Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (22 page)

(30-year-old white woman)

Sadly and typically, all Henry was able to understand about such case histories is revealed in largely irrelevant Freudian-influenced comments that consider lesbianism as nothing more than a neurotic adjustment: for example, “Through homosexual alliances, the affection missed in childhood is obtained from women.”
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But those who were “in the Life” usually knew that their choices were far more complex and meaningful than what was understood in such simplistic little theories which were no more explanatory about lesbianism than speculations about compensation for missing a father’s love would be about female heterosexuality. With or without a large group to whom they could divulge themselves, and despite their need to hide their feelings from the outside world, these women were able to find enough sexual and emotional fulfillment as lesbians to give them satisfaction with their choices such as was never reflected in the media images of their day.

Lesbian Sex in the 1930s

Women who chose to identify themselves as lesbians in the 1930s were by and large a very different group from their mothers and grandmothers who may have been involved in romantic friendships only a few decades earlier—not because the quality of their love for other women was necessarily different, but rather because the nature of their awareness (especially of genital sexual potential between women) and of society’s awareness (especially of their “morbidity” and “decadence”) were very different. They were totally bereft of the luxury (and frustration?) of innocence that characterized their earlier counterparts. Women’s love for women was inevitably “lesbian” now—and patently sexual by definition.

Lesbian sex had long been a subject for sensationalistic and pornographic male fiction writers who aimed to shock and amuse their readers with what they considered bizarre but titillating images, and it became a focus in the work of male sexologists who considered it as bizarre as did the fiction writers, though morbid instead of titillating. However, women said almost nothing whatever about it publicly before the twentieth century. Even during the first decades of this century females who broached the subject of love between women in print were likely to write as though sexuality were definitely not a part of it.

There were rare exceptions, such as Mary MacLane, who confesses in her 1902 autobiography (whose purpose was
epater le bourgeois)
that she feels for another woman “a strange attraction of sex” and asks the reader: “Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?” The Anglo-American writer Renee Vivien, who wrote in French, also dealt with lesbian eroticism in the early twentieth century, but she did it under the influence of earlier male writers such as Baudelaire and Pierre Louys, who presented lesbians as unreal, exotic creatures. Vivien’s lesbian lovers have more in common with those earlier fictions than real life. Her work can be placed in the context of an established genre from which she did not veer, even though she—obviously unlike her male predecessors—had actually had lesbian experiences. For the most part, however, women were silent about lesbian sex. It was not until Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel
The Well of Loneliness
that a book written in English by a woman went as far as to say of two female lovers, “and that night they were not divided”—but it went no further. In the ’30s, however, perhaps because of that one line by Hall that broke the silence, or perhaps because women who identified themselves as lesbian now saw sex as an inevitable aspect of their identity, women writers who loved other women began to treat sexuality in more vivid terms.
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But those lesbians of the ’30s, like their straight counterparts, had a mixed and confusing legacy with regard to sex, despite their now inescapable knowledge that “lesbian” meant sex between women. On the one hand, they had been brought up by parents who were Victorians and often tried to inculcate sexual puritanism in their children. Vestiges of guilt for unorthodox sexuality must have sprouted even in many young lesbians who came out in the years after the roaring, flaming ’20s. On the other hand, young women of the 1930s enjoyed, at least in the abstract, some of the vestigial benefits of the sexual revolution of the previous decade, when popular wisdom claimed that sexual inhibitions could make you sick and sexual expression led to creativity and mental health. Of course as lesbians they had to juggle the prescriptions about gender and the nature of the sex act a bit, but there were lesbians who had no trouble doing that.

The notion of sex as “good medicine” thus made some lesbian writers feel free even to explore their own form of sexuality in print. For example, Mary Casal, who was born a Victorian, in 1864, revealed in her 1930 autobiography
The Stone Wall
that she accepted not only with ease but even with relish the admonition about the unsalutary effects of repressed sexual desire. Without hesitation she announced that she and Juno, her woman lover, always “found ourselves more fit for good work after having been thus relieved.”
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Such a statement by a woman—and a self-identified lesbian woman at that—would have been inconceivable in literature of earlier decades.

Of course other lesbians of her generation were not so adaptable in their sexual adjustment, and their writing about love between women sounded much more like that of romantic friends of previous eras, except that they realized that they had to explain away the popular wisdom about the importance of sex. Vida Scudder, a retired Wellesley professor who had been a “devoted companion” of the novelist Florence Converse, waxed rhapsodic in her 1937 autobiography
On Journey
about love between women, which, she believed,

could approach near to that absolute union, always craved, never on earth, at least, to be attained…. More than any sublunar forces, it initiates us into the eternal. When it has not been born of illusion, it can never die, though strange interludes may befall it…. Its drama normally knows no end, for death sets the seal on the union. … In the Ever-Living land, lover and beloved move together.

But she was certain that such passion, which combines the spiritual with the sensual, must stop short of the genital if it was to remain fine. She believed that Freud had “much to answer for” because he muddied the waters with sex. Scudder, as a displaced Victorian in a modern era, longing for the more innocent days when love between women was considered “romantic friendship,” could not understand why people “pay so much attention to one type of experience in this marvelous, this varied, this exciting world.” She concluded that a woman’s life devoid of sex “is a life neither dull nor empty nor devoid of romance.” Her own romances, she admitted, were all with other women.
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But Scudder was a rare exception by the 1930s in her ability to avoid the sexual implications in female same-sex love.

