Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  “Lesbianism” has not yet become a term that is as neutral as “romantic friendship” once was, but love between women appears to have begun the process of being rescued from the infamous status to which it was relegated for most of this century. Many women who identify themselves as heterosexual have been far more willing in the last twenty years to see other women as kindred spirits and battle allies than such women were throughout the earlier decades of the century, when females were socialized to believe that other women were their enemies and rivals. They now have more insight into what would make some females want to identify themselves as lesbians. They have helped create a new climate in which love between women is no longer accurately described as it was in the sensational pulp novels of the 1950s and early 1960s, in titles such as Odd Girl Out and Twilight Lovers. Love between women is no longer quite as “odd,” the “twilight love,” the love that dares not speak its name, as it had been for so long in our century. That new climate has also permitted self-definitions that transcend the stereotypes such as were characterized by the homophobic essayist of 1942 who argued that women should not be allowed to join the military because the only woman who would be attracted to such a pursuit would be the “naked amazons and queer damozels of Lesbos.”2

  This book is a history of these metamorphoses. I am concerned with tracing the evolution of love between women as it has been experienced in twentieth-century America, beginning with the institution of romantic friendship that reached a zenith around the turn of the last century, when middleclass women in large numbers were able to support themselves independently for the first time in our history. I am also concerned with how the theories of the sexologists filtered into popular consciousness, not coincidentally at about the same time that many jobs that had earlier been closed to women were opening up. I argue that the sexologists’ theories helped to erode relationships that now threatened to be permanent and thus more “serious” than earlier romantic friendships, which had to give way to marriage when women had no means of support.

  My examination of the demise of romantic friendships leads to a study of how some women constructed an identity and a subculture (and how they were frequently discouraged—by psychiatrists, the law, and public and familial pressure) in which they could express their love for other women. I focus particularly on the gradual establishment of lesbian subcultures in large cities; the relationship of class to the nature of those subcultures; the effects that all-female environments such as women’s colleges, the military, and women’s bars have had on the development of lesbianism; the ways in which feminism and gay liberation changed the view of love between women, both for lesbians and for society in general; and the forces that have moved female same-sex loving from the status of romantic friendship to sickness to twilight loves to women-identified-women, and that are gradually destigmatizing it, so that while it is not yet viewed as positively as romantic friendship was, it is becoming far more socially neutral, as even recent opinion polls indicate.3

  The general movement of this book is in the direction of tracing the development of lesbian subcultures. But I have tried also to provide glimpses of lesbians who have remained outside of those subcultures, both historically and in the present, those whose lives were or are lived primarily or exclusively within heterosexual communities and who may be considered lesbian only by virtue of their secret sexual identification. My goal has not been to trace the development of “the lesbian.” There is, of course, no such entity outside of the absurd constructions of textbook and pulp novel writers of the first half of the twentieth century. I have been interested rather in the metamorphoses and diversity of lesbians as they related individually and/or collectively to changing eras in American life.

  Through my research methodology I hoped to be inclusive of the broadest spectrum of lesbian life, past and present. For the sections of this book dealing with the previous century or the earliest decades of this century obviously I had to rely on archives, journals, and other published materials to reconstruct the history of lesbian life in America. But for the chapters for which I could locate women to tell me about their experiences (beginning with the 1920s) I was anxious to do so, not only to round out the picture of lesbian life by a conscious attempt to look at class, age, ethnic, and geographical diversity, but also to provide this study with their living voices.

  I conducted 186 unstructured interviews (lasting from two to four hours) in which I asked lesbians open-ended questions and permitted them to talk as long as they would (often digressively), in the hope of establishing what seemed important to them as lesbians: how they saw themselves and their sexuality, how they related (or did not relate) to the subcultures, what lesbianism meant to them. Through contacts in various states (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas, and California) who assisted me in setting up interviews, I spoke to a wide diversity of women, from the ages of 17 to 86; women who are white as well as those who are Asian, African American, Latina, and Native American; women who span the socioeconomic spectrum from one who milks cows for a living in central California to another who is the primary heir of her grandfather, one of the richest oil men in West Texas; women who have established their lives right in the center of a lesbian community and those who have no contact or only the most peripheral contact with such a community.

  The women I interviewed are, for the most part, self-identified lesbians, in keeping with my definition of post-1920s lesbianism: you are a lesbian if you say (at least to yourself) that you are. Of course such self-definitions were rare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where I begin this book, since many women did not yet have the vocabulary or even a concept of lesbianism that was broad enough to encompass them. I have included such women in my study if it is clear through what can be traced of them that their emotional lives were primarily homoaffectional.

