Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  2. Miami News, May 20, 1942, quoted in John Costello, Virtue Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 43.

  3. The latest Gallup Poll seems to suggest that homophobia in general is quickly receding. In 1987 only 33 percent of those polled believed that “homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal.” By Fall 1989 the number had risen to 47 percent. Similarly, in 1987 only 59 percent of those polled believed that “gays should have equal job opportunities.” In Fall 1989, 71 percent of the respondents were in favor of such equality. Reported in “The Future of Gay America,” Newsweek, March 12, 1990, p. 21.

  4. Since the 1930s there have been a number of studies that have argued that male and female homosexuals are hormonally or genetically different, but many other studies have been unable to replicate such findings, and frequently those studies that have announced hormonal or genetic differences appear to be questionable in their methods. For example, in an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry (October 1977), 134(10): 1117–18, “Plasma Testosterone in Homosexual and Heterosexual Women,” Nanette Gartrell et al. found that testosterone was 38 percent higher in the plasma of lesbians than in heterosexual women. But the researchers accepted subjects as homosexual or heterosexual by determining only that their sexual practices “during the preceding year had involved only individuals of the same sex (for homosexuals) or the opposite sex (for heterosexuals).” But what if a woman had had exclusively heterosexual relations all her life and then formed a relationship with another woman in the preceding year, as often happened during the lesbian chic era of the 1920s or the radical-feminist 1970s? Or what if a woman who had long been a lesbian decided that she wanted to experiment with heterosexuality, as many lesbians do for significant periods of time? Would their testosterone levels rise or fall depending on with whom they had been sleeping? Such studies generally classify sexuality simply into homo and hetero, refusing to acknowledge (or paying only lip service to) the continuum that Kinsey observed in his massive research or the changes in sexual behavior that many individuals experience in the course of their lives. For studies that fail to replicate previous findings that show a physiological base for homosexuality see, e.g., J. D. Rainer et al., “Homosexuality and Heterosexuality in Identical Twins,” Psychosomatic Medicine, (1960), 22: 51–58; G. K. Klintworth, “A Pair of Male Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, (1962), 135: 113–25; K. Davison et al., “A Male Monozygotic Twinship Discordant for Homosexuality,” British Journal of Psychiatry, (1971), 118: 675–82; Bernard Zuger, “Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality: Report of a Pair and Significance of the Phenomenon,” Comprehensive Psychiatry, (Sept./ Oct., 1976), 17(5): 661–69; N. McConaghy and A. Blaszczynski, “A Pair of Monzygotic Twins Discordant for Homosexuality,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (1980), 9: 123–31; Elke D. Eckert et al., “Homosexuality in Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart,” British Journal of Psychiatry (April 1986), 148: 421–25; David Barlow, et al., “Plasma Testosterone Levels in Male Homosexuality: A Failure to Replicate,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (1974), 3(6): 571–75; Susan Baker, “Biological Influence on Human Sex and Gender,” Signs (1980), 6: 80–96; H. F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, “Sex Hormones and Female Homosexuality: A Critical Examination,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (1979), 8: 101–19; P. D. Griffiths et al. “Homosexual Women: An Endocrinological and Psychological Study,” Journal of Endocrinology (Dec. 1974), 63(3): 549–56; Ruth G. Doell and Helen Longino, “Sex Hormones in Human Behavior: A Critique of the Linear Model,” Journal of Homosexuality (1988), 15(3–4): 55–78.

  1. “The Loves of Women for Each Other”

  1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1849); William Alger, The Friendships of Women (Boston: Roberts, 1868), pp. 346–58. Ellen Rothman’s study, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984) suggests that for many young women in the nineteenth century it was not romantic friendship but their “relationships with lovers and future husbands [that] provided their first experiences with closeness,” but Rothman too admits that there were others “who found openness and intimacy only with female friends,” p. 114.

  2. Florence Converse, Diana Victrix (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897).

  3. E. A. Andrews, quoted in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 58. Statistics from Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 326, and Arthur Mann, Yankeee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 202.

  4. Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873). Robert J. Sprague, “Education and Race Suicide,” Journal of Heredity (May 1915), 6: 158–62. See also Roswell H. Johnson and Bertha Stutzman, “Wellesley’s Birth Rate,” ibid., pp. 231–32.

  5. “A New Women’s College,” Scribner’s Monthly (Oct. 1873), 6: 748–49. Writers in the twentieth century were much more explicit in their accusations that women’s colleges were responsible for promoting homosexuality; see, e.g., Floyd Dell, Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Patriarchal Society (1930; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 308. Notions of the danger of female education were not peculiar to the United States. European writers went even further. Cesare Lombroso, for example, presented in his 1893 book The Female Offender a chapter titled “Education—The Bad Results of It,” in which he argued that education drew moral women into crime: “Many women of intelligence find themselves with nothing to show in return for much expense and labour. They are reduced to want while conscious of not deserving it, and being debarred from the probability of matrimony owing to the ordinary man’s dislike of a well instructed woman, they have no resource but in suicide, crime, or prostitution. The chaster ones kill themselves; the others sell themselves or commit thefts” (1893; reprint, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), pp. 204–205. Similar absurd views regarding female education continued well into the twentieth century in Europe also: see, e.g., Walter Heape, Sex Antagonism (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 212–13.

