Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (25 page)

Such euphoria had also been felt by many women in the early decades of this century, yet they experienced a setback in the 1930s and were about to experience another in the 1950s. But certain aspects of progress for lesbianism as a lifestyle were irreversible. Because women who loved other women were brought together in masses during the war, much larger numbers of them became aware of themselves as a group. The media acknowledgment of lesbian sexuality, which had become more explicit during the 1930s, had helped to reinforce the demarcation between romantic friends or devoted companions and lesbians. That awareness now aided the many women who fell in love with other females during the war (and who might earlier have thought of themselves in more sexually innocent terms) in becoming conscious of themselves as
homosexual.
The mobility of the postwar years spread the word of the existence of other lesbian groups, especially in major cities. And although women were now urged back to the home, the phenomenon of the working woman had become more familiar during the war, which meant that those who were really committed to supporting themselves might once again in an improved economic environment find jobs that would let them live without a man’s protection. An identifiable and widespread lesbian subculture was finally formed. Although the reactionary era that followed interfered with that subculture going public, nevertheless a consciousness had taken root that could not be deracinated.

The Heyday of the Lesbian “Sicko”

With the end of the war society took a conservative turn in all areas. Lesbians were affected particularly by the growing interest in mandating conformity through what was promoted as “mental health.” It was at this time that the lesbian “sicko” became the dominant image of the woman who loved other women and curing lesbians on the couch became a big business in America.

Sigmund Freud, the guru of post-World War II psychoananlysts, had actually attempted to consider all psychological states in a value-free manner. But he was, after all, a nineteenth-century, upper-middle-class, patriarchal moralist, and he was not immune to certain assumed “truths” about the proper role of women. He was especially upset by the growing feminist sentiments that challenged those “truths” among European women in the early twentieth century, and his works frequently suggest his opposition to the women’s movement. His most negative views of lesbianism are more specifically negative views of feminism. In his only protracted study of lesbianism, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920),
feminism
is seen as a chief manifestation of his subject’s sexual “abnormality.” Even where he found no specifically
sexual
indication of lesbianism in his subjects, a woman’s failure to be passive or timid, her ambition, and even her athletic interests were proof enough of a latent homosexuality, because those attributes were a failure to adjust properly to the female role as his culture knew it.
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For the many who shared his views, women’s relative economic and social freedom during World War II must have really stimulated anxieties. Such antifeminists preferred, of course, the more traditional roles women had been forced back into during the 1930s. Their discomfort was far from tempered by the climate of the postwar years—a time when authority became king and nonconformity became close to criminality, when men were again settling back into civilian jobs and home life and women again had to be gotten out of the jobs and into the home to welcome them. Psychoanalytic attitudes served to assist those ends.

Post-World War II American psychoanalysts generally employed Freudian language and twisted Freudian theory to insist, with far greater certitude than Freud himself ever mustered and with much more vehemence than in the 1930s, on the sickness of lesbians, which they saw as being responsible for their “antisocial” behavior. Clara Thompson, for example, declared in 1949 that a person who accepts homosexuality as an overt way of life has a weak superego and is “unable to control the direction of [her] libido drives.”
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While Freud believed that a neurosis could always be traced to a disturbance in sexuality, Freudians in the postwar years came to believe that what they viewed as disturbed sexuality—same-sex love—could always be traced to neurosis, and they felt justified in attacking that sexuality since they claimed it was nothing more than a symptom of illness. A woman who loved another woman might come to analysis in the years after the war to deal with a particular problem unrelated to her affectional life, such as heterosexuals often did, or simply to know herself better, to see more clearly, to understand her motivations and choices, but she was often forced to deal with her lesbianism instead.