  As will be revealed in the pages of this book, in the debate between the “essentialists” (who believe that one is born a lesbian and that there have always been lesbians in the past just as there are lesbians today) and the “social constructionists” (who believe that certain social conditions were necessary before “the lesbian” could emerge as a social entity) my own research has caused me to align myself on the side of the social constructionists. While I believe that some women, statistically very few, may have been “born different,” i.e., genetically or hormonally “abnormal,” the most convincing research I have been able to find indicates that such an anomaly is extremely rare among lesbians. Perhaps in the future studies will emerge that present compelling support for the essentialist position with regard to lesbianism, but such work does not exist at present.4 A small number of the women I interviewed told me they were convinced that they were born men trapped in women’s bodies; however, for the most part they suspected they were not lesbians but “transsexuals” (two of them had actually had sex change operations and are living as men). Others told me they were born lesbians, but what they said in the interview suggested to me that what they saw as the earliest signs of “lesbian feeling,” erotic interest in other females, in most cases may not have been particularly different from the childhood crushes that even Freudians have described as being “normal” in the young. Their early “lesbian behavior” also seemed often to have amounted only to “inappropriate” gender behavior, a phenomenon that has been convincingly called into question by feminism.

  Before women could live as lesbians the society in which they lived had to evolve to accommodate, however grudgingly, the possibility of lesbianism—the conception needed to be formulated; urbanization and its relative anonymity and population abundance were important; it was necessary that institutions be established where they could meet women with similar interests; it was helpful that the country enjoyed sufficient population growth so that pressure to procreate was not overwhelming; it was also helpful that the issues of sexuality and sexual freedom became increasingly open; and it was most crucial that women have the oppor
tunity for economic self-sufficiency that would free them from the constant surveillance of family. The possibility of a life as a lesbian had to be socially constructed in order for women to be able to choose such a life. Thus it was not until our century that such a choice became viable for significant numbers of women. This book traces the ways that happened.

  “The Loves of Women for Each Other”:

  “Romantic Friends” in the

  Twentieth Century

  The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so little should be said about them surprises me, for they are everywhere…. In these days, when any capable and careful women can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of “two hearts in counsel,” both of which are feminine.

  —Frances E. Willard,

  Glimpses of Fifty Years, 1889

  Ah, how I love you, it paralyzes me—It makes me heavy with emotion…. I tremble at the thought of you—all my whole being leans out to you…. I dare not think of your arms.

  —Rose Elizabeth Cleveland to

  Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890

  Early twentieth-century women, particluarly those of the middle class, had grown up in a society where love between young females was considered the norm, “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life,” where women’s love for one another was thought to “constitute the richness, consolation, and joy of their lives.”1 They could still envision their relationships as romantic friendship, and if sex entered into it they may have considered it somewhat irregular, but they did not feel compelled to spend too many daytime hours analyzing its implications.

  Romantic friendship in Western society can be traced back hundreds of years, at least to the Renaissance. But it was just as sexologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century were grasping their pens to suggest that women who loved other women were abnormal that romantic friendship, especially in America, truly burgeoned. Its growth was stimulated by the increasing militancy of nineteenth-century feminists who were agitating together not only for suffrage but for more opportunities in education and the professions. Its development was fostered by their shared successes. By the end of the century, ambitious women of the middle class who loved other females no longer needed to resign themselves to marriage in order to survive. They could go to college, educate themselves for a profession, earn a living in a rewarding career, and spend their lives with the women they loved. Perhaps for the first time in history they could proclaim, as Enid does to her would-be male suitor in Florence Converse’s 1897 novel, Diana Victrix:

  I am not domestic the way some women are. I shouldn’t like to keep house and sew … It would bore me. I should hate it! Sylvia and I share the responsibility here, and the maid works faithfully. There are only a few rooms. We have time for our real work but a wife wouldn’t have…. Please go away! I have chosen my life and I love it!2

  Thousands of women such as Enid and Sylvia now banded together in colleges and in various professions, and they created a society of what the nineteenth century and earlier had seen as romantic friends. But there were significant differences between the relationships of these women and those of their predecessors: since they could support themselves, they were no longer economically constrained to give up their female loves in favor of matrimony, and they now had plausible excuses to resist social pressure toward marriage—they could not be adequate wives because they were engaged in pioneering in education and the professions. For the first time in American history, large numbers of women could make their lives with another woman.

