, Holding Their Own: Working Women Apart from Family in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983), p. 1.

  4. Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” in Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); Meyerowitz, p. 149.

  5. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univesity Press, 1986), esp. pp. 62, 103–14, 163–68. See also the discussion of working class sexuality in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), especially parts 2 and 3.

  6. William Lee Howard, “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,” New York Medical Journal (1900), 71:686–87.

  7. Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, “Die Kontrare Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathologischen (psycopathischen) Zustandes,” Archiv for Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (1869), 2:73–108. George Chauncey, in an often-quoted article, was the first to suggest a shift from inversion to homosexuality in medical discourse, which he claimed occurred around the turn of the century. In a recent reprint of the article, however, he added a postscript revising his orginial observation: “Inversion continued for decades to be a major medical concern and to be linked to homosexuality; the shift, as I may not have indicated clearly enough, was hardly decisive or unanimous by the 1920s”; “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance’,” Salmagundi (Fall/Winter 1983), 58/59:114–146, reprinted in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 87–117.

  8. Estimate of female trans vestites in the Civil War in George Washington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army (New York: 1952). “Harry Gorman” discussed in Xavier Mayne (Edward I. Prime Stevenson), The Intersexes: A History of Psychosexualism as a Problem in Social Life (1908; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 149–50. Numerous passing women are presented in Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976) and Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). It was Katz who first popularized the term “passing women.” See also Allan Bérubé, “Lesbian Masquerade,” Gay Community News, November 17, 1979, pp. 8–9, and slide show (with the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society), She Drank, She Swore, She Courted Girls, She Even Chewed Tobacco; also my earlier work, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), passim; Kore Archer, “The One-Eyed Amazon of Santa Cruz County,” Lavender Reader, Summer 1987, pp. 14–15; and Babe Bean file, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives.

  9. Lucy Ann Lobdell, The Narrative of Lucy Ann Lobdell, the Female Deer Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties (1885), presented in Katz, Gay American History, pp. 214–21. Warner is quoted in Berube, “Lesbian Masquerade.” Babe Bean newpaper accounts in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives. A few women continued to pass even into our era for similar reasons. Billy Tipton, for example, a jazz musician, began passing in order to play with the all-male swing bands of the ’30s. She was not discovered to be a woman until her death in 1989: Radio interview, Lynn Niery and Lillian Faderman, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, February 5, 1989. Although most passing women appear to have been working-class, there are several recorded exceptions such as Babe Bean, who claimed to have come from a distinguished family. Another notable exception was Alberta Lucille Hart, who received a medical degree from Stanford in the second decade of the twentieth century and spent most of her career as a physician in male guise; see Katz, Gay American History, pp. 258–79 and Gay/Lesbian Almanac, pp. 516–22.

  10. Mary Fields is discussed in William Katz, The Black West (New York: Doubleday, 1973). Kerwinieo is quoted in Jonathan Katz, Gay American History, pp. 254–57.

  11. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, “Perversion of the Sexual Instinct—Report of Cases,” Alienist and Neurologist, October 1888.

  12. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897; reprint, New York: Random House, 1936, rev. ed.), pp. 261–62.

  13. Julien Chevalier, Inversion sexuelle (Paris: Masson, 1893), pp. 219–25.

  14. James Weir, Jr., “The Effects of Female Suffrage on Posterity,” American Naturalist (September 1895), 24(345):815–25.

  15. William Lee Howard, The Perverts (New York: 1901) and “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,” p. 687.

  16. For a discussion of that literature see Surpassing the Love of Men, op. cit., parts 1B, 2A (chs. 2, 4, 5), 3A (ch. 1).

  17. Figures cited in William G. Shade, “A Mental Passion: Female Sexuality in Victorian America,” International Journal of Women’s Studies (1978), 1(1): 16. Albert H. Hayes, Physiology of Women (Boston: Peabody Medical Institute, 1869), p. 226.

  18. Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, U.S. Army (1896–1916), second series, quoted in Nancy Salhi, “Changing Patterns of Sexuality and Female Interaction in Nineteenth Century America,” paper delivered at Berkshire Women’s History Conference, June 11, 1976, pp. 12–13, in Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

  19. R. N. Shufeldt, “Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion,” Pacific Medical Journal (1902), 45:199–207. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out that it was in the 1890s that physicians and social critics began to initiate a new wave of attacks on the New Woman, the focus of whose deviance in their view shifted from her rejection of motherhood to her rejection of men. “From being ‘unnaturally’ barren, the autonomous woman … emerged as ‘unnaturally’ sexual”; “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and the Gender Crisis, 1870–193 6,” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), p. 265. Girls discussed in Denslow Lewis, The Gynecological Considerations for the Sexual Act (1900; reprint, Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1970), p. 13. “Numerous phases of inversion” in Joseph Richardson Parke, Human Sexuality: A Medico-Literary Treatise on the Laws, Anomalies, and Relations of Sex with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Feelings (Philadelphia: Professional Publishing Company, 1906), p. 272.

  20. Bernard Talmey, Woman: A Treatise on the Normal and Pathological Emotions of Feminine Love (1904; reprint, New York: Practioners Publishing Company, 1910), p. 123. Regarding popular magazine fiction see my article, “Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture (Spring 1978), 11(4):800–17.

  21. A. A. Brill, Psychoanalysis: It Theories and Practical Application, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1914), p. 55, and Douglas McMurtrie, “Manifestations of Sexual Inversion in the Female,” Urologic and Cutaneous Review (1914), 18:4
25. Such “self-ignorance” continued even into the 1920s in England, as an article by British psychologist Stella Browne suggests: “Studies in Feminine Inversion,” Journal of Sexology and Psychoanalysis (1923), 1:51–58.

  22. William Alger, The Friendships of Women (Boston: Roberts, 1868), p. 364. Isabelle Mallon (Ruth Ashmore), Side Talks with Girls (New York: Charles Scribner, 1895), pp. 122–23. Irving D. Steinhardt, Ten Sex Talks with Girls (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1914), pp. 57–62. A College Graduate, “Your Daughter: What Are Her Friendships?” Harper’s Bazaar, October 1913, p. 16 +.

  23. Irving C. Rosse, “Sexual Hypochondraisis,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (November 1892), 17(1):807. August Forel, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygenie, and Sociological Study (1906; reprint, New York: Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, 1924), pp. 251–52.

  24. Marion Joyce, “Flight from Slander,” Forum, August 1938, reprinted in Jonathan Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, pp. 539–45.

  25. Yearbook pictures in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: “History, the 1920s.” Elizabeth Goodwin and Katharine Woodward, “My Heart Leaps Up,” Bryn Mawr Yearbook, 1921, quoted in Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein,” Critical Inquiry (1977), 3:491–506.

  26. Cather’s masculine dress in college is described in James Woodress, Willa Gather: Her Life and Art (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 33. Cather’s “unentangled” image is discussed in Elizabeth Sergeant, Willa Gather: A Memoir (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 115–16. Her relationships with women, particularly Isabelle McClung, are discussed more openly in Sharon O’Brien, Willa Gather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  27. Jeannette Marks’ papers, “Unwise College Friendships,” Williston Memorial Library, Mount Holyoke College. See also Jeannette Marks, A Girl’s School Days and After (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1911), pp. 36–37. Discussion of projected book on homosexuality occurs in unpublished correspondence with Dr. Arthur Jacobson, 1923–1924, Williston Memorial Library, Mount Holyoke College. See also Alice Stone Blackwell, who enjoyed numerous passionate relationships with females yet denounced them when she served on a committee of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (forerunner of the AAUW), which investigated the effects of smashing on college women’s health, discussed in Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (New York: Mentor Books, 1976), pp. 45–46, 252, and Nancy Salhi, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis (1979), 8:17–27.

  28. Mary Casal, The Stone Wall: An Autobiography (Chicago: Eyncourt Press, 1930), pp. 165, 185.

  29. My article, “Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” discusses through literary examples in American and English magazines the persistence in the first two decades of our century of the view of love between women as socially sanctioned romantic friendship. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Felipa,” (Lippincott’s Magazine, 1876; reprint, Rodman the Keeper, New York: D. Appleton, 1880).

  30. Jonathan Katz includes lengthy excerpts about the Alice Mitchell case from both popular and medical periodicals: Gay American History, pp. 53–58, 136; Gay/Lesbian Almanac, pp. 223–27 and passim.

  31. Mary C. Wilkins Freeman, “The Long Arm,” (1895; reprinted in Carolyn Wells, ed., American Detective Stories [New York: Oxford University Press, 1927], pp. 134–78. Mary R. P. Hatch, The Strange Disappearance of Eugene Comstock (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1895).

  32. John Wesley Carhart, Norma Trist; or Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes (Austin, Tex.: Eugene von Boeckmann, 1895). Carhart also refers specifically in this novel to his knowledge of Krafft-Ebing (p. 56). Carhart apparently believed that few other Americans were familiar with the phenomenon of lesbianism. He observed, looking back over the nineteenth century: “It is true, French and German literature abounded with fiction to which sexual abnormalities have given rise; but it was almost universally of so gross a nature as to render it unfit for translation into English for the American reader; and since the subject at that time had awakened no scientific interest, few American readers, from curiosity or pleasure, would seek such literature in the German or French language” (p. 57). For a similar view by a nineteenth-century medical man regarding American innocence about lesbianism see Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, “The Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts,” American Journal of Insanity (April 1896), 52:503–9. The Mitchell case may also have influenced a later work, Gertrude Atherton’s Mrs. Balfame (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1916), in which Anna Steuer, a respected doctor, has a lifelong attachment to Enid Balfame. Unlike Alice Mitchell, however, Dr. Steuer kills not the woman she loves, but rather Enid’s obnoxious husband who has made his wife’s life unhappy. It is not clear if Atherton believed she was depicting lesbianism or a more spiritual romantic friendship, but as one of the characters in the novel observes, Enid was definitely “the romance of poor Anna’s life” (p. 332).

