Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (8 page)

Regardless of the extent or nature of romantic friendship and love between working-class women, when the sexologists (primarily medical men with middle-class backgrounds) who began writing about sexuality in the latter half of the nineteenth century turned their attention to homosexuality, they were more easily able to acknowledge that intimate relations between women in the classes “beneath” them could go beyond the platonic than they could with reference to women of their own class. Their early definitions of the female “sexual invert” (their term for the lesbian) were based on women of the working class. However, although they made their first observations about these women, it was not many decades before relationships between middle-class women (who were becoming entirely too independent) came to be seen by sexologists as similar to what they had observed in the “lower” classes. They were oblivious to the social and economic factors that created important differences between the women’s relationships in each class.

The “scientific” classification of the lesbian in the latter half of the nineteenth century may be seen as consistent with the passion for taxonomy (the minute classification of almost everything) that had overtaken scientific circles at that time. But while they were convinced of the objectivity of their classifications, the scientists—and particularly the medical men who turned their attention to sexology—were often motivated by the moral vision of their day. Influenced by the theories of evolution, they formulated the notion that those who did not contribute to what was considered the human race’s move forward—criminals and deviants and, by virtue of their socio-economic position, the “lower classes”—owed their backwardness to bad heredity. They were “degenerate” because, as the term itself suggests, their genes were defective. Their deviant or backward behavior was thought to have a physiological basis. Through this explanation of the misfit, science came to replace religion as the definer and upholder of mores. White middle-class European values and behaviors that reflected the background of the scientists came to be seen as scientifically normal and healthy. Those who did not conform were “abnormal.” The sexologists thus developed a medical model to study various problems that were earlier considered social or ethical. While in previous eras a person who had a sexual relationship with an individual of the same sex would have been considered a sinner, by the late nineteenth century that person became a “congenital invert,” a victim of inborn “contrary sexual feeling,” a “homosexual”—all ways of looking at same-sex love that had not existed in the first part of the nineteenth century or earlier.

Much of the nineteenth-century classification was done in the name of the eugenics movement, which often attacked the poor and also marked the beginning of a long history of attempted “genocide” of those who loved the same sex. It was now claimed that sexual anomalies were congenital and would not occur without tainted heredity; thus eugenicists were determined to educate the rest of the medical community about the need to make those who were not—as an American doctor, William Lee Howard, said—in “the prime of physiological life” refrain from procreation. Masculine females and feminine males, Howard stated, were only born to parents of the degenerate class who themselves lacked the appropriate “strong sex characteristics.”
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Sexual Inversion and “Masculine” or Transvestite Women

These medical men first observed that inappropriate sex role behavior was sometimes characteristic of women of the working class. The females that the earliest sexologists such as Karl Westphal, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Cesare Lombroso defined as sexual inverts were often a captive population in prisons and insane asylums, daughters of the poor. Westphal, a German psychiatrist writing in 1869, was the first to describe extensively love between women in medical terms. His subject was a thirty-five-year old servant who was admitted to the Berlin Charite Hospital because of hysteria and bizarre behavior. She claimed to be profoundly disturbed by her love for a young girl. Westphal suggested that she was really a man trapped in a woman’s body. As a child she had been fond of boy’s games, she liked to dress in a masculine way, she had dreams in which she appeared to herself to be a man—and she apparently had sexual desires for women. To Westphal and the sexologists who came after him, the romantic interests of women like this one were inextricably linked to what the sexologists saw as their masculine behavior and their conception of themselves as male. Some historians have suggested a shift in the early sexologists’ views from a concern with inappropriate gender behavior, that is, inversion of personality traits so that a female looks and behaves like a male—to a concern with inappropriate sexual object choice, or homosexuality. But such a distinction is not to be found in Westphal’s work, which clearly connected the two. Nor is it to be found in the work of many sexologists well into the twentieth century or in the popular imagination, which often assumes, even today, that lesbians are necessarily masculine and that female “masculinity” is a sure sign of lesbianism.
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Westphal must have often witnessed passionate expression of love between women of his class since it was so prevelant in Germany during his day, but he would have regarded it as romantic friendship. In the poor servant woman he observed, who was also hysterical and not “feminine” as were refined women of his class, he could dare to see a deviant sexuality. What he could not understand about her life, however, was the reality of the perception that more feminine-looking and -acting females might have more difficulty surviving in her rough environment. He connected her “masculinity” with her “inappropriate” sexual drive, assuming a tie between the two. Despite his limited perceptions, Westphal’s writing alerted other medical men to a supposed correlation between “masculinity” and female same-sex love.

There were many masculine-looking women of the working class, not only in Europe but in America as well, during Westphal’s day. While women of the middle class in the latter part of the nineteenth century were enjoying a tremendous expansion of opportunities in terms of education and the slow but sure opening of various professions to them, the situation of working-class women was not to change much until the end of the century. The jobs that were open to them—usually of a domestic nature or in a factory—offered little beyond bare subsistence and no vistas of opportunity such as women from wealthier families were beginning to enjoy. It appeared to a good number of them that had they at least been men, life would have been more fair. Wages would have been higher for work that was not more difficult, and they would have been socially freer to engage in activities such as travel. There were good reasons for them to envy the privileges that males even of their class enjoyed and that were far above what was available to any female.

Most of them suffered in silence. But a few were more active in their resentment, and the most adventurous or the most desperate of them even formulated an ingenious solution to their plight. They figured out that if they moved to an area where they were not known, cut their hair, and wore men’s clothes, their potential in terms of meaningful adventure and finances would increase tremendously. They often saw themselves not as men trapped in women’s bodies, as the sexologists suggested they were, but rather as women in masquerade, trying to get more freedom and decent wages. Their aims were not unlike those that any feminist would applaud today.

