HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

From Sexual Inversion To

Homosexuality:
Medicine And The Changing
Conceptualization Of Female Deviance

BY GEORGE CHAUNCEY, JR.

Historians have recently identified the end of the nineteenth century

as a crucial transitional period in the conceptualization and social
experience of homosexual relations.' Jeffrey Weeks suggests that the
"medical model of homosexuality" replaced the religious one during
this period, characterizing homosexuality as the condition of certain,
identifiable individuals rather than as a form of sinful behavior in which
anyone might engage, while Lillian Faderman assigns the medical
profession responsibility for the "morbidiflcation" of relationships
between women during these years. It was on the basis of the new
medical models, they suggest, that individuals came to identify
themselves — and distinguish themselves from others — as lesbians and
gay men, members of a sexual minority.2 The last years of the nineteenth

1 I would like to thank Lisa Biow, John Boswell, Jeanne Boydston, Nancy Cott, Mitchell
Katz, Harry Scott, Chris Stansell, Tony Stellato and Jack Winkler for their comments
on earlier drafts of this paper. Discussions with Jeanne Boydston were particularly
helpful in developing some of the arguments presented in the third section.
2 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); Lillian Faderman, "The
Morbidiflcation of Love Between Women by 19th-century Sexologists," Journal of
Homosexuality 4 (1978): 73-90; idem, "Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early
Twentieth Century," Journal of Popular Culture II (1978): 700-17. Fadennan's major
work, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow, 1981), unfortunately
appeared too late for me to incorporate its findings in this article.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

century did witness a dramatic increase in medical interest in "deviant"

sexual behavior. The first medical article on what was then termed
sexual inversion was published in Germany in 1870 and was followed
by American studies within the decade; by the mid-1910s, several U.S.
journals devoted regular columns to sexology which frequently reported
on the study of homosexuality.1
But it would be wrong to assume, I think, that doctors created and
defined the identities of "inverts" and "homosexuals" at the turn of
the century, that people uncritically internalized the new medical
models, or even that homosexuality emerged as a fully defined category
in the medical discourse itself in the 1870s. Such assumptions attribute
inordinate power to ideology as an autonomous social force; they
oversimplify the complex dialectic between social conditions, ideology,
and consciousness which produced gay identities, and they belie the
evidence of preexisting subcultures and identities contained in the
literature itself. Although the literature is one of the sources most easily
accessible to historians, we must guard against attributing to it a more
central role in the formation of sexual identities than it actually may
have played. It has not yet been adequately documented that medical
models and homosexual identities appeared at the same time, even for
the members of elite society who have been the subjects of existing
studies. But even if we did know this to be the case, it would not
necessarily indicate that one caused the other; both may have resulted
from more fundamental historical processes. Only extensive and original
research in more intimate records such as diaries and correspondence
will enable us to measure the influence of the medical discourse on the
emergence of gay identities and subcultures. (I use the plural
3 Nancy Sahli notes the increasing medical attention to sexual deviance as evidenced
by the number of articles cited in the Surgeon-General's Index Catalog during these
years in her article, "Smashing: Women's Relations Before the Fall," Chrysalis 8
(1979): 17-27. James Kiernan, one of the earliest writers on homosexuality, edited
a "Sexology" column for the Urologie and Cutaneous Review from the early teens
at least. It included abstracts of articles appearing in other medical journals, and short
editorial comments, including three or four a year on homosexuality. The
Psychoanalytic Review, begun in 1913 by William A. White and Smith Ely Jeliffe,
included original articles, translations, and regular abstracts of articles published in
major German-language psychoanalytic journals, including many on homosexuality.
William J. Robinson established the short-lived Journal of Sexology and Psychoanalysis
in 1923, to supercede the American Journal of Urology and Sexology, published from
1904 to 1922. The first issue of JSP carried an article by Stella Browne, "Studies
in Feminine Inversion," 51-58. Thus by the early teens the number of articles or
abstracts concerning homosexuality regularly available to the American medical
profession had grown enormously.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

deliberately, for the structure and social experience of sexuality and

gender have varied along lines of class, race, and ethnicity.)
Nevertheless, analysis of the medical literature can make an important
contribution to our study of the history of sexuality if we consider it,
in the first instance, as a response to and reflection of the changes in
the organization and ideology of sexuality which occurred in American
culture at the turn of the century. As such, it can provide a key to our
understanding of the transformation of the sex/gender system during
that period, for the cultural definition of deviance indicates with
particular clarity the parameters of the acceptable.4
It is highly significant in this light that the turn of the century
witnessed the development not only of a new explanation of homosexual
behavior, but also — and more centrally — of the very concept of
homosexual desire as a discrete sexual phenomenon. Sexual inversion,
the term used most commonly in the nineteenth century, did not denote
the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality. "Sexual inversion"
referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which
homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect, while
"homosexuality" focused on the narrower issue of sexual object choice.
The differentiation of homosexual desire from "deviant" gender
behavior at the turn of the century reflects a major reconceptualization
of the nature of human sexuality, its relation to gender, and its role
in one's social definition.
While the changing focus of medical inquiry into sexual deviance
reflected a broad shift in conceptualization, each stage in that inquiry
can be analyzed as a response to particular changes in and challenges
to the Victorian sex/gender system such as the women's movement,
the growing visibility of urban gay male subcultures, and the changing
gender structure of the economy. Medical theories achieved general
acceptance and influence because they reflected a much broader cultural
uneasiness with and antipathy to these challenges, and because they
took ideological forms commonly used to resist social change. Indeed,
the early biological explanations offered for sexual deviance were an
integral part of that nineteenth-century scientific discourse which sought
to validate the existing social order by asserting its biological

4 Gayle Rubin introduced the term "sex/gender system" in her article, "The Traffic
in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Kayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward
an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.
Somewhat analogous to "political economy" in scope and purpose, "sex/gender
system" is the general term for the many social systems by which sexuality, gender,
and procreation are structured.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR 327

inevitability. Just as the contemporaneous theory of social Darwinism

served to legitimate racism and colonialism by postulating a biologically-
based racial hierarchy of social development, so the early sexology
sought to justify the particular form of women's subordination to men
during this period by asserting its biological determination.5 Subsequent
theories emphasized the psychic rather than biological "abnormalities"
which resulted in sexual nonconformity, but accepted many of the
premises of earlier work. In the process of debate, the literature
developed many of the terms and categories which continue to structure
our thinking about sexuality and gender.
The following pages, based on a review of approximately 85 medical
books, articles, and reviews published in the United States between 1880
and 1930, examine the medical literature on inversion and
homosexuality as a response to and reflection of changes in the
sex/gender system at the turn of the century. After examining the
changing focus of medical inquiry during these years, they analyze the
assumptions about sexuality revealed by the explanations offered for
sexual deviance, and then consider further the reasons for the emergence
of medical concern about this subject.

The Changing Focus of Medical Inquiry

The Victorian assertion of male sexual aggressiveness and denial of

female sexual interest established the logical framework for the earliest
medical inquiry into sexual deviance, and determined the manner in
which researchers defined it. The major current in Victorian sexual
ideology declared that women were passionless and asexual, the passive
objects of male sexual desire. In the 1880s and nineties, as Havelock
Ellis noted in 1903, this belief was so deeply rooted a tendency in medical
thought that many sexologists considered a woman's expresson of sexual
S In recent years historians have written extensively on the role of medical arguments
in the ideological struggles over gender roles in the late nineteenth century, and in
some respects the discussion which follows should be seen as another aspect of the
process they have described. See Ann Douglas Wood, '"The Fashionable Diseases':
Women's Complaints and their Treatment in Nineteenth Century America," in Mary
S.Hartman and Lois Banner, ed., Clio's Consciousness Raised (New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1974), 1-22; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman:
Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth Century America," Social Research 39
(1972): 654-78; Charles Rosenberg and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female Animal:
Medical and Biological Views of Women," Journal of American History 60 (1973):
332-56.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

desire even in her romantic life to be pathological.' Such an assessment

of women's sexuality necessarily had fundamental implications for the
medical conceptualization of lesbian relations. Indeed, in the context
of female passionlessness, there was no place for lesbianism as it is
currently understood: if women could not even respond with sexual
enthusiasm to the advances of men, how could they possibly stimulate
sexual excitement between themselves?
In the Victorian system, therefore, a complete inversion or reversal
of a woman's sexual character was required for her to act as a lesbian;
she had literally to become man-like in her sexual desire. That this logic
governed early thinking about lesbianism is suggested by the descriptions
of lesbians provided by early sexologists. In 1883, in one of the first
articles on a "Case of Sexual Perversion," P.M. Wise described the
behavior of a woman institutionalized after having been discovered
passing as a man:

In passing to the ward, she embraced the female attendant in a

lewd manner and came near overpowering her before she received
assistance. Her conduct on the ward was characterized by the same
lascivious conduct, and she made efforts at various times to have
sexual intercourse with her associates.'