The consensus among the postwar professionals was that lesbians are incapable of any kind of satisfaction in life, most especially personal happiness. Even if they claim they are happy, they are deceiving themselves, a leading “lesbian expert,” Frank Caprio, observed in the 1950s: theirs “is only a surface or pseudo happiness. Basically, they are lonely and unhappy and afraid to admit it.” Caprio argued that women who love women are characteristically ambivalent about life situations (as though ambivalence were not a part of human nature), and he pointed to several instances of lesbian suicide in fiction (as though Western literature, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to the present, were not rife with heterosexual suicide).
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His intent was not simply to separate off women who love women from the rest of humanity, but also to present any problems they might have not as part of the complex human condition but merely as a manifestation of their perversity.

Other psychiatrists took up his cry. “The greatest importance of homosexuality,” wrote two of them in a 1958 book, “is that it causes so much unhappiness. If happiness is of any value … then homosexuality should be eliminated by every means in our power.” They placed on women who loved women a secret and impossible burden to be happy at all times lest they admit that they deserve “genocide.” Although their heterosexual counterparts in the postwar years had freedom to wallow in the miseries of the feminine mystique, women who loved women had to feel guilty if they were even briefly depressed and to attribute it to their lesbianism. But according to Edmund Bergler, another leading lesbian-smasher of the 1950s, any attempts they made to be happy would be self-defeating anyway because they had an unconscious wish to suffer that was only gratified by “self-created trouble-making” and “injustice collecting.”
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Inevitably, Bergler suggested, lesbians made not only themselves but everyone around them miserable.

According to some psychiatrists of the postwar years, same-sex love was simply a symptom of a more general character disorder. It would disappear if the disorder were resolved, and the woman would then be content to marry and stay home, raising babies and tending to hubby’s needs. Other psychiatrists even declared that women who loved women were worse off than being “disordered” in their character: “not merely neurotics, but … actually borderline or outright psychotics.” One psychiatrist, Charles Socarides, who continued to promulgate his theories of lesbian psychosis years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, reported that in clinical experience the connection between homosexuality and paranoid schizophrenia is “striking” in a great number of patients. He never acknowledged, of course, that the connection between paranoid schizophrenia (or depression or homocide or epilepsy) and heterosexuality is even more striking, nor that lesbians, particularly during the 1950s, often
were
persecuted and not just suffering under
delusions
of persecution.
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These psychiatrists disregarded the warning of their guru, Freud, who stated with surprising enlightenment in “The Sexual Aberrations” that it was not adequate to an understanding of homosexuality to consider only patients in treatment, that if doctors would “strive to comprehend a wider field of experience” they would see that homosexuality was far from being a degeneracy, and that even the concept of perversion was really a matter of cultural definition. Instead they based their definiton of lesbianism almost exclusively on records of patients who needed psychiatric care.
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It was worse than defining heterosexuality through divorce court records.

Every aspect of same-sex love thus came to be defined as sick. Psychotherapists pointed out that within the lesbian couple there were tensions that could lead to a break in the relationship; that not only did lesbian relations serve the function of providing sexual release, but they also served a range of irrational defensive and reparative needs—ignoring the fact that similar problems were at least as probable for heterosexual coupledom.
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In these views love between women was always implicitly contrasted to a heterosexual norm based on 1950s Hollywood movies: after boy got girl heterosexual love was supposedly without complication, conflict, eruption. Only same sex lovers had troubles in their relationships.

It is not surprising that in an era when conformity was worshiped, parents accepted such views without question and panicked if their children did not fit heterosexual norms. An adolescent crush on another female, which half a century earlier was seen as an important and welcome part of the normal course of development, made caring parents send their daughters off to psychiatrists. Parents even had daughters locked up in psychiatric hospitals for being “uncontrollable” because of their lesbianism. One woman tells of how her parents, upon discovering her crush on a physical education teacher when she was fourteen years old, first sent her to a psychologist “to find out if I was crazy.” When her parents’ persistent rejection of her sexual identification during her teen years caused her to be so depressed that she attempted suicide, they committed her to a hospital psychiatric ward where the nurses “tried to fix me up with boys” and the psychiatrists “made me feel I was the only one who ever felt love for someone of the same sex.” When her depression continued after her release, her parents again had her hospitalized, this time in a state mental hospital. She was not alone there, she says. She met a thirty-year-old lesbian who claimed “she had been in and out of institutions all her life for being a lesbian. I thought she was the sanest person there.” Similar stories were not uncommon during the mid-twentieth-century.
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Such societal threats did terrify many females away from same-sex love. Lesbianism became a problem to be grappled with, even when parents and the psychiatrists they hired were not policing one’s emotions. Intense feelings for another woman—whether physically realized or more amorphous—could cause untold hours of worry and even vast expenditures in “getting professional help.” Nor was bisexuality any longer an area for exploration. It was a “condition” to be very concerned about, especially if it led to the horrors of lesbianism. Loving another woman meant that one had to live with the realization that almost anyone who knew would consider one a “lesbian sicko.”