  6. Statistics in William G. Shade, “A Mental Passion: Female Sexuality in Victorian America,” International Journal of Women’s Studies (1978), 1(1): 16; Miriam Slater and Penina M. Glazer, “Female Friendships and the Emergence of Professionalism,” unpublished paper, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, p. 31; Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 212.

  7. Carl Degler, “What Ought to be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review (1974), 79: 1469–77 and Peter Gay, Education of the Senses, vol. 1, The Bourgeois Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) argue that sexual behavior often violated ideology. Clelia D. Mosher, The Mosher Survey: Sexual Attitudes of Forty-Five Victorian Women, eds. James MacHood and Kristine Wanburg (New York: Ayer, 1980) shows that a large percentage of those forty-five women believed that coitus in marriage was for mutual pleasure as well as reproduction. This was far from the “official” view of the period: cf. Dr. Alice Stockham (Tokology: A Book for Every Woman [Chicago, 1887], pp. 151–52), who observed that most women believed “that sexual intercourse is a ‘physical necessity’ to man but not to woman.” In Hands and Hearts Ellen Rothman demonstrates that kissing and embracing were often acceptable for engaged couples in the nineteenth century, but genital sexual exchanges were forbidden, op. cit.

  8. “At Home with the Editor,” Ladies Home Journal, April 1892, p. 12. Rothman, p. 112. Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (Chicago: H.J. Smith, 1889).

  9. Catt quotations from Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 16, 53–56.

  10. Letter to Wayman Crow, August 1854, in Cor
nelia Carr, Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories (London: Bodley Head, 1913), p. 35. Her letters as well as biographies of her friends such as Charlotte Cushman (see, for example, Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970]) suggest intimate relationships with Annie Dundas, Matilda Hays, Chariots Cushman, and a Mrs. Sartoris.

  11. Quoted in Marjorie H. Dobkin, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. xv. See also James R. McGovern, “Anna Howard Shaw: New Approaches to Feminism,” Journal of Social History, Winter 1969, pp. 135–53. Shaw, a minister and renowned suffragist, wrote to a friend who was contemplating marriage in 1902: “Just think of the men along your street…. If a human being or a god could conceive of a worse hell than being the wife of any one of them I would like to know what it could be…. I have seen nothing so far which does not make me say every night of my life, ‘I thank Thee for all good but for nothing more than I have been saved from the misery of marriage.”

  12. For discussion of the male-female division in nineteenth-century America see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 21–41; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); and my discussion in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), ch.2, 2: “Kindred Spirits.” For a discussion of women’s views of their superiority in the second half of the nineteenth century see Judith Becker Ranlett, “Sorority and Community: Women’s Answer to a Changing Massachusetts, 1865–1895,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1974, esp. PP. 41–42, 120–21.

  13. Yale quotation in Nancy Salhi, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis (1979), 8: 21.

  14. Lavinia Hart, “A Girl’s College Life,” Cosmopolitan (June 1901), 31: 192. Josephine Dodge Daskam, “The Evolution of Evangeline,” Smith College Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1900). For some working-class females of that period women’s prisons fostered the same kinds of romantic relationships that were found in women’s colleges. Margaret Otis in 1913 described relationships between white and black women prisoners that were much like those between freshman and sophomore students. Typically, a black woman would send a white woman a lock of hair and a note asking for her love. The romance that ensued was described by Otis as being often “very real … . .almost ennobling.” But, writing with an awareness of the sexologists who preceded her, Otis calls such relationships “perversions”: “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (June/July 1913), 8(2): 113–16. There is, unfortunately, no large statistical study of sexuality between college women in the nineteenth century, but Robert Latou Dickinson’s casual study of women he encountered in his gynecological practice beginning in 1890 identifies twenty-eight cases that he inferred were lesbian. Almost half of those women were college graduates; Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam, The Single Woman: A Medical Study in Sex Education (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), p. 207. Katharine Davis’ broader 1929 survey offers some revealing figures. Davis discovered that more than 50 percent of the 2200 women she studied had experienced “intense emotional relations with other women” and more than 25 percent said those experiences were either specifically sexual or “recognized as sexual in character.” About 88 percent of the latter had been college women, and 78 percent of the former had been college women. Many said their relationships began in women’s colleges and typically characterized them as “an expression of love [which has] made my life inexpressibly richer and deeper”; Katharine Bement Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1929), p. 308.

  15. Blanche Weisen Cook discusses networks in “Female Support Networks and Poltical Activism,” Chrysalis (Autumn 1977), 3: 43–61. For descriptions of female “marriages” see, e.g., Anna Mary Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1944); Nancy Manahan, “Future Old Maids and Pacifist Agitators,” paper given on panel “Lesbian Survival Strategies: 1850–1950,” National Women’s Studies Association, 1981; McGovern, “Anna Howard Shaw,” op. cit.; Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912–1950 (Norwich, Vt.) New Victorian Publishers, 1986); Judith Schwarz, “Yellow Clover: Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman,” Frontiers (Spring 1979), 6(1): 59–67; Leila J. Rupp, “Imagine My Surprise: Women’s Relationships in Historical Perspective,” Frontiers (Fall 1980), 5(3): 63–64.

  16. S. Josephine Baker, M.D., Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 64.

  17. Katherine Anne Porter, “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait,” Harpers (December 1947), 195: 519–27.

  18. Michael Field, Underneath the Bow (1893; 3rd ed., Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1898), p. 50.

  19. Emily Blackwell obituary in Vigilance (New York) (October 1910), 23:13 describes Cushier as her “devoted friend” who was “with her when she passed away.” Irwin and Anthony are discussed in Matthew Josephson, Infidel in the Temple (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 38, where he describes them as “life long friends.” They were also known as “the gay ladies of Gaylordsville [Connecticut].” The lesbianism of the leaders of the Women’s Trade Union League is discussed in Sarah Schulman, “When We Were Very Young: A Walking Tour Through Radical Jewish Women’s History on the Lower East Side, 1879–1919,” Sinister Wisdom (1986), 29/30:232–53. Vida Scudder and Florence Converse are discussed in Mann, op. cit. Frances Witherspoon and Tracy Mygatt are discussed in Manahan, op. cit.

  20. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 77. Addams’ relationship with Starr is discussed in Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

  21. Willam O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (Chicago, 1969), p. 120. Davis, p. 46. Cook, p. 47.

  22. Regarding Starr’s reflections on her personal break with Addams see Davis, p. 85. Mary Rozet Smith is described in Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 67, as “one supremely lovely figure … the most universally beloved person.”

  23. Davis, pp. 85–89.

  24. Poem quoted in James Weber Linn, Jane Addams: A Biography (New York: Appleton Century, 1935), pp. 289–90.

  25. Davis, p. 306n.

  26. M. Carey Thomas, quoted in Elaine Kendall, “Peculiar Institutions”: An Informal History of the Seven Sister Colleges (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975). P. 132.

  27. Thomas’ girlhood is discussed in Edith Finch, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr (New York: Harper and Row, 1947).

  28. Dobkin, pp. 69–70.

  29. For Thomas’ early romantic attachments to other females see, e.g., Dobkin, pp. 90, 118. Letter to mother in Dobkin, p. 229. Mother and aunt quoted in Salhi, p. 22.

  30. Gertrude Stein’s treatment of the Thomas-Gwinn-Hodder triangle in Fernhurst (1904–5?) leaves much to be desired. Stein presents Gwinn as a passive creature and Thomas as a controlling bitch, closer to images in nineteenth-century French decadent novels than the reality. But perhaps this portrayal is not surprising since Stein got the story from Bertrand Russell, who was not very sympathetic to women’s relationships, his friendship with Stein notwithstanding. The Mamie character returns to Carey’s clutches at the end of Fernhurst instead of running off with Hodder.

  31. Quoted in Horowitz, p. 193.

  32. Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 86.

  33. Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in
the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), p. 495. Robert Latou Dickinson, whose gynecological practice began in the 1890s, observed a number of “known or inferred homosexual cases,” but while some of those women were “in relationships of companionship, chief interest and so on with women friends over periods of years … [though] very fond of each other [there] had never been anything of physical consumation in their relationship.” Dickinson and his coauthor found that credible because “these accounts of love between women follow the pattern of Victorian ideals and perfectionism.” However, it is certainly possible that Dickinson’s lesbian patients simply lied to him: Dickinson and Beam, pp. 426, 211. See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. I (1897; reprint, New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 219, 222–28. Rose Elizabeth Cleveland to Evangeline Marrs Simpson Whipple, 1890, quoted in Paula Petrik, “Into the Open: Lesbianism at the Turn of the Century,” unpublished paper, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives; original letters in Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

  34. Ida to Anna Dickinson, quoted in Lisa Duggan and Kay Whitlock, “Rituals of Glory and Degradation: The Life of Anna E. Dickinson,” unpublished paper, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives.

  35. Almeda Sperry to Emma Goldman quoted in Cook, p. 57, and Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), pp. 174–75.

  36. Quoted in Richard and Anna Maria Drinnon, eds., Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 132–33.

  37. Wanda Fraiken Neff, We Sing Diana (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). M. Carey Thomas quoted in Leila J. Rupp, “‘Imagine My Surprise’: Women’s Relationships in Historical Perspective,” Frontiers (1981), 5(3):62.