This description, typical of the early literature, emphasizes the sexual

aggressiveness of the female "pervert" in terms closely paralleling
descriptions of male sexual lust prominent in nineteenth-century
thought. At mid-century, for instance, the Female Moral Reform

6 See, e.g., the assertion by H. Fehling that "the appearance of the sexual side in the
love of a young girl is pathological" (Die Bestimmung der Frau, 1892, p. 18), quoted
in Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2d ed., rev. (1903, Philadelphia:
F.A. Davis, Co., 1913): 3:195. Ellis cited similar opinions by other major European
sexologists who were influential in the United States, including Krafft-Ebing, Moll,
Naecke, and Lombroso (pp. 194-96). Carl Degler's study of women's sexuality in the
nineteenth century suggests that this ideology had begun to change earlier than
historians previously thought ("What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality
in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1467-90), but
it relies for its evidence on sources published only in the last third of the century.
My evidence suggests that the assertion of women's sexual subjectivity, which had
become common by the 1920s, remained only a minority medical opinion in the closing
yean of the nineteenth century. For a reinterpretation of the origins and instrumentality
of passionlessness, see Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: A Reinterpretation of
Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 4 (1978): 219-36.
7 P.M. Wise. "Case of Sexual Perversion," Alienist and Neurologist 4 (1883): 87-88.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

Society thought the "male lecher... a creature controlled by base sexual

drives which he neither could nor would control," according to Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg; woman, "innocent and defenseless, gentle and
passive," was just the opposite.' This polarization of masculine and
feminine sexuality suggests that the perversion described by Wise was
not so much in the object of the woman's sexual desire as in the
masculine, aggressive form it took: the woman had inverted her whole
sexual character.
Sexual inversion, the term used in most of the nineteenth century
literature, thus had a much broader meaning than our present term,
homosexuality, which denotes solely the sex of the person one sexually
desires. Sexual inversion, rather, connoted a total reversal of one's sex
role.
But in Victorian thought, people's sex roles were not limited to their
behavioral roles in intimate sexual relations; rather, a woman's sexual
passivity, for instance, was to serve as a paradigm for her complete
gender role. In the thinking of many doctors, sexual inversion referred
not only to sexual excesses or to non-procreative sexual activity, as some
have argued,' but even more centrally to aberrations in one's sex-defined
social role. As George Beard wrote in the 1880s, when "the sex is
perverted, they hate the opposite sex and love their own; men become
women and women men, in their tastes, conduct, character, feelings
and behavior."" Richard von Krafft-Ebing explained that a person's
thought, character and behavior "correspond with the peculiar sexual
instinct [i.e., "the sexual role in which they feel themselves to be"],
but not with the sex which the individual represents anatomically and
physiologically."11 Transvestism was therefore seen as characteristic
of sexual inversion, and the case histories regularly observed that many
inverts revealed their true nature as children by their queer behavior.
"She was peculiar in girlhood," observed Wise, "in that she preferred
masculine sports and labor; had an aversion to attentions from young
8 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study
in Sex Role and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly 23 (1971):
571.
9 Vera Bullough, "Homosexuality and the Medical Model," Journal of Homosexuality
I (1974): 99-110.
10 George M. Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia, ed. by A.D. Rockwell (New York: E.B. Treat,
Co., 1884), 106.
11 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, With Especial Reference to the
Antipathic Sexual Instinct, transl. by F.J. Rebman (Brooklyn: Physicians and Surgeons
Book Co., 1908), 336.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

men and sought the society of her own sex."11 P.M. Lichtenstein's list
of the "male characteristics" of female sex perverts in a conservative
1921 article included the fact that "they wear strictly tailor-made
clothing, low shoes, and they seldom wear corsets. The hair is usually
bobbed."" Another doctor observed with astonishment that "some of
the women inverts can whistle admirably"; and Douglas McMurtrie
characterized an invert by her drinking, smoking, and being "very
independent in her ways."14 W.C. Rivers, on the other hand, thought
it significant that a male pervert "never smoked and never married;
[and] was entirely averse to outdoor games," while two other researchers
described as perverted a man who, among other things, was "fond of
looking in the mirror . . . [and] talk[ed] in a squeaking, effeminate
voice.""
Havelock Ellis provided perhaps the most comprehensive description
of female sexual inversion. Although on the one hand claiming that
transvestism was unrelated to homosexuality, Ellis nonetheless provided
numerous examples of lesbian transvestites in his major work, Sexual
Inversion, and noted that even those lesbians who wore female attire
usually showed "some traits of masculine simplicity" in their dress.
Furthermore,

The brusque, energetic movements, the attitude of the arms, the

direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the masculine
straightforwardness and sense of honor . . . will all suggest the
underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer. In the habits
not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking
cigarettes, often found in quite feminine women, but also a
decided taste and tolerance for cigars. There is also a dislike and

12 Wise, "Case of Sexual Perversion," 88; P. Leidy and O.K. Mills, "Reports of Cases
of Insanity from the Insane Department of the Philadelphia Hospital," Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease 13 (1886): 712; Perry M. Lichtenstein, "The Fairy and
the Lady Lover," Medical Review of Reviews 27 (1921): 370.373-74; George F. Shrady,
"Perverted Sexual Instinct," Medical Record 26 (1884): 70; Ralph Werther, "Studies
in Androgynism," Medical Life 27 (1920): 243-45.
13 Lichtenstein, "The Fairy and the Lady Lover," 372.
14 K. "Review of Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion." Alienist and Neurologist 23 (1902):
111; Douglas C. McMurtrie, "Principles of Homosexuality and Sexual Inversion in
the Female," American Journal of Urology 9 (1913): 147.
15 W.C. Rivers, "A New Male Homosexual Trait (7)," Alienist and Neurologist 41 (1920):
22; Leidy and Mills, "Reports of Cases of Insanity," 713.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

sometimes incapacity for needlework and other domestic

occupations, while there is often some capacity for athletics."

These examples suggest not only the paradigmatic nature of woman's

sexual role for her social role, but also the polarization of masculine
and feminine modes of behavior in Victorian thought. In their
discussions of sexual behavior the doctors were unable to conceive of
a single person simultaneously embodying both: a woman could not
invert any aspect of her gender role without inverting her complete role.
The occasional medical accounts of the heterosexual relations of
married inverts emphasize the importance of sexual role inversion rather
than homosexual object choice in these discussions. Inverts were
occasionally involved in heterosexual relations, if only because of social
convention, but they were always attracted to someone whose sex role
was opposite their own. Ellis thought that the man attracted to an
inverted woman, for instance, must be exceptionally effeminate, and
he cited the case of one such man he knew who was "of slight physique,
. . . with a thin voice, . . . considerate to others to a feminine
degree, . . . and very domesticated in his manner of living — in short,
the man who might easily have been attracted to his own sex."" William
Lee Howard, writing four years later, in 1900, warned that feminists
and sexual perverts alike, both of whom he classed as "degenerates,"
married only men whom they could "rule, govern and cause to follow
[them] in voice and action."" J.F.W. Meagher claimed in 1929 that
16 Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 3d rev. ed., Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol.
2 (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co., 1915), 250. For other accounts which conceptualize
inversion in these broad terms, rather than focusing exclusively on homosexual object
choice, see William Lee Howard, "Effeminate Men and Masculine Women," New
York Medical Journal 71 (1900): 686; Allan MacLane Hamilton, "The Civil
Responsibility of Sexual Perverts," American Journal of Insanity 52 (1896): 505;
Herbert J. Clairborne, "Hypertrichosis in Women: Its Relation to Bisexuality
(Hermaphroditism): With remarks on Bisexuality in Animals, Especially Man," New
York Medical Journal 99 (1914): 1181; J. Allen Gilbert, "Homosexuality and its
Treatment," Journal of Nervous and Menial Disease 52 (1920): 297-322; James G.
Kieraan, "Sexual Perversion and the Whitechapd Murders," Medical Standard 4
(1888): 170-72; Richard von Krafft-Ebing, "Perversions of the Sexual Instinct: Report
of Cases," Alienist and Neurologist 9 (1888): 556-70, 579-81; Douglas C. McMurtrie,
"Manifestations of Sexual Inversion in the Female: Conditions in a Convent School,
Evidence of Transvestism, Unconscious Homosexuality, Sexuality of Masculine
Women, Masturbation Under Homosexual Influences, Indeterminate Sexuality in
Childhood," Urologie and Cutaneous Review 18 (1914): 444-46; idem, "Psychology
of a Tribadistk Uxoricide: A Lombrosian Case Record," ibid., 18 (1914): 480; Shrady,
"Perverted Sexual Instinct," 70-71.
17 Havelock Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895): 154.
18 Howard, "Effeminate Men and Masculine Women," 687.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

