Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (10 page)

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.”
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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.
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Class may have accounted for profound differences here. The luxury of naivete regarding lesbianism that many socially sheltered middle-class 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.
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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.
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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 friendships.” 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.
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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:

Our lives were on a much higher plane than those of
the real inverts.
While we did indulge in
our sexual intercourse,
that was never the thought uppermost in our minds…. But we had seen evidences of overindulgence on the part of some of those with whom we came in contact, in loss of vitality and weakened health, ending in consumption. [Italics are mine.]
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True
lesbianism for her had nothing to do with whether or not one has sexual relations with a person of the same sex. Rather it is a matter of balance: Those who do it a lot are the real ones. She and Juno are “something else.”

It is likely that many early twentieth-century women, having discovered the judgments of the sexologists, formulated similar rationalizations to make a distinction between their love and what they read about in medical books. That perception may have permitted many of them to live their lives as publicly as they did—in the presidents’ houses on college campuses, the directors’ apartments in settlement houses, the chiefs’ offices in betterment organizations. They knew they were not men trapped in women’s bodies, the inverts and perverts the sexologists were bringing to public attention. If they had to call themselves anything, they were romantic friends, devoted companions, unusual only in that they were anachronisms left over from purer times.

The Dissemination of Knowledge Through Fiction

The readership for most of the sexologists’ books and articles was long limited to the medical profession. Although lay people were occasionally able to obtain copies of books such as
Psychopathia Sexualis
and
The Psychology of Sex,
nevertheless it took some time before these images of the masculine female invert filtered down to the popular imagination in America. To the extent that fiction is an accurate reflection of social attitudes it would seem that despite the sexologists, love between women, especially females of the middle class, continued for many years to be seen as romantic friendship rather than congenital inversion.

While the exotic and erotic aspects of love between women had long been explicit themes in nineteenth-century French literature, there was little in American literature that was comparable to
Mademoiselle de Maupin, Nana,
or
Idylle Saphique.
Occasional stories hinted at the awareness of the sexologists’ new discoveries about the dangers of love between women. The earliest example is Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1876 story “Felipa,” which suggests that the author may have had some familiarity with the ideas of Westphal or other sexologists who were writing at that time. The title character is a twelve-year-old Florida girl who dresses in the clothes of the dead son of a fisherman, which, she acknowledges, “makes me appear as a boy.” In the complicated plot Felipa falls in love with a woman and then, as an afterthought, with the woman’s fiance. When it appears that the couple will be leaving the Florida coast where they have been vacationing, Felipa, in great anguish, wounds the woman’s fiance with a knife. The first-person narrator tries to comfort Felipa’s grandfather who is distraught over the girl’s act of passion. The narrator tells him, “It will pass; she is but a child.” But the grandfather seems to know about inversion and how it asserts itself early. It will not pass, he insists: “She is nearly twelve…. Her mother was married at thirteen.” Again to the narrator’s assurance: “But she loved them both alike. It is nothing; she does not know,” the grandfather replies, “But I know. It was two loves, and the stronger thrust the knife”—that is, Felipa’s more powerful love for the woman caused her to try to stab the man, despite her affection for him. The grandfather’s main concern is not about the child’s attempt to murder, but rather that she tried to kill a man whom she conceived to be her rival for a woman.
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Woolson’s story, however, stands out as an almost isolated instance of knowledge of female sexual inversion (as opposed to romantic friendship) in nineteenth-century American literature.

There are three other examples, all dealing with violence, which, in fact, the sexologists said often accompanied degeneracy. These examples were influenced by the real-life 1892 murder of a seventeen-year-old Tennessee girl, Freda Ward, by her nineteen-year-old female lover, Alice Mitchell, which brought the possibility of violent passions between women to widespread public attention, as it had never been brought before in America. The medical journals described Alice Mitchell in terms out of Krafft-Ebing’s and Havelock Ellis’ work: as a child she preferred playing boy’s games; she liked to ride bareback on a horse “as a boy would”; her family regarded her as “a regular tomboy.” Alice planned to wear men’s clothes and have her hair cut like a man’s so that she might marry Freda Ward and support her by working at a man’s job. She killed her lover because she feared that Freda would marry a real man instead of her. Popular news coverage, such as that in the
New York Times,
was clear about Alice Mitchell’s claim, which became part of her insanity plea, that “I killed Freda because I loved her and she refused to marry me.”
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It was probably no coincidence that in 1895, only a few years after the Mitchell case received such attention, three fictional works were published that contained images of lesbians as masculine and murderous. In Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm,” Phoebe, an aggressive businesswoman with a masculine build, kills not her female love, Mary, but the man who wishes to take Mary away from her. In Mary Hatch’s novel of the same year,
The Strange Disappearance of Eugene Comstock,
Rosa, alias Eugene Comstock, is not only a murderer but also manages in the guise of a man to marry another woman, just as Alice Mitchell desired. It is explained that her natural perversion was encouraged by her environment: her father had wanted a son and hence raised her as a boy until she was twelve. Like the medical descriptions of Alice Mitchell and other textbook lesbians, Rosa-Eugene disdained to sit in the parlor and do fancywork or attend to the domestic needs of a man.
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