Diana Frederics, author of the putatively autobiographical
Diana,
is a polar opposite in her focus on those sexual implications. In her view, women who loved other women in the 1930s were often sexually promiscuous, and she deals with that topic explicitly, the first female American author to do so. Frederics relates numerous incidents of lesbian sex outside of long-term commitments among women in the ’30s, though sharing with Vida Scudder a sexually conservative Victorian upbringing (she claims that there is “something askew about lesbian morals”). But she also offers a credible, first of its kind, defense of casual sex between women:

It was natural enough that the homosexual would approach intimacy more quickly than the normal person. The very lack of any kind of social recognition of their union gave it a kind of informality. Normal love, having to consider property and children, had to assume responsibilities that were of no consequence to the homosexual. Fear of conception, a deterrent to the consumation of normal love, was no problem to homosexuals.

Frederics’ own vestiges of Victorian discomfort with sexuality are clearly revealed in this novel and hint at the hard time many women may have had adjusting to the sexual consciousness that had been recently foisted on them. In one scene Diana’s lover, Leslie, feeling frustrated because of some emotional barrier between them and wanting to compensate, becomes very sexually demanding. Diana is worried and even admits to being uncomfortable with Leslie’s sex drive. When they solve the problem and the demands abate, Diana says, “I hadn’t realized how hard it had been to endure sensuality until it was over and I felt a lighthearted freedom I had not known in months. I had almost forgotten how sweet Leslie could be.” Diana was too close in time to an era when sex outside of duty was disturbing to many women, too disruptive of their conception of moral decency, to be “sweet.”
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But to other lesbians of the 1930s it was sweet, and they admitted as much in their writings. Elisabeth Craigin’s autobiography,
Either Is Love,
is a post-Freudian textbook rhapsody on the beauty and salutary benefits of sex, both heterosexual and what she calls “interfeminine love.” Craigin talks much of the “importance of a thoroughgoing sex life,” and she lets the reader know that her own relationship with Rachel was filled with sexual experimentation, fantasy, and physical passion. For example, when she must go off to Europe while Rachel remains in America, Craigin observes: “The transatlantic mailbag can never have contained more incendiary matter than we put into it with all the suggestion that we could kindle at pencil-point.” The sexiness of Craigin’s relationship with Rachel, like Mary Casal’s relationship with Juno, is indicative to them of the health of their love rather than an unfortunate distraction or a sign of trouble as it was to Vida Scudder and Diana Frederics.
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While there was in the 1930s a multiplicity of views about sex between females by women who loved other women, no one could pretend any longer that it did not exist. Knowledge of sexual potentials, which was by now virtually inescapable, necessarily had complex effects on female same-sex love: for example, it made love between women “lesbian”; it challenged women to explore feelings that they would have repressed in other eras; it frightened many women away from any expression of love for other women. But most of all, with regard to lesbian life in America, it was essential to the formation of a lesbian subculture, since it helped women who identified themselves as lesbians to make a conscious and firm distinction between themselves and other women and thus to define themselves as a group.

While the depression seemed to put an end to the lesbian chic that was prevalent in some areas in the 1920s, and it may have discouraged many women from living as lesbians because of economic difficulties, the momentum of the sexual revolution of the ’20s had not been entirely lost on lesbians. By virtue of all the proliferation of books and plays and newspaper articles alone that dealt with lesbians, the innocence of the pre-World War I years became even more improbable than it was in the 1920s. In some women this new knowledge, coupled with the dreadful popular images of lesbianism, must have caused great guilt and anxiety and must have hurried them into heterosexual marriages, at the least as a disguise to the world. But others felt that their choices were expanding. Many women who would not have recognized a “lesbian” import in their own homoaffectional feelings twenty years earlier knew in the 1930s that lesbianism was not an entirely uncommon phenomenon, that there were women who even chose to construct their personal lives around that identification, and that it might have a strong sexual dimension. Meeting lovers and making a circle of lesbian friends were not easy, and to some women lesbian life must have appeared like a virtual social wasteland, but oases were slowly proliferating. Awareness now permitted a more conscious pursuit of contacts than would formerly have been possible. And it was not much later, with the advent of World War II, that the problems of meeting other lesbians, as well as the economic problems of supporting themselves, were largely overcome for many women.

“Naked Amazons and Queer Damozels”:
World War II and Its Aftermath

World War II WAC Sergeant Johnnie Phelps, in response to a request from General Eisenhower that she ferret out the lesbians in her battalion:

Yessir. If the General pleases I will be happy to do this investigation…. But, sir, it would be unfair of me not to tell you, my name is going to head the list…. You should also be aware that you’re going to have to replace all the file clerks, the section heads, most of the commanders, and the motor pool…. I think you should also take into consideration that there have been no illegal pregnancies, no cases of venereal disease, and the General himself has been the one to award good conduct commendations and service commendations to these members of the WAC detachment.