"a homosexual woman often wants to possess the male and not to be
possessed by him. . . . With them," he added, "orgasm is often only
possible in the superior position." l, If a female behaved like a man,
it seemed, she could only relate to a male who would be her "woman."
By 1900, however, a fundamental shift in conceptualization was
underway, as medicine began to specify and narrow the definition of
the sexual, and to distinguish and classify sexual deviations in ever more
discrete categories, particularly in the case of men. While early
investigators had maintained that male sexual inversion involved
transvestism, effeminacy, and such unmasculine characteristics as the
inability to whistle, as well as sexual desire for men instead of women,"
Havelock Ellis and other writers tried at the turn of the century to
redefine male sexual inversion in narrowly sexual terms. Ellis
emphatically distinguished it from transvestism and other forms of
gender inversion (initially called sexo-aesthetic inversion, and later
Eonism), which he claimed were often practiced by heterosexual men.
Sexual inversion, he told a meeting of the Chicago academy of Medicine
in 1913, correctly referred "exclusively [to] such a change in a person's
sexual impulses, . . . that the impulse is turned towards individuals
of the same sex, while all the other impulses and tastes may remain
those of the sex to which the person by anatomical configuration
belongs."11 He had already written that a man could invert his sexual
object and behavior — becoming the "passive," "feminine" sexual
partner to another man — while "remaining] masculine in his non-
sexual habits.""
Sigmund Freud clarified this distinction by introducing the concepts
of sexual object and aim in the first of his Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality (1905). Sexual aim, in Freud's view, referred to a person's

19 J.F.W. Meagher, "Homosexuality: Its Psychobiological and Pathological

Significance," Urologie and Cutaneous Review 33 (1929): S13.
20 One of the more bizarre — and late — examples of the literature which used this broad
definition of male inversion was W.C. Rivers' article, "A New Male Homosexual
Trait (?)." The newly discovered trait was cat-loving, and Rivers concluded that "If
fondness for cats be entitled to a place among male homosexual traits, the reason
will be that it is a woman's taste" (27).
21 Havelock Ellis, "Sexo-Aesthetk Inversion," Alienist and Neurologist 34 (1913): 156.
In this speech, Ellis presented the case of a male heterosexual transvestite, and cited
a case originally reported by Krafft-Ebing of what might now be termed male
transsexualism. Magnus Hirschfeld's massive work, Die Transvestiten, which appeared
in 1910 and made the same distinction between homosexuality and transvestism,
obviously influenced Ellis a great deal, as be acknowledges.
22 Havelock Ellis. "Sexual Inversion in Men," Alienist and Neurologist 17 (1896): 142.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

preferred mode of sexual behavior, such as genital or oral sex, or passive

or active roles. Sexual object referred to the object of sexual desire;
Freud classified children, animals, and persons of the same sex as
"deviations in respect of the sexual object.""
The introduction of this distinction between aim and object, which
may seem self-evident today, was a highly significant change at a
particular moment in the intellectual history of sexuality, and reflects
the changes which occurred in the sex/gender system around the turn
of the century. In the late nineteenth century, as we have seen, the fact
of active or passive sexual aim — seen as paradigmatic for one's
complete gender role — was at least as important as sexual object in
the social classification of sexuality. Investigators classified a woman
as an invert because of her aggressive, "masculine" sexual and social
behavior, and the fact that her sexual object was homosexual was only
the logical corollary of this inversion; "men," whether biologically male
or female, necessarily chose passive women as their sexual objects. By
the turn of the century, however, researchers increasingly distinguished
passive or aggressive sexual behavior from sexual object, and the latter
became the more important element in the medical classification of
sexuality.
Although discussions of both male and female sexuality reflect
investigators' growing concern about sexual object choice, the change
in focus occurred first and most decisively in the study of men. Ellis,
as I have noted, distinguished men's homosexual object choice from
their sexual and social behavior. Freud maintained that although the
"secondary and tertiary characteristics" of one sex often appeared in
the other, which he attributed to a kind of hermaphroditism, there was
no correlation between their appearance and homosexual desire in the
case of men. "The most complete mental masculinity," he observed,
"can be combined with [male] inversion." 14 For many subsequent
theorists, then, a man's sexual object choice, rather than his actual role
in intimate sexual relations, was the primary determinant in the
classification of his sexuality, and they no longer saw his sexual role
as paradigmatic of his social role. Doctors postulated that he could be
the passive partner to another man's sexual advances without necessarily
being passive and effeminate in his social role, while creating the new
category of heterosexual men whose deviance was embodied in their

23 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, et
al. (New York: Bask Books, 1962), 1-2.
24 Ibid., 8.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNTIED STATES

effeminacy. As Michel Foucault has argued, the varieties of perversion

thus multiplied, as ever more discrete categories were labelled and
distinguished — transvestism from homosexuality, effeminate behavior
from taking the "passive" role in intercourse, and so forth."
The growing differentiation of sexual object choice from sexual roles
and gender characteristics, and the growing importance of object choice
in the classification of sexuality, were reflected, albeit inconsistently,
in the increasing frequency with which the term "homosexuality" was
used in the place of sexual inversion after 1900. While "sexual
inversion" referred to an inversion in the full range of gender
characteristics, "homosexuality," precisely understood, referred only
to the narrower issue of homosexual object choice, and did not
necessarily imply gender or sexual role inversion. Although during the
transition in medical thinking which I have described, some doctors,
as one would expect, used the terms interchangeably, others
distinguished them quite carefully, and in general the terminology of
homosexuality achieved currency in the literature at the same time that
concern about object choice was beginning to supercede concern about
gender inversion."
The change in the focus of sexual inquiry was slower and more
complicated in the case of women. As with men, sexual object choice
became relatively more important than character inversion, but doctors
were less willing — perhaps culturally less able — to distinguish a
woman's behavior in sexual relations from other aspects of her gender
role. Doctors continued to characterize women who took the aggressive,
"masculine" role in sexual relations as masculine in character and social
role, even after they had determined that men who were "passive"
sexually could engage in the social behavior which was masculine. The
long statement by Havelock Ellis cited above, for instance, in which
he characterized female inverts as masculine, appeared in the third
edition of Sexual Inversion, which was published two years after his
25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
26 Two additional points should be made. First, although "inversion" and
"homosexuality" were the most common terms used, and reflect the changes in the
conceptualization of sexuality which I have outlined, they were not the only terms
used during this period to denote these concepts. Second, inversion has never entirely
disappeared as a term or concept. A major study appearing in the mid-sixties, for
instance, used the term in its title (J. Marmor, ed.. Sexual Inversion: The Multiple
Roots of Homosexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1965]), while individual researches,
particularly in periods of acute gender role distress such as postwar years, have
attempted to revive the concept.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

address to the Chicago Academy of Medicine. Freud, like Ellis and the
whole of turn-of-the-century sexology, continued to assert that
"character inversion" was a regular feature of female inversion,
although no longer maintaining that this was true of male inverts."
There were, however, changes in medical descriptions of women
involved in lesbian relationships between 1880 and 1930 which paralleled
the changes in ideas about male sexual deviance. Most of the early
accounts of sexual inversion discussed only the invert, leaving her sexual
partner anonymous and undefined. In the earliest accounts of this form
of sexual deviance, those concerning women who dressed and passed
as men, for instance, the women's "wives" received virtually no
attention. In the nineteenth century accounts of passing women who
married other women collected by Allan Berube and Jonathan Katz,
the wives usually play only a minor role, and (when they are considered)
are not labelled deviant in the same manner as their husbands. Many
accounts simply treated them as normal wives, playing their proper
feminine roles, as if it did not matter that their "husbands" were
biologically female." Further research would be required to substantiate
this point, but it seems that many nineteenth-century doctors considered
the truly serious offense to be the invert's assumption of the opposite
gender role rather than either her or her "wife's" homosexual object
choice.
Although later observers considered the role of the wifely partner
in increasingly sexual and pathological terms, the nature of her
relationship as wife to a female husband remained the fundamental
paradigm which governed medical thought. In the Victorian context
this might appropriately be termed the "heterosexual paradigm," for
it represented conventional wisdom about the proper relation of
husband to wife and man to woman. In a culture which polarized the
acceptable behavioral and emotional characteristics of men and women,
marriage was to represent a union of opposed but complementary
characteristics, in which men were dominant and women submissive.
This paradigm appears to have been so fundamental to Victorian
concepts of marriage that when doctors began to scrutinize homosexual
relationships — as well as individuals — around the turn of the century,
they were unable to think of them in any other terms. No matter what
27 Freud, Three Essays, 8.
28 A few of the many accounts collected by Allan Berube are reported in his article,
"Lesbian Masquerade," Gay Community News (17 November 1979). See also the
documents reprinted in the chapter on "Passing Women, 1782-1920," in Jonathan
Katz, Gay American History (New York: Avon, 1978), 317-423.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

the anatomical sex of the two partners, they thought, one must play
the man and the other the woman; one was an invert, and the other
subject to homosexual tendencies."
The "actively inverted woman," wrote Havelock Ellis in 1895, was
distinguished from her partner by "one fairly essential character: a more
or less distinct trace of masculinity." It was she who took the initiative
in relations with other women. The second group of women were those
"to whom the actively inverted woman is most attracted." Ellis
described these women as "plain" in appearance and as almost asexual,
with a "genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women
over men"; they were "always womanly." He did not refer to these
women as inverts, but rather as "a class in which homosexuality, while
fairly distinct, is only slightly marked." 1 ' Allan MacLane Hamilton,
writing in 18%, observed the same distinction between active and passive
lesbians, emphasizing, like most writers, the correlation between
inversion in sexual behavior and social role:

The offender was usually of a masculine type, . . . [holding views

which were] erratic, 'advanced,' and extreme, and she nearly
always lacked the ordinary modesty and retirement of her sex.
The passive agent was, as a rule, decidedly feminine, with little
power of resistance, usually sentimental or unnecessarily
prudish. . . . [T]he weak victim can be made the tool of the
designing companion."