  Those females who enjoyed such privileges were, for the most part, of middle-and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Among the rich higher education and professional pursuits were still considered entirely inappropriate for women, and among the poor there were no such options for many decades to come. Women from wealthy families who loved other women generally remained constrained to behave much as they would have in past centuries—they still suffered under tremendous and often inescapable pressure to marry “appropriately” at a proper age. And women from poor families who loved other women also continued to be limited. It was not easy for two working-class women to set up a home together on the wages they could earn through menial labor. Economically, long-term relationships continued to be most feasible between working-class women if one of them could pass as a male and get a man’s wages for a man’s work, as some had managed to do in earlier eras. But for women of the middle class, these new times made a whole new lifestyle possible.

  The Educated “Spinster”

  More than any other phenomenon, education may be said to have been responsible for the spread among middleclass women of what eventually came to be called lesbianism. Not only did it bring them together in large numbers within the women’s colleges, but it also permitted them literally to invent new careers such as settlement house work and various kinds of betterment professions in which they could be gainfully and productively employed and to create all-female societies around those professions. Although these ramifications were undreamt of when the first real college for women, Mount Holyoke, was established in 1837, those who believed in the sacred-ness of stringent sex role behavior or were intent on keeping females chained to domesticity were quick to sniff danger even then. As one writer observed in The Religious Magazine that year, the new education for women meant that all that was “most attractive in female manners” would be replaced by characteristics “expressly formed for acting a manly part upon the theatre of life…. Under such influence the female character is fast becoming masculine.” Despite warnings like that, women’s colleges continued to proliferate. Vassar was founded in 1865, Smith in 1872, Wellesley in 1875, Bryn Mawr in 1886. In the 1870s several universities such as Cornell and the University of Michigan also began to open their doors to females. By 1880, forty thousand women, over a third of the higher education student population in America, were enrolled in colleges and universities and there were 153 American colleges that they could attend.3

  But conservatives continued to be unhappy about the revolution in educational opportunities for females. Most of the attacks on women’s higher education centered on the ways in which it would render them unfit for the traditional roles that the writers believed vital to the proper functioning of society. Dr. Edward Clarke, for example, whose 1873 book Sex in Education: or, A Fair Chance for Girls continued to be printed for the next two decades, warned that study would interfere with women’s fertility, cursing them with uterine disease, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, and prolapsed uteri. Even into the twentieth century such writers, often imbued with racist and classist theories of eugenics, feared what they called “race suicide” and prophesied that since “the best [female] blood of American stock” went off to college and probably would not marry, the mothers of America would eventually all be “from the lower orders of society” and the country would be ruined.4

  Even worse, some writers eventually came to fear (not without cause) a problem they hardly dared to express: that higher education for females, especially in all-women colleges, not only “masculinized” women but also made men dispensable to them and rendered women more attractive to one another. One author of the 1870s, alarmed perhaps by decadent French novels such as Mademoiselle de Maupin (about an adventuress who has affairs with men and women indiscriminately) that were being translated into English and by the writings of the sexologists that were just beginning to emerge, hinted in the pages of Scribner’s Monthly at the sexual possibilities that might arise if large numbers of women had unlimited access to one another. However, he obviously did not feel free to be specific in his allegations:

  It is not necessary to go into particulars … [but] such a system is fearfully unsafe. The facts which substantiate [this] opinion would fill the public mind with horror if they were publicly known. Men may “pooh! pooh!” these facts if they choose, but they exist.
Diseases of body, diseases of imagination, vices of body and imagination—everything we would save our children from—are bred in these great institutions where life and associations are circumscribed, as weeds are forced in hot beds.5

  Perhaps understanding the potency of romantic friendship in nineteenth-century America, such writers could imagine where that sentiment might lead in the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances. They were not far from the mark, but for many young women these effects were fortunate rather than tragic.

  Statistics corroborate that those who were interested in maintaining women in the narrow prison of heterosexuality as it was experienced by females in the nineteenth century were quite right in fearing the spread of higher education. Females who attended college were far less likely to marry than their uneducated counterparts. While only 10 percent of American women in general remained single between 1880 and 1900, about 50 percent of American college women at that time remained single. Fifty-seven percent of the Smith graduating class of 1884, at the height of women’s excitement over their newfound opportunities in education and the professions, never married. Marriage statistics for Vassar and Mount Holyoke were similar. Many of the most successful alumnae of that era were “spinsters.”6