They had few problems with detection. It was relatively easy for women to pass as men in earlier times because, unlike in the latter half of the twentieth century, women never wore pants. A person in pants would have been assumed to be male, and only the most suspicious would have scrutinized facial features or body movements to discern a woman beneath the external appearance.

Obviously there were more working-class women who were disgruntled with their limitations as females but simply eschewed feminine behavior in mild protest than who actually chose to become transvestites and try to pass as men, but the number of the latter was sizable. One researcher has estimated through Union Army doctors’ accounts that at least four hundred women transvestites fought in the Civil War. Many continued as transvestites even into the twentieth century, such as “Harry Gorman,” who, around the turn of the century, did heavy work as an employee of the New York Central Railway and frequented saloons and dance houses every night. Gorman was discovered to be a woman when she was hospitalized for a broken limb. She admitted that she had been passing as a man for twenty years. She also declared that she knew of “at least ten other women,” also employed by the New York Central, who passed as men, appeared wholly manlike, and “were never suspected of being otherwise.” Since there were at least eleven such women working for the New York Central alone and there are records of myriad other such cases, one can safely guess that transvestism and attempts to pass were not so rare and that there must have been thousands of women wandering around America in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century who were passing as men.
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Most of these working-class women appear to have begun their “masculine” careers not because they had an overwhelming passion for another woman and wanted to be a man to her, but rather because of economic necessity or a desire for adventure beyond the narrow limits that they could enjoy as women. But once the sexologists became aware of them, they often took such women or those who showed any discontent whatsoever with their sex roles for their newly conceptualized model of the invert, since they had little difficulty believing in the sexuality of women of that class, and they assumed that a masculine-looking creature must also have a masculine sex instinct.

Autobiographical accounts of transvestite women or those who assumed a masculine demeanor suggest, if they can be believed at all, that the women’s primary motives were seldom sexual. Many of them were simply dramatizing vividly the frustrations that so many more women of their class felt. They sought private solutions to those frustrations, since there was no social movement of equality for them such as had emerged for middle-class women. Lucy Ann Lobdell, for example, who passed as a man for more than ten years in the mid-nineteenth century, declared in her autobiography: “I feel that I cannot submit to all the bondage with which woman is oppressed,” and explained that she made up her mind to leave her home and dress as a man to seek labor because she would “work harder at housework, and only get a dollar per week, and I was capable of doing men’s work and getting men’s wages.” “Charles Warner,” an upstate New York woman who passed as a man for most of her life, explained that in the 1860s:

When I was about twenty I decided that I was almost at the end of my rope. I had no money and a woman’s wages were not enough to keep me alive. I looked around and saw men getting more money and more work, and more money for the same kind of work. I decided to become a man. It was simple. I just put on men’s clothing and applied for a man’s job. I got it and got good money for those times, so I stuck to it.

A transvestite woman who could actually pass as a man had male privileges and could do all manner of things other women could not: open a bank account, write checks, own property, go anywhere unaccompanied, vote in elections. The appeal was obvious. Even those passing women who denied they were “women’s-righters,” as did Babe Bean, had to admit, “As a man I can travel freely though unprotected and find work.”
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Transvestism may have had a particular appeal to some minority women, who suffered doubly from the handicaps visited on women because of gender and on minorities because of racial prejudice. If they could pass as a man they obliterated at least one set of handicaps. Thus a black woman, Mary Fields, who had been born a slave in Tennessee, found remunerative and honorable employment as a stagecoach driver, even accompanying and protecting a group of nuns on a trek out West. As late as 1914 gender passing obviously provided more opportunities for a minority female than she would have had living as a woman. Ralph Kerwinieo (nee Cora Anderson), an American Indian woman who found employment for years as a man and claimed that she “legally” married another woman in order to “protect” her from the sexist world, also expressed feminist awareness for her decision to pass as a man:

This world is made by man—for man alone. … In the future centuries it is probable that woman will be the owner of her own body and the custodian of her own soul. But until that time you can expect that the statutes [concerning] women will be all wrong. The well-cared for woman is a parasite, and the woman who must work is a slave…. Do you blame me for wanting to be a man—free to live as a man in a man-made world? Do you blame me for hating to again resume a woman’s clothes?
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There must have been many women, with or without a sexual interest in other women, who would have answered her two questions with a resounding “no!”

It appears that an interest in sexual relations with other females came only later in the careers of many of these transvestite women (and in some cases was never of interest to them). But it is plausible that often transvestites did not become lovers with other women until they took on the persona of men and had available to them only those sexual opportunities typically open to men. As subtle as such developments may have been, the sexologists saw only the obvious when they formulated their early definitions of the lesbian. They could not recognize a woman’s wish to be masculine and even to pass as a man as a desire for more economic and social freedom. In their own narrow views she acted masculine because she was a man trapped in a woman’s body and all her instincts were inverted, including her sexual instinct. The sexologists conflated sex role behavior (in this case, acting in ways that have been termed masculine), gender identity (seeing oneself as male), and sexual object choice (preferring a love relationship with another woman). They believed in an inevitable coherence among the three. It was thus that transvestite women and women who behaved as men traditionally behaved, generally women of the working class whose masculinity was most apparent, came to be seen by the early sexologists as the prime example of the lesbian, whether or not those women had sexual relations with other females. And conversely, women who were passionately in love with other females but did not appear to be masculine were considered for some years more as merely romantic friends or devoted companions.