Hamilton's description, like the one by Ellis, suggested that the passive,
feminine woman was almost asexual, simply the recipient (or victim)
of active lesbian advances, much as women might be considered the
sexual victims of men. Her prudishness and sentimentality were also
hallmarks of the Victorian lady's prescribed sexual consciousness —
precisely the reverse of the invert's sexually aggressive, man-like
character. As another writer later put it, one could imagine her

29 Only further research will reveal the actual organization and phenomenology of lesbian
and gay male relationships during this period. In the mid-twentieth century, certainly,
"butch-fern" relationships were the norm for many couples. For an important
reappraisal of lesbian role-playing, see Joan Nestle, "Butch-Fein Relationships: Sexual
Courage in the 19S0s," Heresies 12 (1981): 21-24.
30 Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," 147-48. Ellis used the same wording in the third
edition of Sexual Inversion (1915), 222.
31 Hamilton, "Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts," SOS.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

remaining involved with inverts only until she came "under the influence
of a man."
The passive homosexual woman thus occupied an ambiguous position
in medical thinking, for though her deviation from social norms was
qualitatively different from the more easily recognizable perversion of
her seducer, the invert, she did respond to another woman's advances.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the medical profession
had begun expressing greater concern about such women. Hamilton
himself complained about the lack of attention paid them in earlier
years, citing the difficulties he had once faced in a case involving one,
since "at that time her mental perversion was not of a recognized
kind."" In explaining the difficulty — but urgency — of detecting
female homosexuality, Ellis pointed out that "we are accustomed to
a much greater familiarity and intimacy between women than between
men, and we are less apt to suspect the existence of any abnormal
passion.""
Doctors increasingly subjected to medical inquiry relations between
women which they previously had considered properly asexual, and they
sought to identify both active and passive lesbians. Doctors began to
discern homosexual elements in such single-sex institutions as
"convents, boarding schools, manufacturing establishments, etc.," and
the "smashes" common to girls' schools — powerful emotional
relationships between students — were studied by doctors in the United
States and several European and Latin American countries.14 The
researchers viewed both active and passive lesbians as pathological
because of their object choice. Douglas McMurtrie, for instance, who
wrote proliflcally on lesbianism in the mid-1910s, agreed that in "the
relations of Lesbian couples we And that the sexuality of the two
32 Ibid., 507.
33 Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," 142.
34 Douglas McMurtrie, "Sexual Inversion Among Women in Spain;" idem, "Principles
of Homosexuality and Sexual Inversion in the Female;" Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 214-16.
Ellis appended an essay on "The School Friendships of Girls" to Sexual Inversion,
368-84, which mentions studies in the United States, Italy, England, and Argentina.
The U.S. study was by E.G. Lancaster, "The Psychology and Pedagogy of
Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary (July 1897). See also Nancy Sahli, "Smashing:
Women's Relations Before the Fall," and Lillian Faderman, "Lesbian Magazine
Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century." Faderman mentions several popular short
stories which unselfconsciously describe intense, emotional relationships between girls
and young women at school. For particularly charming examples, sec Jeanette Lee,
"The Cat and the King," Ladies Home Journal (October 1919), 10, 67-68, 71 — an
unusually late example; and "The Evolution of Evangeline," in Josephine Dodge
Das kam. Smith College Stories (New York: Scribners, 1900), 247-78.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

individuals is comparative [i.e., 'complementary']." One would be the

"more masculine" and "play the male part" both by courting the other
and "play[ing] the active role in the sexual relations." But McMurtrie
evinced none of the older nineteenth-century sympathy for the woman
seduced. He even argued that these roles were reversible; the woman
who played the masculine role in one relationship might be forced to
play the woman to another, even more masculine partner."
The role of the "wife" in lesbian relationships was increasingly
sexualized in the medical literature, which saw her no longer as simply
victimized by the invert's advances but as fully complicit in homosexual
perversion. In later years the heterosexual paradigm itself seemed less
satisfactory to doctors. In 1913, Margaret Otis published a study of
interracial sexual relationships at a girls' reformatory ("A Perversion Not
Commonly Noted"). Although keen to discover who "seemed the man"
in the relationships, it was not obvious to her, and she defined the young
women's perversion in terms of their homosexuality and interracialism
rather than their role inversion.1* It was only twenty years later,
however, that researchers seriously disputed the heterosexual paradigm.
Lura Beam and Robert Latou Dickinson carefully explained that every
lesbian in their study who had been asked "whether she or the other
person took the male part" answered that it was not she; "the typical
reply was that they did not think of it in that way."17 Beam emphasized
that "no transposition to male feeling or manifestation of male
sexuality" appeared in the case histories, and that the women alternately
assumed various female roles such as child, equal, and mother in their
relationships.1' By refuting the paradigm, however, Beam's study
highlighted the increasing importance attached to sexual object choice
instead of gender characteristics in classifying women's sexual deviance.

The Explanation of the Perverse

Given the nature and purposes of the medical profession at the turn
of the century, it is not surprising that so profound a redefinition of
35 McMurtrie, "Principles of Homosexuality and Sexual Inversion in the Female," 152.
Elsewhere McMurtrie noted that "the authorities on this matter"believed all lesbians
took on "active" or "passive" roles ("Manifestations of Sexual Inversion in the
Female . . . ," 424).
36 Margaret Otis, "A Perversion Not Commonly Noted," Journal of Abnormal
Psychology 8 (1913): 113-16.
37 Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam, The Single Woman: A Medical Study in
Sex Education (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 212.
38 Ibid., 214, 203.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

sexual deviance and the role of gender in sexual identity should have
occurred. The medical profession's reconsideration of the nature of
mental disease and disorder during this period also provided the context
for the emergence of quickly changing and often contradictory
explanations of inversion and homosexuality. Changes in theories
concerning sexual deviance parallelled those concerning mental disease
in general; doctors' growing conviction in the late nineteenth century
that nervous disorders had a somatic (physical) basis and demonstrated
somatic symptoms, for instance, profoundly influenced studies of
inversion. Once sexual inversion had been successfully classified as a
disease, therefore, its intellectual history was significantly influenced
by broader trends in the history of medicine. Within this general context,
the emergence of medical theories concerning inversion was related
particularly closely to medical theories of women's and men's biological
and social roles, physical ailments, and sexual disorders. Inversion
theories were thus part of a logical system whose structure we can
analyze in order to learn the medical profession's and society's basic
assumptions about sexuality and gender.
Before the medical profession could explain inversion authoritatively,
it had to demonstrate that inversion was symptomatic of a disease, and
thus a matter properly in the domain of medicine, rather than of religion
or the law. Numerous doctors in the 1880s and nineties had to argue
that "conditions once considered criminal are really pathological, and
come within the province of the physician."" As G. Frank Lydston
wrote in 1889,

The subject has been until a recent date studied solely from the
standpoint of the moralist, and from the indisposition of the
scientific physician to study the subject, the unfortunate class of
individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality have been
viewed in the light of their moral responsibility rather than as the
victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect.40

But although early medical theorists criticized the religious precept

that sexual inversion represented a sinful act of will, for a short while

39 Shrady, "Perverted Sexual Instinct," 71; R.W. Shufeldt, "Dr. William Lee Howard
on 'The Perverts'," Pacific Medical Journal45 (1902): 143-30; Wise, "Case of Sexual
Perversion," 91; William Lee Howard, "Sexual Perversion," Alienist and Neurologist
17 (1896): 6.
40 George Frank Lydston, "Sexual Perversion, Satyrii>sis and Nymphomania," Medical
und Surgical Reporter 61 (1889): 2S3.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

