Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  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 antisocial 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.15

  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 throwbacks 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.16 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 middleclass 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.17

  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.”18

  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 cunnilinguistic 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.]”19

  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.”20

  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 psychoa
nalysts were still noting that “homosexual women are often not acquainted with their condition.”21

  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.”22

  The medical journals sometimes went much further in their imputation of wild sexual practices between females, though again their focus was generally on women of the working class. Dr. Irving Rosse, for example, discussed sex between women in sensationalistic, excessive, and bizarre terms that appear to have come right out of French novels rather than reality. In an 1892 article for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease he described one case of a prostitute who had “out of curiosity” visited various women who made a “speciality of the lesbian vice” and on submitting herself “by way of experiment to [their] lingual and oral maneuvers … had a violent hystero-cataleptic attack from which she was a long time in recovering.” Another case he described was of a young unmarried woman who became pregnant through her married sister, “who committed the simulacrum of the male act on her just after copulating with her husband.” To divine the means she used to transfer her husband’s semen from her vagina to her unmarried sister’s challenges the average imagination, but Dr. Rosse seemed to find nothing dubious in such a feat. In a 1906 work, August Forel, a Swiss psychiatrist and director of the Zurich Insane Asylum, wrote about lesbian sexual orgies “seasoned with alcohol” and nymphomaniacal lesbians. “The [sexual] excess of female inverts exceed those of the male,” he stated. “This is their one thought, night and day, almost without interruption.”23 The literature disseminated to the lay public was considerably tamer.

  Nevertheless, the new persective undoubtedly created great confusion in women who were brought up in the previous century to believe in the virtues, beauty, and idealism of romantic friendship. Suddenly they learned that what was socially condoned so recently was now considered unsalutary and dangerous. One woman remembered the shock of the new “knowledge” that came to her when she was eighteen, in 1905. She had been raised with the idea of the preciousness of intimate attachments between females, but almost overnight all changed, she suggested: “Public opinion, formed by cheap medical reprints and tabloid gossip, dubbed such contacts perverted, called such women lesbians, such affection and understanding destructive.” She was, however, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a deep voice who sold books door-to-door. Females of more “refinement,” who were more feminine-looking and had a more protected social status, were apparently able to continue relationships such as earlier eras viewed as romantic friendship much longer into the twentieth century than unsheltered women who looked as though they had stepped out of the pages of Krafft-Ebing.24

  Class may have accounted for profound differences here. The luxury of naivete regarding lesbianism that many socially sheltered middleclass American college women were able to enjoy even into the sophisticated 1920s is illustrated in their yearbooks. The Oberlin College yearbook of 1920, for example, contains a page of thirty-two photographs of women who are identified by name under the heading “Lesbians.” They were members of the Oberlin Lesbian Society, a woman’s group devoted to writing poetry. The Bryn Mawr yearbook for 1921 contains an essay titled “My Heart Leaps Up,” in which the writers observe ironically (but absolutely without any of the implications that psychoanalysts of that era would have felt compelled to draw):

  Crushes are bad and happen only to the very young and very foolish. Once upon a time we were very young, and the bushes on the campus were hung with our bleeding hearts. Cecil’s heart bled indiscriminately. The rest of us specialized more, and the paths of Gertie Hearne, Dosia, Eleanor Marquand, Adelaide, Tip, and others would have been strewn with roses if public opinion had permitted flowers during the War.

  The type of person smitten was one of the striking things about the epidemic. For instance, our emotional Betty Mills spent many stolen hours gazing up at Phoebe’s window. The excitable Copey was enamoured successively of all presidents of the Athletic Association, and has had a hard time this year deciding where to bestow her affections.

  But there were some cases that were different from these common crushes. We know they were different because the victims told us so. Only the most jaundiced mind could call by any other name than friendship Nora’s tender feeling toward Gertie Steele, which led her to keep Gertie’s room overflowing with flowers, fruit, candy, pictures, books, and other indispensible articles….

  The real thing in the way of passion was the aura of emotion with which Kash surrounded Sacred Toes. She confided her feelings to one-half the campus, and the other half was not in total ignorance, but Kash constantly worried lest it should leak out.

  Of course all these things happened in our extreme youth.25

  However, not all females of their social class remained as innocent. Although some early twentieth-century women apparently saw no need to hide their same-sex relationships (for example, Vida Scudder, discussed in chapter 4), many apparently did. Willa Cather was perhaps representative in this regard. At the beginning of her college career at the University of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century she called herself Dr. William and dressed virtually in male drag. By the end of her college years her presentation was considerably more feminine, but she continued her amorous relationships with other women—Louise Pound, Isabelle McClung, with whom she was involved for about twelve years, and later Edith Lewis, with whom she lived for forty years. Yet she cultivated the image of celibacy and pretended to reject all human ties for the sake of art. She claimed that she could not become “entangled” with anyone because to be free to work at her writing table was “all in all” to her. She seems to have felt that it was necessary to conceal the ways in which the women she loved and lived with, and was very “entangled” with, contributed to her ability to create, although the latest Cather biographers have not seen the need for such reticence.26

  Cather became very secretive about her private life around the turn of the century because she was cognizant of the fall from grace that love between women was beginning to suffer. Other women who had same-sex relationships at about that time, when society’s view of such love started to turn, adopted a much more aggressive and sadder ploy to conceal what was coming to be considered their transgressions: they bitterly denounced love between women in public. Jeannette Marks, professor at Mount Holyoke, lived for fifty-five years in a devoted relationship with Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke, and yet wrote and attempted to publish an essay in 1908 on “unwise college fri
endships.” She called such relationships “unpleasant or worse,” an “abnormal condition,” and a sickness requiring a “moral antiseptic.” Marks appears not even to be talking about full-fledged lesbianism, since she decribes those loves only as “sentimental” friendships. But against all her own experiences and those of her closest friends, she baldly states in this essay that the only relationship that can “fulfill itself and be complete is that between a man and a woman.” Later Marks even began work on a book dealing with homosexuality in literature in which she intended to show that insanity and suicide were the result of same-sex love.27 Were those works a pathetic attempt to deny to the world that her domestic arrangement, which all Mount Holyoke knew about, was not what it seemed?

  Perhaps it would be more charitable to try to understand her ostensible dishonesty through a revelation that her contemporary Mary Casal makes in her autobiography, The Stone Wall. Casal, writing about the turn of the century a number of years later (1930), talks frankly about her own earlier lesbian sexual relationship with Juno, which she decribes as being “the very highest type of human love,” but she insists on a distinction between their homosexuality and that of “the other” lesbians: