Dreamers of a New Day (13 page)

The free thinkers and anarchists in the US created a similarly hard-won space for the study and discussion of sexuality. In 1891 Lizzie Holmes affirmed the value of the voice
Lucifer
gave to radical women, and upheld women’s own experiences against received knowledge:

It is the mouthpiece, almost the only mouthpiece in the world, of every poor, suffering, defrauded, subjugated woman. Many know they suffer, and cry out in their misery, though not in the most grammatical of sentences. . . . A simple woman may know nothing of biology, psychology, or of the evolution of the human race, but she knows when she is forced into a relation disagreeable or painful to her. Let her express her pain; the scientists may afterwards tell why she suffers, and what are the remedies, if they can.
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The creation of an explicitly female counter-cultural space in which to articulate wants and desires continued to preoccupy early twentieth-century women writers seeking to understand and alter sexual customs and behaviour. The editor of the
Freewoman
, Dora Marsden, deplored ‘the failure of language’ to express a new sexual awareness among women.
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She spoke for a group of rebel feminists who believed in tackling sex head-on, rejecting what she dubbed ‘the great soporifics – comfort and protection.’ Echoing the heroic individualism of the anarchists, she declared that free women would stand alone, convinced of their own strength, and claim all experience. For Marsden this could involve being ‘content to seize the “love” in passing, to suffer the long strains of effort and to bear the agony of producing creative work’. She believed that through asserting their power as individuals, women would learn ‘that their own freedom will consist in appraising their own worth, in setting up their own standards and living up to them’.
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Similar ideas circulated in Greenwich Village where Mabel Dodge Luhan, too, was demanding the right ‘to encompass all experience’.
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This mixture of aggressive will and sexual appetite appalled some women. Olive Schreiner complained to Havelock Ellis that the
Freewoman
‘ought to be called the Licentious Male . . . It is the tone of the brutal self-indulgent selfish male.’
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Conflict erupted on the
Freewoman
’s letters page with a feminist, Kathlyn Oliver, expressing the view that ‘freewomen’ would not be ‘slaves of our lower appetites’.
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When a ‘New Subscriber’ wrote in defending women’s right to sexual experience, Oliver assumed the correspondent to be male. But it was the Canadian birth control campaigner, Stella Browne, quoting Havelock Ellis on ‘auto-eroticism’.
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Ellis’s diligent observation documented a wide range of sexual practices and wants – including his wife Edith’s attraction to women. Ellis’s method of case studies, combined with his stance as a scientific observer, established an idiom for talking about sex. Instead of appealing to either morality or an ideal of free love, he had devised a standpoint from which he could catalogue and consider what his subjects declared as their wants. The study of sex psychology created a platform of ‘objectivity’ which could provide a reference point beyond subjectivity and be a means of comprehending feelings and behaviour which did not ‘fit’. However, in creating a new terrain for sexual expression he, along with other sex psychologists, also defined and constrained women’s varied experiences and desires; both by imposing their own categories and by the ponderous scientific terminology which pinned down individuals according to type, rather in the manner of nineteenth-century natural science’s specimens of butterflies. Nevertheless, Ellis’s assumption of the role of the distanced expert gave a new, secular, scholarly significance to personal testimony. He helped to establish a conduit for sexual observation which broke with the confessional and the peep show: observation of sexual feelings and behaviour was transmuted into a field of study. An important space had been opened.

Even Ellis had found that his writing on homosexuality and lesbianism could be castigated as ‘obscene’, and any public assertion of same-sex desire remained well-nigh impossible. Instead women tentatively expressed their emotions in private correspondence. Edith Ellis, an anonymous witness in her husband’s volume on ‘inversion’, confided in the socialist and sexual radical Edward Carpenter, whose openly lived homosexuality gave him a kind of gender neutrality. Following the death of her lover, Lily, in 1905, Edith Ellis wondered why she was getting headaches after years without them, and concluded that ‘the need of the lusts of the flesh – like mine – was the reason.’
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Edith Ellis (Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Archives)

Women communicated their own responses to sympathetic male friends, explicitly distinguishing those who evinced a capacity to observe and listen, and they made a selective use of the writings of male sexologists in relation to their own perceptions. When in 1915 Stella Browne gave a paper at the newly formed British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology on ‘The Sexual Variety and Variability among Women’, she explained carefully:

I have tried to say nothing in this paper, that was not known to me, either through my own experience, or the observation and testimony of persons I know well. My conclusions are based on life, not on books, though I have been confirmed in my personal opinions and conclusions by some of the greatest psychologists, especially Dr Havelock Ellis, whose immense research is fused and illuminated by an inspired intuition.
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Stressing the need to relate experience and theory, Browne also explicitly addressed the need for women to devise a new discourse. ‘The realities
of women’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary. While her brother has often learned all the slang of the street before adolescence, the conventional “decently brought-up” girl, of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences.’
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Like the rebel free lovers, Browne challenged the idea that women did not possess a ‘sex impulse’, arguing instead that women’s desires were diverse, differing not only between individuals but in the same individual over time. She did not believe their varied sexual needs could be expressed or satisfied within either patriarchal marriage or its corollary, prostitution. While Browne, the modern woman, absorbed earlier arguments from the sex-radical tradition, she was well read in contemporary European sexual theory, and familiar with the new philosophic trends which stressed energy and flux. Like her counterparts in Greenwich Village, she was aware of the new context psychoanalysis was creating for personal testimony. Browne and her contemporaries not only invoked reason; they were seeking a space for a more complex cultural expression of contradictory feelings.

Interest in sex psychology and psychoanalysis was part of the wider contemporary preoccupation with self-observation. In 1916 Elsie Clews Parsons, reflecting on subjective knowledge, noted: ‘At times testimony about the private life takes on a sufficiently public significance to free it from ridicule or the charge of bad taste.’
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Greenwich Village bohemians, male and female, were fascinated by the dual processes of self-examination and self-revelation. Intimacies were common knowledge, corresponded about, written about in novels and plays and openly discussed. Christine Stansell comments on how their ‘talking about sex’ was created by an ‘amalgam of feminism, cross-class fascination with working-class mores, and a belief in the power of honesty between the sexes’.
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The bohemian and anarchist Hutchins Hapgood, who had pioneered the impressionistic documentation of ‘outsiders’ in the 1890s by writing on immigrant life, wanted to apply the same conscious scrutiny to sex. He and the novelist Neith Boyce set out to be sexual chums. ‘I begin to feel we are a couple of sports’, Boyce declared in 1899.
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But when they had children, it was to be Hapgood who retained the freedom to roam in a quite conventional manner. ‘Varietism’, Boyce concluded in 1905, using the free lovers’ terminology, was so ‘crude and unlovely – and besides it takes the zest out of sinning.’
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Emma Goldman, whose eclectic openness caught the mood of the Village perfectly, acted as a crucial intermediary between free lovers and twentieth-century bohemians. Goldman possessed a unique capacity to look backwards, outwards and forwards. She was familiar with the little clusters of American free-thought and free-speech groups, as well as Russian writers such as Chernyshevsky, while being equally well versed in Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, Carpenter, Ellis and Freud.
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Even as the Villagers took over some of the watchwords and demands of the free lovers, they re-routed and transposed the old ideals, shaping them into the new set of assumptions about sexuality which would surface in mainstream culture during the 1920s. Confident in the infinite possibility of ‘being’ amidst a booming America vibrant with energy, the bohemian rebels stressed release and expression rather than the conservation of energy, Slenker-style. The free lovers’ ‘self-control’ morphed into Margaret Sanger’s term ‘birth control’, and their interest in therapeutic cures and closeness to nature fed into a concern to manage the body through diet and exercise, in accord with the early twentieth-century American ‘can-do’ approach to mind and body.

Greenwich Villagers resolutely set out to break down the taboos between the hidden world of forbidden sex and a new, sexually radical culture. Emma Goldman personified the new mix. Goldman’s letters to her lover Ben Reitman combine lofty transcendent imagery with a language designed to arouse. The two lovers devised an effusive code designed to confuse the censorship of the mail, and the juxtapositions are bizarre. Goldman declares that she wanted to drink from his ‘fountain of life’. She wanted to make him ‘go mad with joy and ecstasy . . . I know how to induce you, and if I could draw, you would see, but this way you wait until Oh let it be soon, please, please, come right on. I want you.’
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Christine Stansell suggests that Ben Reitman represented the Romantic fantasy of the primitive. By embodying a forbidden power he released a carnal self within Goldman.
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In her agonized relationship with the unfaithful Reitman, Goldman reversed gender roles by becoming the Romantic artist while he was cast as the temptress. Her more down-to-earth friend Almeda Sperry, a former prostitute, berated her for romanticizing Reitman. She revealed how Reitman had ‘asked Hutch Hapgood to suck one of my breasts while he sucked the other so I could have two orgasms at the same time . . . he also asked me how many men there are in this town that I had not fucked yet.’ Sperry told Goldman, ‘For a woman of your knowledge you are strangely innocent. . . . I
understood him thoroughly as soon as he grabbed my arm as we walked down the street. I used the same kind of language he did.’ She called the language ‘“fuck” talk’.
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To Ben Reitman, Sperry, once a prostitute, was always a prostitute.

Men still set up the boundary posts; they defined the terms of freedom. Meridel LeSueur relates how when she arrived in Greenwich Village as a young woman, Emma Goldman took her to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s weekly salon. The young Mid-Westerner felt humiliated when, after refusing ‘the amorous advances of some famous male writers’, she was ‘laughingly dubbed the Corn Virgin from Kansas’. She was left feeling ‘culturally rebuked’.
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Class stereotypes also held fast. Agnes Smedley, from a working-class background in Colorado, became a socialist and supporter of Indian nationalism through contact with Indian immigrants in California. She moved to New York in the spring of 1917, but felt uncomfortable and inarticulate among Greenwich Village intellectuals who, in idealizing the working class as embodying raw experience, assumed that working-class women were naturally sensual.
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In fact, many working-class women had strong inhibitions about sex. Margaret Llewellyn Davies referred with regret to ‘the heavy curtain’ which falls in working-class women’s lives upon marriage, encouraging Women’s Co-operative Guild members to speak out rather than regard sex and the family as aspects of life which could not be changed.
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The Yorkshire socialist and feminist Mary Gawthorpe moved in radical political circles herself, but was all too aware of the gulf in sexual attitudes. She reflected in her autobiography
Up Hill to Holloway
that her father had given her mother sufficient grounds for a legal separation. But custom and cash made this inconceivable. ‘Mother still believed that you had made your bed and would lie on it. Or at least she thought she believed that.’
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