their theories gave willful anti-social behavior a central role in its

etiology. The earliest medical model considered inversion to be an
acquired disease, which the individual could avoid by refraining from
improper activity. This is particularly evident in the role which Richard
von Krafft-Ebing, George Beard, and others attributed to masturbation
in inversion's etiology in the 1870s and eighties. Krafft-Ebing's concern
about the effects of masturbation, for instance, resulted from his
conviction that normal, "civilized" sexual relations could occur only
in the emotional context of a loving, monogamous, heterosexual
relationship, the result of "noble and ideal sentiments."41 To
masturbate was to seek the mere gratification of lust, and put one "at
once on a level with the beast" thus "despoil[ing] the unfolded bud
of perfume and beauty, and leav[ing] behind only the coarse, animal
desire for sexual satisfaction."43 The results could be ominous: a loss
of interest in the other sex, preference for masturbation over "the
natural mode of satisfaction," or even homosexual desire.41 Self-abuse
was thus a vice which one properly avoided, and inversion was only
one of its worst consequences.44
New theories which emphasized inversion's congenital nature and
biological basis superceded older concerns about environmental and
volitional factors in the 1880s and nineties. This was simply one instance
of the growing preeminence of somatically-based theories in the
explanation of nervous disease, but the form taken by the somatic
explanation of inversion highlights particularly sharply both the
polarization of gender roles implicit in the broad definition given sexual
inversion and the assertion by late Victorian medicine of the biological
determination of the sex/gender system. Medical theory tied men and
women's gender characteristics so closely to their respective biological
sexes that a somatic explanation had to be found for those people who
41 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 286.
42 Ibid., 1, 286.
43 The conviction that sexual relations were "healthy" only in the context of a romantic
heterosexual relationship persisted. In 1929, Lura Beam noted that the famous
gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson considered "sex expression without avowed
emotional interest in other persons" as well as homosexual desire to be "regressive]"
(Single Woman, xiii).
44 Even after theories attributing a causal role to masturbation in the etiology of
homosexuality were discarded, many medical observers continued to claim a correlation
between the two. Wilhelm Stekel, Bisexual Love, transl. J.S. Teslaar (Boston: R.G.
Badger, 1922), 13-15, e.g., while specifically criticizing Krafft-Ebing's reasoning, also
asserted a correlation. See also William Lee Howard, "Psychical Hermaphroditism:
A Few Notes on Sexual Perversion with Two Clinical Cases of Sexual Inversion,"
Alienist and Neurologist 17 (1897): 111-18; Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 276-77.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

threatened to contradict the theory by appearing to be one sex while

assuming the gender role of the other (the so-called "opposite" sex).
One of the most influential theories at the turn of the century
proposed a radical solution to this dilemma, by asserting that inverts
simply were not the sex they first appeared to be, but were
hermaphrodites, incorporating biological elements of both sexes. For
Herbert Clairborne, for instance, this provided the only possible
explanation not only for lesbianism but also for the violent tactics of
British suffragists in 1914, whose acts, he thought, "are certainly not
in any sense feminine." The cause of both phenomena, he wrote in
an article nomimally on hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth) in
women, "lies in the possession by the individual of structural cellular
elements of the opposite sex."45 James Kiernan argued that the ancestors
of the human race were "bisexual" (i.e., hermaphroditic), but that
highly differentiated gender roles had evolved during the course of
human civilization. Disease or congenital defects in a particular
individual, however, could eliminate the "inhibitions" which prevented
people from acting on their atavistic impulses.4' Havelock Ellis
incorporated a version of this theory in Sexual Inversion when he argued
that each person contained male and female "germs" of varying
strengths, arranged in a variety of configurations which determined the
individual's physical and psychic states.47 Thus masculine physical
attributes could be a sign of psychic masculinity and perversion in
women. "Bearded women approach the masculine type," Clairborne
observed, and an exceptionally high percentage of them (68% in one
1881 survey he cited) were unmarried.4'
Scientific concern about hermaphroditism has often resulted from
challenges to the sex/gender system in Western history,4' but it took
45 Clairborne, "Hypertrichosis in Women: Its Relation to Bisexuality (Hermaphroditism):
With Remarks on Bisexuality in Animals, Especially Man," 1183, 1181.
46 Kiernan, "Sexual Perversion and the Whitechapel Murders," 129; Lydston, "Sexual
Perversion, Satyriasis and Nymphomania," 254-55; George Frank Lydston, The
Disease of Society (The Vice and Crime Problem) (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1904).
47 Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 310-11.
48 Clairborne, "Hypertrichosis in Women . . . ," 1178. The survey cited by Clairborne
was reported in Max Bartell, "Lieber abnorme Behaarung beim Menschen," Zeitschrift
fuer Ethnologie 13 (1881). Of 146 women surveyed, 106 were single.
49 Hermaphroditism has long been associated with inversion and been a subject of medical
inquiry. In 1836, for instance, a woman discovered passing as a married, male factory
worker in Patterson, New Jersey, tried to persuade a court that she was an
hermaphrodite. Although "surgical examination prove[d] her statement to be false,"
the newspaper account of the incident suggests the court might have considered this
a reasonable excuse for her behavior (The National Laborer[New York), 25 August
1836; thanks to David Roediger for drawing my attention to this document). For

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

particular form in the scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century.

Victorian medical conceptions of woman, for instance, centered on her
reproductive role and organs, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown;
puberty and menopause were the two great endpoints and crises of
womanhood, and menstruation her fundamental identifying
characteristic.5' The early medical case histories of lesbians thus
predictably paid enormous attention to their menstrual flow and the
size of their sexual organs. Several doctors emphasized that their lesbian
patients stopped menstruating at an early age, if they began at all, or
had unusually difficult and irregular periods. They also inspected the
women's sexual organs, often claiming that inverts had unusually large
clitorises, which they said the inverts used in sexual intercourse as a
man would his penis." Underlying all such descriptions and inquiries
was the assumption that persons who behaved as the female invert did
simßly could not be women.
As somatically-oriented psychological theories began to wane in the
early years of this century, however, the theory of psychic
hermaphroditism superceded that of the physical. The evidence against
somatically-based theories of nervous and mental disease became
overwhelming in the general scientific literature during this period, and
this was the case in studies of inversion as well. For although scrupulous
attention was paid to physical organs in the case histories, many
investigators did after all have to report that there were no physical
abnormalities." Some doctors continued to argue, however, that even
49 Continued
discussion of earlier appearances of hermaphroditism as a subject of medical inquiry,
see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People
in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin:
Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite,
transl. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
50 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in
Nineteenth Century America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, 23-37.
51 See, for example, Wise, "Case of Sexual Perversion," 90; Lichtenstein, "The Fairy
and the Lady Lover," 372; J.C. Shaw and G.N. Ferris, "Perverted Sexual Instinct,"
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 10 (1883): 183-204, which summarizes the
cases previously reported in the European literature; and James Kiernan's comment
in 1916, when his opinion had changed, that although earlier doctors had usually looked
for "an enlarged clitoris as a stigma of perversion," Havelock Ellis had since
demonstrated that it was not characteristic of lesbians ("Increase of Sexual Perversion,"
Urologie and Cutaneous Review 20 (1916): 45).
52 Trignant Burrow, "The Genesis and Meaning of 'Homosexuality' and its Relation
to the Problem of Introverted Mental States," Psychoanalytic Review A (1917): 272-84,
and James Kieraan, "Comment on Burrows: The Genesis and Meaning of
Homosexuality and its Relation to the Problem of Introverted Mental States," Urologie
and Cutaneous Review 21 (1917): 467.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

if the hermaphrodite's anatomical features were of its biological sex,

its mind must surely be of the other sex. Karl Ulrichs, the first German
writer (and for decades the only openly gay man) to discuss inversion
in a public forum, had first characterized male inversion as representing
a "woman's spirit in a man's body" in the 1860s. Many of the next
generation of gay intellectuals, including Edward Carpenter and Magnus
Hirschfeld, adopted a version of this theory at the turn of the century,
claiming that they were best characterized as an "intermediate sex"
(the loose but popular translation of sexuelle Zwischenstufe),
hermaphroditically combining psychic qualities of both the male and
female."
Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced degeneration theory as a means
of explaining inversion in the early editions of his monumental work,
Psychopathia Sexualis. His explanation quickly gained wide currency
in the United States, for in the last years of the nineteenth century
degeneration theory had come to dominate explanations of nervous and
mental disease in general. The theory drew from those currents in late
Victorian thought which postulated an organic relationship between the
processes of evolution and civilization. The development of sexual
morality and order, according to Krafft-Ebing, laid the "basis upon
which social advancement is developed." Lust ran wild in primitive
society, which tolerated acts which civilized society considered criminal,
he argued, while the Victorian sexual order represented both the
pinnacle and the necessary basis of the world's most advanced
civilization. Maintaining such a society required that human sexual
relations be based on love and monogamy; sexual relations outside of
the heterosexual institution of marriage thus represented not only a
degeneration to an earlier, lower state of evolution, but threatened
civilization itself."
Krafft-Ebing's theory led investigators to consider the relationship
of social development to the evolution of sexual morality, and resulted
in the publication of numerous anthropological studies of "primitive"
sexual morality in medical journals. Several studies described the
53 For a brief statement of Edward Carpenter's views, see his essay, "The Intermediate
Sex," in his Love's Coming-of-Age (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1906;
12th enl. ed., 1923), 130-49. See also Florence Beery, "The Psyche of the Intermediate
Sex," Medico-Legal Journal 41 (1924): 4-9.
54 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 344-46. For background on degeneration theory,
see Nathan Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971), 75-76.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

