LESBIAN IDENTITIES

Lesbianism was an unknown concept for most of the nineteenth century. It had always been known in European culture that women did engage in emotional and sexual relations with one another, but this female intimacy had no name.

Lesbian love and female same-sex desire, as well as intimate friendship, are widely documented before 1800. Female intimacy was recognised as an acceptable expression of women’s natural emotional sensibility. It was not unknown for women to marry and yet to conduct passionate relations with a woman too. By the eighteenth century it was accepted that women would develop immensely strong relationships with one another, perhaps to com­pensate for the absence of emotion within their marriages. These relation­ships were probably not sexual, but were culturally sanctioned intimacy amongst women providing an acceptable and desirable counterweight to arranged marriages. Such friendships may also have been in imitation of the male platonic homosocial relations which were so useful to men in their public lives. Women demonstrated their affections for one another by writing one another romantic poetry, sharing intimate secrets, exchanging love tokens such as locks of hair and miniature portraits, holding hands, and kissing and caressing.

The rise of the ideology of domesticity in the early nineteenth century had a twofold impact on the expression and interpretation of female intimacy. The ideological containment of woman within the home and marriage, and the construction of ideal femininity as sexually passive, altered male percep­tions of women's homosocial world. Female eroticism was now confined to prostitutes, because prostitutes were sexual deviants who inverted the normal rules of sexual relations by selling sex and rejecting motherhood. On the other hand, domesticity nurtured and reinforced women's friendships by allowing them to cultivate a separate and acceptable female world of senti­ment and mutual support.⁶⁶ In 1778, Eleanor Butler (1739—1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755—1831), two upper-class Irish women, eloped with one another. When Sarah's family found out she had run away with a woman they were relieved rather than shocked. The Ladies of Llangollen, as they came to be known, settled down into comfortable domesticity in Wales and were admired for their enduring romantic friendship. In 1811, two Edinburgh boarding-school mistresses won a celebrated libel case in the House of Lords, against an accusation of improper and criminal conduct. It was alleged the pair had enjoyed vigorous sexual activity in the same bed as one of their pupils. Both cases demonstrate a common attitude towards female intimate relationships at this time. It was almost inconceivable that women of a certain social standing would or could engage in sexual relations. After all, in the words of one of the lawyers acting for the Edinburgh school­teachers: ‘If a woman embraces a woman it infers nothing.'⁶⁷ Indeed, one member of the House of Lords who brought judgement on the Edinburgh case, criticised the implication by the prosecution that ‘wherever two young women form an intimacy together, and that intimacy ripens into friendship, if ever they venture to share the same bed, that becomes proof of guilt.' After all, women often shared beds; it was a necessary and standard practice, just as men shared beds.

Improvements in women’s access to education and employment from mid-century onwards allowed some women a degree of economic independ­ence, and it has been suggested that these circumstances facilitated same-sex relationships between women who no longer needed to marry. Although there may be some truth in this, the focus on the material incentives behind the setting up of all-female households privileges middle-class educated women — those who ‘live by their brains’ — over working-class women who, it is assumed, could not engage in such relationships on account of their con­tinued dependence. Surviving sources such as diaries and letters inevitably create a bias in our knowledge about such women and create the impres­sion that only educated, literary women were able to live their passion. The correspondence of Bettina von Arnim (1785—1859) and Karoline von Gunderode in 1805—6, illustrates this combination of intellect and emotion. When Bettina writes, ‘Thou shinest on me with thy intellect, thou Muse’ and ‘If thou wert not, what would the whole world be to me?’, we gain an insight into a relationship which thrived on the women’s mutual passion for learning as well as love for one another.⁶⁹ There are many examples of similar partner­ships, like those between the Irish writer Edith Somerville (1858—1949) and Violet Martin (1862—1915) who collaborated as writers and as feminists, and the French artist Rosa Bonheur (1822—99) and the inventor Nathalie Micas, whose relationship was not unlike that of a heterosexual marriage with Nathalie fulfilling the role of the supportive wife to Rosa the artist, so that she might be spared ‘the material cares of the household, the daily worries of existence’.⁷⁰ Clearly such women benefited from their privileged position. They could afford not to marry (although one should not under­estimate the moral and social pressures to succumb to the married state), they were literate and learned and therefore may have been able to resist the pressures to conform.

What changed this relatively benign situation for women in same-sex rela­tionships, whether romantic or sexual, was the invention of a new language to describe same-sex love. The science of sexology, pioneered and popu­larised by writers such as the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825—95), the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840—1902) and, most influential, the sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis (1859—1939), applied a medico-scientific approach to what was formerly a religious or moral issue. The turn of the century was a time when sexuality and human relationships were being hotly debated in intellectual circles, and scientific knowledge bore considerable weight. What became known as sexual inversion — in Ellis' words ‘sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex'⁷¹ — both ‘morbidified' and pathologised women's romantic friend­ships, and allowed women to identify themselves as lesbians.⁷² For some women, their identification as an ‘invert' was not necessarily a legitimation of sexual desire for another woman; indeed, the sexologists' continued resist­ance to a female active sexuality could be seen as limiting the identity of lesbians who did not regard themselves as ‘mannish' (since, according to Ellis, only the masculine female invert would take the initiative). Ellis's case study, Miss H, now presumed to be based on his wife Edith Lees Ellis, is a singular example of such an invert-type whom he describes as engaging in physical, erotic sex: ‘they used to touch and kiss each other tenderly (especially on the mons veneris)... they each experienced a strong, pleasurable feeling in doing this.'⁷³ Other women, perhaps benefiting from the feminist campaign to recognise sex as something women might own and even enjoy, were more willing to recognise the physical joys of sex, thus confounding those men for whom lesbian sex was merely kissing and cuddling.⁷⁴ Lesbians themselves, often uncomfortable with the language of the sexologists, devel­oped their own slang vocabulary.

The emergence of a lesbian subculture in the 1890s, primarily in the cosmopolitan cities, suggests that a confident group of women had benefited from the change in discourse. In liberal, and some would say risque, Paris at the end of the century, lesbianism was something ‘all the noteworthy women' were doing according to one salon hostess.⁷⁶ The novelist Collette (1873—1954) for a time lived with a cross-dressing woman in the Parisian lesbian quarter and described the ambience there in her 1932 fictionalised memoir The Pure and the Unpure. A lesbian bar in Montmartre was portrayed as a comforting space ‘that welcomed these uneasy women, haunted by their own solitude'.⁷⁷ Similarly, in German cities it was said there was a lively lesbian community centring upon bars, cafes, dances and the aesthetic world. Lesbianism was also said to be fashionable in St Petersburg before the revolution. Yet, it was still illegal for a woman to dress as a man in France, and working-class lesbians were routinely identified as whores. Some were even imprisoned or treated for hysteria. The reality of the lesbian lifestyle was a far cry from the fantasies imagined by male writers and artists who tended to focus on the erotic and exotic at the expense of tenderness, companionship and love.

The women's movement in general did not explicitly take up the rights of lesbians. Even Madeleine Pelletier, who dressed like a man and who admitted she would have liked a girlfriend, was unable to speak publicly about female same-sex relations.⁷⁸ Only in Germany did the League for the Protection of Motherhood stand up for the rights of lesbians when the German govern­ment threatened to outlaw female sexual relations in 1911.