Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (11 page)

Dr. John Carhart’s
Norma Trist; or Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes,
also brought out in 1895, most resembles the Alice Mitchell case. Norma stabs her woman love when she learns that the woman is engaged to be married to a Spanish captain and then responds to the authorities when she is questioned in terms similar to the newspaper accounts of Mitchell’s response. Norma’s inversion is revealed once again to have manifested itself in childhood through her masculine interest in riding “man fashion” on her pony, being good at math, and loathing perfume. Significantly, her inversion is aggravated because her father insists she be given a “good education,” since she is fond, as only males presumably were, of “books and learning.”
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Outside of these stories, however, lesbianism as the sexologists viewed the phenomenon was an infrequent theme in American fiction until the publication in the United States of
The Well of Loneliness
(1928), Radclyffe Hall’s famous English novel. Surprisingly, Americans, more than Europeans, seem to have been reluctant to attribute “perversity” to women—unless, that is, the women presented a threat to the social structure by excessive feminist demands. But once the notion of female “perversity” did capture the popular imagination, love between women assumed the image of mannishness rather than the many other images it might have taken, such as exotic, orchidlike mysterious beauty suggested often in French literature, or the gentle, nurturing epitome of femaleness suggested in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century depictions of romantic friendship in American life and literature. It is not, of course, that many masculine women who loved women did not exist, but rather that lesbianism and masculinity became so closely tied in the public imagination that it was believed that only a masculine woman could be the genuine article.

Why Some Lesbians Accepted the Congenital Invert Theory

Most sexologists were not very flattering in their views of inversion. August Forel was representative in his assumption that homosexual love is pathological in nature and “nearly all inverts are in a more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics.”
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The new explanations for love between women made it degenerative and abnormal where earlier it was socially sanctioned. Those “explanations” eventually blew the cover of women whose sexual relationships with other women may have been hidden under the guise of romantic friendship. It would be logical to assume that women who loved other women would in a mass, categorically, reject the sexologists’ theories, tainted as they were with traditionalism and stereotypes. And many women, finding the sexologists’ theories disabling, did reject them. But a surprising number of women found them extremely enabling. They perceived real benefits in presenting themselves as congenital inverts.

It meant to some of them that romantic friendship would not have to give way to heterosexuality and marriage with the advent of a creditable male suitor. If they were born into the “intermediate sex,” no family pressure or social pressure could change them. Their love for women was mysteriously determined by God or Nature. If their attraction to women was genital and they failed to keep that a secret, they could not in any case be seen as moral lepers. They were simply biological sports, as Natalie Barney, an American lesbian, wrote in her autobiography, reflecting the sexologists’ influence on her conception of her own homosexuality: “I considered myself without shame: albinos aren’t reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair; why should they hold it against me for being a lesbian? It’s a question of Nature. My queerness isn’t a vice, isn’t deliberate, and harms no one.”
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The sexologists had provided that ready-made defense for homosexuality.

For the woman who was caught up with notions of gender-apppropriate behavior, the sexologists’ views of the lesbian as a “man trapped in a woman’s body” could be turned in her favor sexually if she wished: she could give herself permission to be sexual as no “normal” woman could. In her essay “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” Esther Newton suggests that the congenital inversion theory must have appealed to some women because it was one of the few ways a woman could “lay claim to her full sexuality.” The “normal” female’s sexuality was supposed to be available for procreation and her husband’s conjugal pleasure only. But if a female were not a female at all but a man trapped in a woman’s body, it should not be condemnable nor surprising that her sexuality would assert itself as would a man’s. Newton suggests that for decades the female invert was alone among women in her privilege of being avowedly sexual. Frances Wilder is an example of a woman who took that privilege. In a letter she wrote in 1915 to Edward Carpenter, a leading promoter of the congenital theory, she confessed that she harbored a “strong desire to caress and fondle” another female. Hoping to justify her sex drive, she explained that she experienced such a desire because she had within her not just “a dash of the masculine” but also a “masculine mind.”
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Such defenses, which attributed sexual difference to nature, also meant that those who identified themselves as homosexual could, for the first time, speak out against legal and social persecution. Lesbians (as women) were generally seen as being beneath the law and therefore ignored, with a few rare exceptions. But homosexual men and the lesbians who identified with their struggle through such groups as the German Scientific Humanitiarian Committee used the congenital inversion theory to challenge legal sanctions against sodomy: the law and society had no business persecuting homosexuals, since their behavior was normal for them. And there was no reason for social concern about homosexual seduction, since someone who was not a congenital invert could not be seduced by a person of the same sex.
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It was, in fact, much better to be a congenital invert than one who had the option of being heterosexual and chose homosexuality out of free will. Such a conscious choice in those unexistential times was an offense to society. As one American medical doctor, Joseph Parke, observed in 1906, “If the abnormality is congenital, clearly it cannot be a crime. If it be acquired it may be both vicious and criminal.”
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For many, to claim a birth defect was preferable to admitting to willful perversity.