institutionalization of homosexual relations or inversion in Native

American and Asian societies (usually involving transvestism and
mirroring the heterosexual paradigm), thus lending support to the
argument that primitive cultures could be characterized by their
tolerance of such practices." Early gay scholars devoted much of their
attention to the refutation of this argument, however, and the work
of John Addington Symonds and others on the role of homosexuality
in ancient Greek civilization was widely cited to that end. If
homosexuality not only was tolerated but flourished in the culture which
represented the epitome of Western civilization, they asked, how could
it be associated with degeneration? Edward Carpenter argued that
inverts had made special contributions to civilization as artists,
spiritualists, and warriors in primitive societies.5' Such arguments
doubtless did not persuade the unconvinced, but they dominated the
medical literature by the mid-teens.
Several theories, including that of degeneration, embodied middle
class assumptions about the class nature of sexual morality as well as
a concern about the standards of the 'civilized West.' For the medical
profession grew out of the white middle class and reflected its values
35 C.G. Seligmann, "Sexual Inversion Among Primitive Races," Alienist and Neurologist
23 (1902): 380-83; William J. Robinson, "The Bote [abstract of an anthropologist's
article]," Journal of Sexology and Psychoanalysis 1 (1923): 544-46; Ellis, Sexual
Inversion, 203-9. One article, however, while making no comment on male
homosexuality, described men's violent repression of lesbianism: Douglas McMurtrie,
"Legend of Lesbian Love Among the North American Indians," Urologie and
Cutaneous Review 18 (1914): 192.
36 Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (London, 1914); John
Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being an Inquiry Into the
Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion (privately printed, 1883, 1901); M.H.E. Meier,
" Paederastia," in J.S. Ersch and J.J. Grober, Algemeine Encyclopaedic der
Wissenschaften und Kuensten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837), 3.9.149-88. Symond's
privately printed treatise was "Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and
Jurists" (title page). The work was to have been included as an Appendix to Ellis'
Sexual Inversion, but Symonds' estate bought out the first English edition in 1897
and withdrew permission for its inclusion in subsequent editions (Weeks, Coming
Out, 39-60). For examples of the utilization of the Greek evidence introduced by
Symonds and others, see I.H. Coriat, "Homosexuality: Its Psychogenesis and
Treatment," New York Medical Journal 97 (1913): 389-94; Ellis, Sexual Inversion,
197-98; Kiernan, "Homosexuality in Early Greek Poetry," Urologie and Cutaneous
Review 24 (1920): 670; idem, "Sexual Inversion Among Greek Women," ibid.: 663-66;
McMurtrie, "Principles of Homosexuality and Sexual Inversion in the Female," 143-46;
Rivers, "A New Male Homosexual Trait (?)," 22. The wealth of information available
did not prevent Freud from misrepresenting Aristophanes' legend of the hermaphrodites
(Plato, Symposium, 189c-193d) in his Three Essays, 2. The original legend explained
the creation of what might be called lesbians and gay men as well as heterosexuals,
but Freud implied that it referred only to the latter.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

and concerns in an extremely class-conscious manner; it perceived not

only non-Europeans but also America's own lower classes as immoral.
Doctors assumed that sexual license and sensuality characterized the
poor and working classes, that only the middle and upper classes had
"achieved" a sense of sexual pΓopriety.,, Degeneration theory explained
the immorality of the poor — as well as their poverty — by asserting
the degeneration of the class as a whole. Some nineteenth-century
alienists maintained that sanity and morality alike were socially
constructed and a function of class: behavior common to the
"immoral" classes, when it appeared in a person from a higher class,
could thus be a sign of insanity. Others maintained that the working
class suffered from a high incidence of sexual disorders and disease
because of its sexual excess.
Each of these tendencies is evident in the medical literature on
homosexuality. A number of doctors who described inversion as a
disease when it afflicted their middle class patients considered it to be
an immoral, willfully chosen mode of behavior on the part of the poor.
This distinction was sometimes expressed as the difference between
congenital or disease-induced "perversion" and willfull, immoral
"perversity"; the person suffering from perversion was to be pitied,
while those who were simply perverse, perhaps responding to the
pervert's advances, were "worse than the pervert and deserve no
sympathy."" Furthermore, many doctors accused servants, the
representatives of the working class in the middle class household, of
introducing perversion into respectable homes. Highlighting one of the
most frightful aspects of the Victorian "servant problem," doctors
charged that servants showed children how to masturbate, which
resulted in their becoming involved in homosexual activity.
Prostitutes, of whom Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and other
major sexologists asserted a quarter or more were lesbian, came under
particular attack in this context. Female prostitutes (and even more
emphatically their male counterparts) chose to respond to the perverse
sexual demands of their diseased clients, in and of itself damnable
behavior; many doctors maintained that in so doing the prostitutes
further perverted their sexuality. In one widely accepted theory, the
57 Peter T. Cominos, "Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System,"
International Review of Social History 8 (1963): 33,238-40; Smith-Rosenberg, "The
Hysterical Woman," 667; Charles Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in Nineteenth
Century America," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 131-54.
58 Lichtenstein, "The Fairy and the Lady Lover," 374; JCrafft-Ebing. "Perversion of
the Sexual Instinct: Report of Cases," 563-66.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

lesbianism of female prostitutes was but one of the sexual perversities

resulting from their "satiation" with "normal" sex." For others,
however, prostitution necessarily indicated a partial, organic inversion,
since the women were without "feminine honor." Havelock Ellis argued
in this vein that the "prevalence of homosexuality among women in
prison [presumably working class women] is connected with the close
relationship between feminine criminality and prostitution."" To many
doctors, prostitutes seem to have embodied the sensuality and sexual
immorality of the working class, but doctors did not believe perversity
was restricted to them. Female hotel servants and factory workers were
also frequently accused of lesbian behavior. In part this seems to have
reflected the growing concern about women in single-sex institutions
such as boarding schools and convents, but the doctors' descriptions
of autoeroticism, mutual masturbation, and other sexual activity
amongst women workers were especially lurid and morbid. Even
Havelock Ellis was shaken from his normal position to characterize
factory-centered lesbianism as "homosexual vice . . . common and
recognized."*1
One of Havelock Ellis' major purposes was to establish the congenital
basis of homosexuality; he considered this theory to be politically
progressive, since it might remove homosexual behavior from the
purview of the law." By 1900, the medical profession had accepted the
congenital theory in the explanation not only of inversion, but also of
a wide range of other supposed mental diseases. Ellis and other
sexologists also postulated the importance of heredity in its etiology,
but how exactly it might have entered the hereditary chain continued
to be disputed. The degenerationists themselves had claimed that, once
acquired, sexual perversion was inheritable, each generation suffering
an exacerbated form. Doctors such as George Beard, who associated
inversion with a variety of other mental disorders, frequently noted the
59 Douglas McMurtrie, "Sexual Inversion Among Women in Spain"; Howard, "Sexual
Perversion," 4; Ellis, "Sexual Inversion Among Women," 157.
60 Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 209-10.
61 Ibid., 214 (my emphasis; it is extremely uncharacteristic for Ellis to term homosexuality
a vice); Douglas McMurtrie, "Record of a French Case of Sexual Inversion," Maryland
Medical Review 57 (1914): 170-81; idem, "Sexual Inversion Among Women in Spain."
Race also plays an important role in sexual ideology, and theories used to stigmatize
homosexual relations were used similarly in the case of interracial relations. See, for
instance, Charles E. Hughes, "Homo Sexual Complexion Perverts in St. Louis: Note
on a Feature of Sexual Psychopathy," Alienist and Neurologist 28 (1907): 487-88,
which seems to find the interrarialism of Black and white ofen found dancing together
as disturbing — and pathological — as their homosexuality.
62 Weeks, Coming Out, 57-67.

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incidence of neurasthenia and other nervous disorders in the invert's

family history/ 1 Later theorists, such as Ellis, were careful to specify
the incidence of inversion itself, though often in conjunction with other
neuroses." The hermaphroditic theory which Kiernan, Lydston, and
others espoused was not wholly incompatible with the congenital theory,
and thus continued as an important theoretical tendency even after the
demise of other aspects of the degeneration theory.
But the new psychological theories of Freud and his American
followers challenged the hegemony of the congenital theory in the early
1900s. In his most radical thought, Freud posed heterosexuality as
problematic in the same sense as homosexuality, by arguing that the
suppression of any aspect of the libido required explanation.69 But
although he maintained that many inverts neither desired nor needed
treatment, his now familiar theory that the "aberration" of
homosexuality resulted from the child's failure to resolve psychosexual
relations with one or another parent presupposed a preferred, healthier
course of development." Freud's work reintroduced the acquired theory
of homosexuality so forcibly that congenital theorists such as Ellis were
compelled to devote much of their later work to its refutation."
Nevertheless, Freud's American followers and other non-Freudian
psychiatrists continued to mix his radically mental explanation of
homosexuality with those which attributed the "disorder" to congenital
defects and even to vice. C.P. Oberndorf, for instance, argued in 1919
that only the behavior of "objective," passive lesbians, or "subjective,"
63 Shardy, "Perverted Sexual Instinct," 70; James Kiernan, "Perverted Sexual Instinct,"
The Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner 48 (1884): 264; idem, "Insanity: Sexual
Perversion," Detroit Lancet 7 (1884): 483.
64 Ellis claimed in 1915 that the frequency of inversion among the near relatives of inverts
whose case histories appeared in the literature was "now indisputable" (Sexual
Inversion, 308).
65 Freud, Three Essays, 11-12, note added in 1915.
66 Ibid., esp. pp. 114. Abraham Brill provided the first English translation of this text
in 1910, and published an article summarizing the essay on inversion three years later,
"The Conception of Homosexuality," Journal of the American Medical Association
61 (1913): 335-40. Isadore Coriat's article that year also essentially summarized Freud's
essay, "Homosexuality: Its Psychogenesis and Treatment." The American Freudians,
and Freud himself, treated male homosexuality almost exlusivety in their early writings,
as Trignant Burrow pointed out in 1917, "The Genesis and Meaning of
'Homosexuality' and its Relation to the Problem of Introverted Mental States." Freud
finally devoted a full essay to the explanation of lesbianism in 1920, "The Psychogenesis
of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transl. James Strachey, et al (London:
Hogarth Press, 1955), 18:174-72. An extended analysis of Freudian theories is beyond
the scope of this article.
67 Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 304-9.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNTIED STATES

aggressive gay men, could be explained by psychotraumatic processes.