Curing Lesbians on the Couch

Disdain for same-sex love quickly spread in a war-exhausted country that wanted only to return to “normalcy,” and American psychoanalysts felt entirely justified in their desire to cure women of their love for each other and their independence. Modern women who rejected what Betty Friedan has called “the feminine mystique” were now considered “the Lost Sex,” as the title of a popular 1947 book by two American Freudians suggested. According to the authors, such women were influenced in their aspirations by feminism, which was “an expression of emotional illness, of neurosis …, at its core a deep illness,” foisted once again on American women primarily by lesbians who carried the notion of independence to the greatest extreme. Psychoanalysts of the postwar years were very quick to pick up such a rallying cry. Not only did lesbians influence feminism, but feminist gains in work, dress, and pastimes had “more than likely” influenced many women to become homosexual. “This new freedom that women are enjoying,” Dr. Frank Caprio pronounced with alarm in the early 1950s, “serves as a fertile soil for the seeds of sexual inversion.”
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A society that agreed once again that woman’s place was in the home saw feminists as a threat to the public welfare, and lesbians, the most obvious advocates of feminism, once more became the chief villains. The social benefits of curing lesbians, who were all sick anyway and needed curing, were unquestionable.

In the name of science these therapists promoted heterosexuality with religious fervor, and they were at least as intolerant as religious zealots, despite their obligatory nod to the importance of “understanding.” There was no room for debate in their view that love between women was an illness that must be eradicated, regardless of the individual personality or level of adjustment or productivity of the women involved. Freud believed (and many of his early disciples agreed with him) that the object of psychoanalysis should not be the “cure” of homosexuality (which he thought was impossible anyway) but rather, as he said in his letter to an American mother of a male homosexual, to help the homosexual find harmony, peace of mind, and full efficiency. Although in the 1920s and ’30s in America there were a few psychoanalysts who desired to cure their patients of same-sex love, it was not until the ’50s, with its worship of “normality” and its terror of female independence, that the cure of love between women became such a large-scale business.
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Many of the therapists of the 1950s simply ignored Freud’s conservatism regarding the efficacy of treatment, claiming that lesbianism was always curable if the doctors went about it the right way. They published in books and medical journals fabulous accounts of their successes in converting homosexuals into heterosexuals and shared their formulas with their colleagues. Albert Ellis, in a 1956 article, reported that through his work with lesbian patients one-third were “distinctly improved” and two-thirds were “considerably improved” in their progress toward heterosexuality. Ellis explained that his approach was to insist on unmasking the neurotic motivations behind his patients’ same-sex love and to show by his manner and verbalizations that he was himself “favorably prejudiced” toward heterosexuality. The patients were persuaded, Ellis wrote, “to engage in sex-love relationships with members of the other sex and to keep reporting to the therapist for specific discussion and possible aid with these love relationships,” outrageously regardless of whether or not they had come to Ellis desiring to change their sexual orientation. Edmund Bergler actually promised his patients that same-sex love was reversible, but only through psychoanalytic treatment by a psychiatrist for one or two years, with a minimum of three appointments each week (at the cost of as much as sixty thousand dollars, calculated in present dollars).
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