  33. Forel, p. 244.

  34. Natalie Barney quoted in Jean Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney, trans. Carol Baker (New York: Crown, 1976), p. 47.

  35. Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” in Estelle Freedman et al., eds., The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 7–25. Frances Wilder to Edward Carpenter, 1915, in Ruth F. Claus, “Confronting Homosexuality: A Letter from Frances Wilder,” Signs (Summer 1977), 2(4):928–33.

  36. I discuss the rare historical instances of lesbian persecution in Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 47–54. See also Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Punishment from 1270 to 1791,” Journal of Homosexuality (Fall/Winter 1980/81), 6(1/2): 11–25.

  37. Joseph Richardson Parke, Human Sexuality: A Medico-Literary Treatise on the Laws, Anomalies and Relations of Sex, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Feelings (Philadelphia: Professional Publishing Company, 1906), p. 245.

  38. Walhalla (Valhalla?) Hall dance described by Dr. Charles Nesbitt, quoted in Jonathan Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, pp. 218–20. Mary Casal, a lesbian who was born in 1864, also alludes to a small lesbian subculture in New York around the turn of the century: The Stone Wall, pp. 180–85. An unpublished story by Harriet Levy (an early friend of Alice B. Toklas), written around the turn of the century, suggests that the new awareness even sometimes promoted “cruising” between women and attempts to pick each other up: “A Beautiful Girl,” in ms. collection of Harriet Levy, chapter 20, unpublished stories, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 54–65. See also my dicussion in Surpassing the Love of Men, pp. 188–89. In a 1914 article Douglas McMurtrie wrote of “lesbian assemblies,” but in the light of his antifeminist source his reference is most likely to feminist societies for career women such as Heterodoxy (see p. 83 here); “Notes on the Psychology of Sex,” American Journal of Urology and Sexology (Sept. 1914), 10(9):432. See also William Lee Howard, “Sexual Perversion in America,” American Journal of Dermatology and Genito-Urinary Diseases (1904), 8:9–14. Chauncey, pp. 105–6.

  39. Personal interview with Barbara Gittings, age 55, Philadelphia, October 7, 1987.

  40. Personal interview with LuAnna, age 35, Austin, Tex., April 1, 1988. On the uses of essentialism see Paul Horowitz, “Beyond the Gay Nation: Where Are We Marching?,” Out/Look, Spring 1988, pp. 7–21.

  3. Lesbian Chic

  1. Quoted in Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York, 1971), p. 405.

  2. Susan Glaspell, quoted in Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America (1933; reprint, New York: Dover, 1960), p. 278.

  3. Lesbian communities in Salt Lake City and San Francisco are discussed in Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s: A New Found Study,” Signs (Summer 1977), 2(4):895~904. Discussion of small town homosexuality in the 1920s is in Bob Skiba, “Pansies, Perverts, and Pegged Pants,” Gay and Lesbian Community
Guide to New England, 1982, p. 3, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1920s.

  4. Katharine Bement Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1929), p. 247. See also my analysis of Davis’ data in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), pp. 326–27.

  5. George Hannah, “Boy in the Boat,” AC-DC Blues: Gay Jazz Reissues, side B, Stash Records, ST-106.

  6. Hemingway’s most recent biographer, Kenneth Lynn, observes “a larger drama of sexual confusion” in Hemingway’s life: a mother who was a lesbian, sisters who wished to be boys, obsession with women’s short hair, cross dressing. He was intrigued by Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism and was also close friends with other expatriate lesbians such as Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney. Lynn suggests that Hemingway derived the name of his impotent hero in The Sun Also Rises from them: “Jacob” from Natalie’s famous address, 20 rue Jacob, and “Barnes” from Djuna’s last name. Jake is in love with Brett who is sexually aggressive and mannish, and Lynn states that his “dilemma is that, like a lesbian, he cannot penetrate his loved one’s body”; Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). But Hemingway’s interest in lesbians may be explained as easily in the context of his times as in the context of his personal life. Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), pp. 150–55.

  7. Kaier Curtin discusses the flurry over God of Vengeance, Sin of Sins, and The Captive in “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians”: Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage (Boston: Alyson, 1987). When Thomas Dickinson’s Winter Bound, a play that seems to be influenced by D. H. Lawrence’s novella of lesbian defeat, The Fox, appeared on Broadway at the end of the decade it caused little stir, perhaps because by then the public had become more used to the subject of lesbianism, particularly through The Well of Loneliness, which was published in America shortly before the production of Winter Bound (1929) and quickly became a best-seller.