For an aggressive gay man behaved sexually as a man should, he argued,
and the "abnormal" fact that he chose to initiate sexual relations with
a man instead of a woman was explicable in terms of a traumatic
heterosexual experience in childhood, and could be cured by
psychoanalysis. But Oberndorf believed this theory was inadequate to
explain the behavior of the "objective" gay man (i.e., the passive
"object" of sexual activity), the man called an invert in the nineteenth-
century literature. These men, he argued, represented "biological
anomalies of development which are often coupled with unmistakable
physical signs."" Not only was their sexual object abnormal, but also
their sexual aim, and only with the older theories of hermaphroditism
and sexual intermediacy could Oberndorf adequately account for so
fundamental an inversion of the man's (or obverse woman's) role.
OberndorPs interweaving of several traditions of conceptualization
and explanation in his analysis of homosexuality accurately reflects the
intellectual confusion and anachronism of the period under
consideration. The very subject of the debate had narrowed from
comprehensive gender inversion to homosexual desire, although the
heterosexual paradigm continued to structure much medical thinking,
as OberndorPs article indicates. But while the shift in subject accounts
for some of the theoretical fluctuation, the primary cause rests in the
more general crisis of medical thought at the turn of the century.
Speculation about the etiology of homosexuality was but an aspect of
a more general reconsideration of the nature and etiology of nervous
disease, and closely adhered to the more general pattern.

The Insrumentality of the Perverse

To note the relationship between theories of inversion and of other

supposed mental disorders, however, does not explain why gender
deviance and homosexual relations became the subject of medical
inquiry when they did, nor does it account for the changing focus of
the inquiry. To examine these questions we must assess the broader
cultural context in which the medical inquiry emerged. Such analysis
can only be tentative and suggestive at this stage in our research, although
recent scholarship in women's history has made it possible to understand
more deeply the social context of the study of female sexuality than
of male. The analysis I suggest here focuses on the reasons for the study
68 C.P. Oberndorf, "Homosexuality," Medical Record 46 (1919): 841.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

of lesbianism, although it also considers inquiry into male inversion

and homosexuality. I think that three developments in American society
during this period were particularly important in this context: the
increasing visibility of urban gay male subcultures, the political and
economic challenges posed to the Victorian sex/gender system by
women in the late nineteenth century, and the related "resexualization"
of women in mainstream sexual ideology in the first decades of the
twentieth. The professionalization of medicine and its rise to ideological
hegemony over religion and, in certain arenas, the state apparatus, were
also crucial to the process, but I will only note those developments
here."
In the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women began
to question and challenge the limits placed on their social role, both
institutionally through the suffrage movement and more generally
through their entrance into the wage-labor force and the efforts of many
to achieve economic and social independence. The declining marriage
and birth rates of the native-born middle class and the general movement
of women into men's sphere alarmed many men. Joe L. Dubbert has
argued that a "masculinity crisis" developed in the years 1880-1920
because of the challenge posed to masculine sex-role definitions by both
the women's movement and men's perception that women exerted
undue influence over key cultural and socializing institutions." The
declining autonomy of both working class men at the factory and middle
class men at the office, due to the introduction of scientific
management, the undermining of the crafts, and the rationalization of
clerical work, also may have contributed to this crisis.71 Men who had
lost power at the workplace may have needed to reassert power and
to redefine their masculinity in their marriages and families.
Conservative medical pronouncements played a key role in the
ideological reaction to these challenges, and as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
and Charles Rosenberg have argued, "would-be scientific arguments
were used in the rationalization and legitimization of almost every aspect
69 Several useful essays on this process appear in Susan Reverby and David Rosner, ed.,
Health Care in America: Essays in Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1979). See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, and the several essays
by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg cited above.
70 Joe L. Dubbert, "Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis," The Psychoanalytic
Review 61 (1974): 443-55.
71 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); David Montgomery,
Worker's Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

of Victorian life, with particular vehemence in those areas in which

social change implied stress in existing social arrangements.72
The sudden growth in the medical literature on sexual inversion, I
would argue, was part of the general ideological reaction by the medical
profession to women's challenge to the sex/gender system during this
period. The designation of their challenge as the disease of sexual
inversion allowed male doctors both to explain the phenomenon in a
non-threatening way and to stigmatize it as deviant behavior which
should be avoided by "healthy" women. Thus the observation by A.M.
Hamilton in 1896, that "the views of such a person were erratic,
'advanced,' and extreme, and she nearly always lacked the normal
modesty and retirement of her sex," was not simply a curious addendum
to his description of her homosexuality, as some have assumed, but
was central to his concept of women's sexuality and social place, and
the nature of the "invert's" disorder."
The implicit concern about challenges to the sex/gender system which
pervades these medical accounts was made quite explicit in some, which
linked the apparent rise in sexual inversion to the influence of the
women's movement. Havelock Ellis, as Nancy Sahli has noted, asserted
such a relationship:

Having been taught independence of men and disdain for the old
theory which placed women in the moated grange of the home
to sigh for a man who never comes, a tendency develops for
women to carry this independence still farther and to find love
where they find work."

Ellis had to qualify his argument by noting that the "unquestionable

influences of modern movements cannot directly cause sexual
inversion" (my emphasis), since otherwise it would contradict his
congenital theory, but his point was clear. He quoted without
qualification the opinion of "a well informed American correspondent"
that one of the "obvious reasons" for the increase in sexual inversion
was "the growing independence of the women, their lessening need for

72 Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, "The Female Animal," 332; Aileen Kraditor, The
Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. 1890-1920 (New York: Anchor Books, 1971),
12-37.
73 Hamilton, "The Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts," 505. "Advanced" was a
common codeword for "feminist."
74 Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 262.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

marriage." He also reported on the extensive debate within advanced

German medical and feminist circles about this relationship.71 Other
doctors attributed the supposed increase in inversion to the repudiation
of motherhood by women influenced by feminism. The progeny of the
woman who "prefers the laboratory to the nursery," warned William
Lee Howard in 1900, "are perverts, moral or psychical." By forsaking
their proper social role, he claimed, these "emancipated" women
produced effeminate sons and masculine daughters.7'
While some doctors indicated their concern about the women's
movement by warning that it led to an increase in sexual inversion,
others were even more explicit in postulating a literally organic
relationship between the two. James Kiernan's comments in 1914 on
the Clairborne article on hermaphroditism are interesting in this light,
for they suggest that such an association was often proposed. "As might
be expected," Kieraan wrote, "Clairborne does not finish his paper
[nominally on hypertrichosis] without touching upon the influence of
defective sexuality in women upon political questions. While, of course,
he does not think every suffragist an invert, yet he does believe that
the very fact that women in general of today are more and more deeply
invading man's sphere is indicative of a certain impelling force within
them."" Other doctors were less restrained in their appraisal of the
organic relationship between the women's movement and inversion.
Howard warned in his article of 1900 that

The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence; the

viragint who would sit in the public highways and lift up her
pseudo-virile voice, proclaiming her sole right to decide questions
of war or religion, or the value of celibacy and the curse of
women's impurity, and that disgusting anti-social being, the
female sexual pervert, are simply different degrees of the same
class — degenerates."