The spread of the congenital theory also informed many who loved the same sex that there were others like them. That information carried with it potential political and personal benefits that would have been impossible earlier. First in Europe and later in America, it encouraged those who wished to define themselves as homosexuals to organize publicly. The sexologists virtually gave them not only an identity and vocabulary to describe themselves, but also an armor of moral innocence. Once they knew there was a sizable minority like them, they could start looking for each other.

Already by 1890 some female “inverts” had joined the sexual underworld of big cities such as New York, where, along with male “inverts” in evening gowns, they attended balls at places such as Valhalla Hall in the Bowery, wearing tuxedos and waltzing with other more feminine-looking women. The women who attended such functions were perhaps the first conscious “butches” and “femmes.” There could be no such social equivalents for women who loved women before the sexologists turned their attention to them, since earlier they had had no awareness of themselves as a group. In effect, the sexologists gave many of them a concept and a descriptive vocabulary for themselves, which was as necessary in forming a lesbian subculture as the modicum of economic independence they were able to attain at about the same time in history. Historian George Chauncey points out with regard to male homosexuals that the sexologists were merely “investigating an [existing] subculture rather than creating one” through their formulations of sexual inversion. And, indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that homosexual male subcultures have been in existence at least since the beginning of the eighteenth century. But for women who loved women the situation was somewhat different, since economic dependency on marriage had made it impossible for them to form such a subculture as early as male homosexuals did. The sexologists, emerging just as women’s economic position was beginning to change, provided the crucial concept of sexual
type
—the female invert—for women who in earlier times could have seen themselves only as romantic friends or isolated women who passed as men.
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If the sexologist did not
create a
lesbian subculture, they certainly were the mid wives to it.

The usefulness of the writings of the early sexologists has been felt even in more recent times by lesbians. Barbara Gittings recalls that in 1950 when she first realized she was homosexual she went to the library looking for more understanding of what that meant. Although she had to search under “Abnormal.” “Perversion,” and “Deviation,” she remembers: “I did find my way to some good material. Though I couldn’t identify with the women Ellis described, at least I knew that other female homosexuals existed. They were real-life people. That helped.” The sexologists crystallized possiblities for young women that they would have had difficulty in conceptualizing on their own.
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Thus some women who loved women were happy about the sexologists’ explanations of the etiology of their “problem.” Perhaps those theories even seemed accurate to women who desired to be active, strong, ambitious, and aggressive and to enjoy physical relationships with other women: since their society adamantly defined all those attributes as male, they internalized that definition and did indeed think of themselves as having been born men trapped in women’s bodies. For many of them, the image of their masculinity was an integral part of their sexual relationships and they became “butches” in the working class and young lesbian subcultures, especially during the 1950s. If the only cultural models they saw of lovers of women were male, it is not unlikely that they might have pictured themselves as male when making love to a woman, just as the sexologists suggested.

The congenital theory even enjoyed some revival in the 1980s. While Freud’s explanation of lesbianism as determined in childhood was the dominant view from the 1920s through the 1960s and the feminist explanation of lesbianism as a political choice held sway in the 1970s, more recently, perhaps in response to a perceived climate of conservatism, the congenital theory has reappeared in the guise of essentialism. Ignoring the evidence of the 1970s, when many women came to be lesbians through their feminist awareness, essentialists say that biology alone explains lesbianism, which is a permanent, fixed characteristic. One is a lesbian if one is born a lesbian, and nothing can make a lesbian a heterosexual. Heterosexuality is “natural” only to one who is born heterosexual, just as homosexuality is “natural” to the born lesbian. As an Austin, Texas, woman observed, “I’m a lesbian because of genetics. I’m sure my great-grandmother and grandmother were lesbians, even though they never came out.” Her proof of their lesbianism, like many of the sexologists’ “proofs,” is only their feminism and their “masculinity”: “They rebelled against playing the traditional roles. They smoked, hunted, did carpentry at home. And they let me know it was okay for a young girl to do things.” An adherence to the congenital theory is perhaps the safest position homosexuals can take during homophobic times when they fear they might be forced to undergo “treatment” to change their sexual orientation. And it serves to get parents or detractors off one’s back. Essentialism is also a political strategy. Even in conservative periods, it encourages homosexuals to build their own culture and institutions with the conviction that since they are born different from heterosexuals they must find ways to rely only on themselves and others like them.
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However, historically no less than today, there were other females who did not see themselves as having been born men trapped in women’s bodies, despite the fact that they made their lives with other females and even had sexual relations with them. For these women, much of what the sexologists wrote was frightening or meaningless. Those who were scared by the sexologists’ pronouncements perhaps ran into heterosexual marriages that would mask their feelings or lived as homosexuals but practiced furious homophobic denial to the world. But many others must have been outraged at the imputation of degeneracy and rejected the theories out of hand, believing perhaps that there were some freaks somewhere such as those the medical men wrote about, but it had nothing to do with them. They simply loved a particular female, or they preferred to make their life with another woman because it was a more viable arrangement if one were going to pursue a career, or they did not think about it at all—they lived as they pleased and saw themselves as uncategorizable individuals.