Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (59 page)

27
. Thomas’ girlhood is discussed in Edith Finch,
Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr
(New York: Harper and Row, 1947).

28
. Dobkin, pp. 69–70.

29
. For Thomas’ early romantic attachments to other females see, e.g., Dobkin, pp. 90, 118. Letter to mother in Dobkin, p. 229. Mother and aunt quoted in Salhi, p. 22.

30
. Gertrude Stein’s treatment of the Thomas-Gwinn-Hodder triangle in
Fernhurst
(1904–5?) leaves much to be desired. Stein presents Gwinn as a passive creature and Thomas as a controlling bitch, closer to images in nineteenth-century French decadent novels than the reality. But perhaps this portrayal is not surprising since Stein got the story from Bertrand Russell, who was not very sympathetic to women’s relationships, his friendship with Stein notwithstanding. The Mamie character returns to Carey’s clutches at the end of
Fernhurst
instead of running off with Hodder.

31
. Quoted in Horowitz, p. 193.

32
. Charlotte Wolff,
Love Between Women
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 86.

33
. Alfred Kinsey et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), p. 495. Robert Latou Dickinson, whose gynecological practice began in the 1890s, observed a number of “known or inferred homosexual cases,” but while some of those women were “in relationships of companionship, chief interest and so on with women friends over periods of years … [though] very fond of each other [there] had never been anything of physical consumation in their relationship.” Dickinson and his co-author found that credible because “these accounts of love between women follow the pattern of Victorian ideals and perfectionism.” However, it is certainly possible that Dickinson’s lesbian patients simply lied to him: Dickinson and Beam, pp. 426, 211. See also Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
vol. I (1897; reprint, New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 219, 222–28. Rose Elizabeth Cleveland to Evangeline Marrs Simpson Whipple, 1890, quoted in Paula Petrik, “Into the Open: Lesbianism at the Turn of the Century,” unpublished paper, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives; original letters in Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

34
. Ida to Anna Dickinson, quoted in Lisa Duggan and Kay Whitlock, “Rituals of Glory and Degradation: The Life of Anna E. Dickinson,” unpublished paper, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives.

35
. Almeda Sperry to Emma Goldman quoted in Cook, p. 57, and Candace Falk,
Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), pp. 174–75.

36
. Quoted in Richard and Anna Maria Drinnon, eds.,
Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
(New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 132–33.

37
. Wanda Fraiken Neff,
We Sing Diana
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). M. Carey Thomas quoted in Leila J. Rupp, “‘Imagine My Surprise’: Women’s Relationships in Historical Perspective,”
Frontiers
(1981), 5(3):62.

38
. For examples of recent historians who deny their subjects’ homosexuality see Wells; Doris Faber,
The Life of Lorena Hickok: E. R.’s Friend
(New York: William Morrow, 1981); Dobkin; Fowler; Alice Wexler,
Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 182–83. See also Blanche Cook, “The Historical Denial of Lesbianism,”
Radical History Review
(1979), 20:60–65.

2. A Worm in the Bud

1
.  Marion S. Goldman,
Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), pp. 120–21. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “Women, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds.,
Women, Culture and Society
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 17–42.

2
.  Margaret Otis, “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
(June/July 1913), 8(2):1 13–16. In an article written fifteen years later, Charles Ford observed similar relations between black and white women in prison: “Homosexual Practices of Institutionalized Females,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychiatry
(January/March 1929), 23:442–48.

3
.  Figures cited in Joanne Meyerowitz,
Holding Their Own: Working Women Apart from Family in Chicago, 1880–1930
(Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983), p. 1.

4
.  Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” in Michael Gordon, ed.,
The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); Meyerowitz, p. 149.

5
.  Kathy Peiss,
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple Univesity Press, 1986), esp. pp. 62, 103–14, 163–68. See also the discussion of working class sexuality in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), especially parts 2 and 3.

6
.  William Lee Howard, “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,”
New York Medical Journal
(1900), 71:686–87.

7
.  Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, “Die Kontrare Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathologischen (psycopathischen) Zustandes,”
Archiv for Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten
(1869), 2:73–108. George Chauncey, in an often-quoted article, was the first to suggest a shift from inversion to homosexuality in medical discourse, which he claimed occurred around the turn of the century. In a recent reprint of the article, however, he added a postscript revising his orginial observation: “Inversion continued for decades to be a major medical concern and to be linked to homosexuality; the shift, as I may not have indicated clearly enough, was hardly decisive or unanimous by the 1920s”; “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance’,”
Salmagundi
(Fall/Winter 1983), 58/59:114–146, reprinted in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds.,
Passion and Power: Sexuality in History
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 87–117.