The same historical processes which generated concern about female

gender deviance contributed to social apprehension about male
75 Ibid., 261, η. 3, 262-63. For documents from the German debate, as well as
contemporary lesbian literature, see Lillian Fadennan and Brigitte Eriksson, ed.,
Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany (Weatherby Lake, Mo.: Naiad
Press, 1980).
76 Howard, "Effeminate Men and Masculine Women," 687.
77 James Kieraan, "Bisexuaüty," Urologie and Cutaneous Review 18 (1914): 37S;
Clairborne, "Hypertrichosis in Women," 1183.
78 Howard, "Effeminate Men and Masculine Women," 687.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

inversion. Values under attack are likely to be reasserted with particular

vigor, and, as Joe L. Dubbert has argued, many men reacted to the
crisis in masculine role definition at the turn of the century by reasserting
the traditional values of masculinity. In this context, any man who
behaved as if he had rejected his masculinity must have generated
considerable anxiety on the part of other men, since his behavior
implicitly challenged the biological basis attributed to the prescribed
male role. Indeed, much of the nineteenth-century literature on male
inversion treats these men as veritable traitors to the sex, and the inverts'
supposed fear of women was seen as one of their most damning un-
masculine traits.
Concern about men who refused to conform to masculine gender
norms was exacerbated by the increasing visibility of gay male
subcultures, which many observers attributed to urbanization. That
doctors were aware of these subcultures and considered them to be a
crucial subject of their inquiry is evidenced in some of the earliest articles
on male inversion. G. Frank Lydston observed in 1889 that there was
"in every community of any size a colony of male sexual perverts; they
are usually known to each other and are likely to congregate together.""
The phenomenon seemed especially evident in New York; even in the
early 1880s, George Beard thought that many male inverts lived there,
while by 1913 A.A. Brill confidently estimated there were "many
thousands of homosexuals in New York City among all classes of
society." Three years later, James Kiernan noted that gay men were
popularly called "fairies" in New York and "brownies" in
Philadelphia; he also knew of interracial gay cafes in Chicago."
Furthermore, doctors realized that the subjects of their inquiry already
identified themselves as part of a sexual underground; two articles
reporting the case histories of male inverts in the 1880s noted that "these
patients claim to be able to recognize each other."" The very existence
of such subcultures motivated doctors' interest in male inversion and
homosexuality; they considered it their proper domain — and
responsibility — to map out the typology of the emerging sexual
undergound, and to classify its inhabitants in ever more discrete
79 Lydston, "Sexual Perversion, Satyriasis and Nymphomania," 2S4.
80 Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia, 102; Brill, "The Conception of Homosexuality," 335;
James Kiernan, "Classification of Homosexuality," Urologie and Cutaneous Review
20 (1916): 3S0.
81 James Kiernan, "Insanity: Sexual Perversion" Detroit Lancet 7 (1884): 482; G. Adler
Blumer, "A Case of Perverted Sexual Instinct (Contraere Sexualempfindung),"
American Journal of insanity 39 (1882): 25. Krafft-Ebing made a similar observation
of German "inverts" in "Perversions of the Sexual Instinct: Report of Cases," 570.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

categories. They were investigating a subculture rather than creating

one.
Despite the ideological attacks on feminist and wage-earning women,
their challenge to the Victorian sex/gender system resulted in limited
but significant changes. The number of employed women continued
to increase; women secured new positions in the professions; and they
won two major political campaigns, for suffrage and prohibition. Their
economic and political advances led to changes in the cultural
conception of middle class womanhood. The early decades of the
century witnessed a "new freedom in manners and morals" for women,
and the resexualization of women in mainstream sexual ideology.
Although that ideology continued to postulate the greater sexual interest
and aggressiveness of the male, it increasingly allowed women the
capacity for sexual interest and initiative.'2 To a limited extent, gender
norms changed to recognize the greater complexity of actual gender
roles in the society. Particularly notable was the weakening of the
holistic character of masculinity and femininity in the ideological
system; doctors began to question whether one aspect of one's
behavior — sexual passivity or aggressiveness — was paradigmatic for
one's entire gender role, although more decisively in the case of men
than of women. Thus the increasing differentiation of "perversions"
in medical thought may itself have reflected the decline of the older
holistic concepts of gender, and the increasing complexity of actual
gender roles in American society.
But the liberalization of gender norms in the face of women's activism
did not alter the fundamental power relations between men and women,
and it was in this context that the "homosexual" replaced the "invert"
as the subject of medical concern. For if it no longer was considered
a deviation from the norm for a woman to initiate sexual relations,
then it no longer needed to be considered an inversion of her sexual
or social role to do so. But once all women were considered able to
experience and act on sexual desire, medical concern shifted logically
from the fact of women's sexual activity to their choice of sexual and

82 Michael Gordon, "From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm: Sex

in American Marital Literature, 1830-1940," in James Henslin and Edward Sagarin,
ed., The Sociology oj Sex (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 59-84; James
McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War 1 Freedom in Manners and
Morals," Journal of American History 55 (1968): 315-33. The historical literature
on women in this period is thoughtfully reviewed in Estelle Β. Freedman, "The New
Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s," Journal of American History
61 (1974): 372-93.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

social partners. The fact that some women chose other women rather
than men as sexual partners thus became the primary fact to be
explained and condemned, despite the narrowness of this issue
compared to inversion; as we have seen, both the "active" and
"passive" partners came under scrutiny. Indeed, the resexualization
of women — in one sense a progressive development — was used to
tie them to men, as the culture increasingly postulated the importance
of women's sexual desire as a basis for their involvement in heterosexual
institutions such as marriage, which their employment supposedly
rendered less of an economic necessity than before. The new
complexity — and restrictiveness — of sex/gender roles was epitomized
by the flapper, who was at once both sexually precocious and
profoundly heterosexual.
The new celebration of heterosexual bonding and the increasing
hostility to homosexual relations between women evident in both the
medical literature and the broader culture were central to the general
subversion of women's culture and solidarity which Estelle Freedman
and other historians have identified as instrumental in the decline of
the women's movement after the attainment of suffrage in 1920. The
growth of the movement, and the very ability of numerous activists
and professional and working class women to work, had depended in
part on the development in the nineteenth century of a women's culture
of supportive friendships and networks." The most striking indication
of this development is that in the closing years of the century many
feminist activists and professional women chose not to marry at all,
but to be sustained by their relationships with other women.
Heterosexual marriage and motherhood, as constituted in Victorian
society — unlike relationships with women — would have left them
little chance to pursue their chosen work.
In this context, the increasing denigration of single sex institutions
and relations and the new urgency attached to the development of
women's relations with men in the 1910s and twenties constituted
— to modify a current phrase — a veritable "Heterosexual

83 Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American

Feminism, 1870-1930," Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 512-29. The most important works
contributing to this argument include Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ellen DuBois, "The Radicalism of the Woman
Suffrage Movement: Notes Toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century
Feminism," Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 63-71; and Blance Weisen Cook, "Female
Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald. Crystal Eastman, Emma
Goldman," in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pieck, ed., A Heritage of Her Own
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 412-44.

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 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

Counterrevolution." The available evidence suggests that this was a

pervasive phenomenon in middle class culture; the newly burgeoning
advertising industry did its part, and the marriage manuals of the 1920s
and thirties, according to Christina Simmons, emphasized the need for
men to develop "companionate marriages" in order to make marriage
more attractive and satisfying to women. The results were also widely
evident. Some observers noted that dyadic, heterosexual dating had
replaced same-sex group activities as the dominant pattern of youth
culture by the 1920s, while autobiographical material from the decade
suggests that increasing numbers of professional women chose to marry,
often to the detriment of their careers. A full explanation of the decline
of the women's movement after 1920 would have to consider many
factors, including outright political repression and more subtle processes
such as the reconstitution of women as "consumers" upon the rapid
expansion of the consumer economy during this period. But the
increasing hostility to a women's culture of supportive relationships
and networks was also crucial to the movement's decline,'4 and it is
in this context that we may best understand the growing medical concern
about homosexual desire. Scientific discourse reflected and was but one
aspect of a much broader subversion of women's culture and
reconstitution of sexual and gender relations in a manner which linked
women to men.

Conclusion

Sexuality is socially structured in a complex relationship with gender,

class, and other lines of social demarcation, in order to serve definite
social purposes, and a recognition of how profoundly sexual categories
and norms can change is essential to the development of a satisfactory
conceptual framework for the historical and political analysis of
sexuality. Examining the changing focus of sexological inquiry points
out how important it is in our study of the history of homosexuality

84 Christina Simmons, "Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat," Frontiers

4 (Fall 1979): 54-59. The observers of youth culture were Robert S. Lynd and Helen
Merrell Lynd, Middietown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1929), 110. Short autobiographies published in The Nation in the 1920s
are collected in Elaine Showalter, ed.. These Modem Women (Old Westbury, NY:
The Feminist Press, 1978). See also J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social
Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975) and Mary Ryan,
Womanhood in America (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979, 2nd ed.), 151-82.
Discussions in Nancy Cott's seminars at Yale in U.S. women's history also contributed
substantially to my thinking on these issues.

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 HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

to reconstruct the conceptual frameworks in which homoerotic desire

and relations have been understood. As in the late nineteenth century,
such conceptual schemas may not even have recognized homoeroticism
as a discrete sexual phenomenon.
The medical literature on sexual deviance was not the central force
in the transformation of popular attitudes and the social relations of
sexuality between 1880 and 1930. But it does provide us with a key to
understanding the politics of sexuality during that period. It developed
in response to challenges to the Victorian sex/gender system and the
emergence of sexual subcultures in the cities, and it changed in a manner
which reflected changes in the actual organization of sex/gender roles
in the society. The medical profession's increasing concern about
homosexual desire, and its differentiation of homosexual object choice
from deviant gender behavior, represent both a reorientation of gender
norms and a continuing imperative to define and delimit the range of
acceptable social relations.

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