8
.  Estimate of female trans vestites in the Civil War in George Washington Adams,
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army
(New York: 1952). “Harry Gorman” discussed in Xavier Mayne (Edward I. Prime Stevenson),
The Intersexes: A History of Psychosexualism as a Problem in Social Life
(1908; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 149–50. Numerous passing women are presented in Jonathan Katz,
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
(New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976) and
Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary
(New York: Harper and Row, 1983). It was Katz who first popularized the term “passing women.” See also Allan Bérubé, “Lesbian Masquerade,”
Gay Community News,
November 17, 1979, pp. 8–9, and slide show (with the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society),
She Drank, She Swore, She Courted Girls, She Even Chewed Tobacco;
also my earlier work,
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present
(New York: William Morrow, 1981), passim; Kore Archer, “The One-Eyed Amazon of Santa Cruz County,”
Lavender Reader,
Summer 1987, pp. 14–15; and Babe Bean file, New York Lesbian Herstory Archives.

9
.  Lucy Ann Lobdell,
The Narrative of Lucy Ann Lobdell, the Female Deer Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties
(1885), presented in Katz,
Gay American History,
pp. 214–21. Warner is quoted in Berube, “Lesbian Masquerade.” Babe Bean newpaper accounts in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives. A few women continued to pass even into our era for similar reasons. Billy Tipton, for example, a jazz musician, began passing in order to play with the all-male swing bands of the ’30s. She was not discovered to be a woman until her death in 1989: Radio interview, Lynn Niery and Lillian Faderman,
All Things Considered,
National Public Radio, February 5, 1989. Although most passing women appear to have been working-class, there are several recorded exceptions such as Babe Bean, who claimed to have come from a distinguished family. Another notable exception was Alberta Lucille Hart, who received a medical degree from Stanford in the second decade of the twentieth century and spent most of her career as a physician in male guise; see Katz,
Gay American History,
pp. 258–79 and
Gay/Lesbian Almanac,
pp. 516–22.

10
. Mary Fields is discussed in William Katz,
The Black West
(New York: Doubleday, 1973). Kerwinieo is quoted in Jonathan Katz,
Gay American History,
pp. 254–57.

11
. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, “Perversion of the Sexual Instinct—Report of Cases,”
Alienist and Neurologist,
October 1888.

12
. Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1897; reprint, New York: Random House, 1936, rev. ed.), pp. 261–62.

13
. Julien Chevalier,
Inversion sexuelle
(Paris: Masson, 1893), pp. 219–25.

14
. James Weir, Jr., “The Effects of Female Suffrage on Posterity,”
American Naturalist
(September 1895), 24(345):815–25.

15
. William Lee Howard,
The Perverts
(New York: 1901) and “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,” p. 687.

16
. For a discussion of that literature see
Surpassing the Love of Men,
op. cit., parts 1B, 2A (chs. 2, 4, 5), 3A (ch. 1).

17
. Figures cited in William G. Shade, “A Mental Passion: Female Sexuality in Victorian America,”
International Journal of Women’s Studies
(1978), 1(1): 16. Albert H. Hayes,
Physiology of Women
(Boston: Peabody Medical Institute, 1869), p. 226.

18
. 
Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, U.S. Army
(1896–1916), second series, quoted in Nancy Salhi, “Changing Patterns of Sexuality and Female Interaction in Nineteenth Century America,” paper delivered at Berkshire Women’s History Conference, June 11, 1976, pp. 12–13, in Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

19
. R. N. Shufeldt, “Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion,”
Pacific Medical Journal
(1902), 45:199–207. Carroll Smith- Rosenberg points out that it was in the 1890s that physicians and social critics began to initiate a new wave of attacks on the New Woman, the focus of whose deviance in their view shifted from her rejection of motherhood to her rejection of men. “From being ‘unnaturally’ barren, the autonomous woman … emerged as ‘unnaturally’ sexual”; “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and the Gender Crisis, 1870–193 6,”
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), p. 265. Girls discussed in Denslow Lewis,
The Gynecological Considerations for the Sexual Act
(1900; reprint, Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1970), p. 13. “Numerous phases of inversion” in Joseph Richardson Parke,
Human Sexuality: A Medico-Literary Treatise on the Laws, Anomalies, and Relations of Sex with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Feelings
(Philadelphia: Professional Publishing Company, 1906), p. 272.