Normal Women, page 52
Some single women used the absence of a husband as the key to leave the separate sphere, to live alone in their own lodgings, pursuing careers that were slowly opening on the fringes of the professions, or working in family businesses, or to live together in the women-only educational schools and colleges, or as companions and friends or lovers. Many took their freedoms and had adventurous lives identifying themselves as ‘new women’ by more practical clothing.
More than half of the women in feminist organisations were unmarried, or married late in life, inspired by the example of other happy single women, and drawn to feminist organisations by a wish to live and work with women.147 Those that worked on causes around male violence, the double sexual standard, the breadwinner wage and the campaign for the vote, mostly without support from men, inevitably radicalised to become ‘anti-man’ – as they were accused. More moderate single women looked at the disadvantages of marriage even after the 1850s reforms, and decided against or deferred it till later in life. One of the Langham Place activists, Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925), who ran the Victoria Press and edited The English Woman’s Journal, married at 38 years old, but refused an earlier suitor. She wrote in her diary of 1859: ‘To live with him and give up in some measure my beloved Emmie and Barbara, to be dependent on that quiet . . . face for my intellectual nutriment . . . To give up as I then must very much; my dear cousin Sam and my dear brother Frank; oh never never. A single woman is so free, so powerful.’148
Women Loving Women
Elite women who made lifetime loving attachments to female partners continued to be well regarded in society and could socialise as a recognised couple without scandal about their sexuality. They kept silent about their private intimacy and generally escaped comment since they were ladies who were expected to lack sexual desire.
Hostile or satirical comment about women loving women actually diminished in the middle of the nineteenth century as it became widely believed that women lacked erotic desires for anyone – especially for each other. From 1830, discussion about sexual intimacy between women was either medicalised or ‘pornified’ – the only descriptions were from doctors or pornographers.149 Some doctors’ descriptions of female sexual activity managed to be both a doom-laden warning and titillation.
In the agreed silence about women’s sexuality with women, many relationships thrived in the 1860s and 1870s, socially accepted as lifetime friendships and were even described as ‘marriages’. Matilda Hays, who was introduced to Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the married partner of the ‘unimpeachable’ actress Charlotte Cushman, went on to make a long-term live-in relationship with Theodosia Dowager Lady Monson.Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), a single woman, lived most of her life with sculptor Mary Lloyd whom she addressed as ‘husband’, ‘wife’ and ‘beloved friend’. Both women described their friendship as ‘marriage’ and were part of a high-status, highly respectable friendship group that included John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone and Charles Darwin, who wrote to the two women as a couple and invited them as a couple to social events.150
Sophia Jex-Blake had a deeply loving relationship with Octavia Hill, the philanthropist, describing her as ‘my dear loving strong child’, and in retirement lived with Dr Margaret Todd, a fellow pioneer doctor and novelist. Jex-Blake saw herself as invulnerable to male attraction, saying of herself: ‘I believe I love women too much ever to love a man.’151
These public relationships were not necessarily privately or secretly sexual. Sophia Jex-Blake’s intense and loving letters to Margaret Todd contain no sexual references. As a doctor, Jex-Blake would have been taught that sexual feelings and practices in women led to mental and physical disease; but she expressed no anxieties about her feelings, nor did she compare herself, or the women she loved, to patients said to be sick with sexuality. She described feelings of intense love but none of sexual arousal, and she showed no doubt or embarrassment about them.152
Edward Carpenter, the poet and ‘sexologist’, rejected the idea of different sorts of love in 1912: ‘No hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment . . . friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love . . . loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of passion.’153
Some relationships were profound experiences. Pioneer sportswoman and commentator Marjorie Pollard killed herself rather than live without her companion May Morton. Marie Correlli, the novelist, had a lifetime partner and biographer in Bertha Vyer. They were a recognised couple. One diarist saw them together at an evening party: ‘They did not dance but spent most of the evening with their arms around each other looking on at the rest.’154
Catherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were childhood friends. When they began to write together, they combined their nicknames into a pseudonym: Michael Field. Publication of joint volumes of poetry and drama proved successful, until it was discovered that Michael Field was two women, then their work fell out of fashion. They wrote: ‘My love and I took hands, and swore against the world, to be poets and lovers evermore.’155
Some women reproduced the old belief that a female husband was the last resort of the woman who could not catch a male one. Maria Richmond wrote to her friend: ‘I sincerely hope, dear Margie, that should you continue single . . . you will, however old you may be, come out and marry me, helping to farm my little estate, and lecture my nephews and nieces.’156
Women, deeply attached to each other, might introduce a friend into their marital home without scandal. No less a wife than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Minnie Benson, had a close woman friend to live with her and her husband and their children, but felt deep guilt.157 She prayed for a spiritual union with her friend and the death of ‘carnal affections’: ‘Once more, and with shame oh Lord, grant that all carnal affections may die in me, and that all things belonging to the spirit may live and grow in me. Lord, look down on Lucy and me and bring to pass the union we have both so blindly each in our own region of mistake continually desired.’158
The husbands and wives who lived openly with an intimate woman friend on the assumption that the friendship was not sexual were deeply disturbed by the ‘Codrington divorce’, when in 1863 Helen Jane Smith Codrington was accused by her divorcing husband of adultery with a fellow officer and others. Her friend, Emily Faithfull (1835–95), a well-known philanthropist who founded the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, with Bessie Rayner, lived with the unhappily married couple and – as was announced in court – the two women slept in the same bed, when Helen Codrington refused to sleep with her husband. The implication, that the women were sexually intimate, and that Helen Codrington was bisexual and promiscuous, persuaded the jury, who gave her husband a divorce. It was a disastrous and shaming process for all three. Helen Codrington never saw her children again and disappeared in disgrace from elite society and from the historical record. Emily Faithfull, publicly humiliated by the suggestion made in court that she was sexually active with her woman friend, was dropped by the Langham Place feminist group, but courageously continued to campaign for women’s rights. Later, she lived with her friend Charlotte Robinson, to whom she willed her property, thanking her for the ‘happiest years’ of her life.159
Some families, alerted by the Codrington divorce, aware of the numbers of women who would not or could not marry, became increasingly wary of daughters who did not conform to the female ideal, sought education or independence, or appeared – as the families said – to be ‘manly’.160 Such girls might attend the new women’s schools, colleges and even universities, where middle- and upper-class like-minded young women could meet each other without interruption from men. Political campaigns for women provided the same opportunities for female friendships that were ‘intense, passionate and committed’.161 Religious organisations that promoted same-sex missions also provided a place where women could meet and unite passionately in service of a cause. Girls born in the 1850s came of age and into independence in a society that allowed more independence and education for women, and some found partners and lovers.162
Kissing, embraces and touching were rarely described, and may have been rare in life, as in letters. Frances Wilder, a young woman, wrote a searingly honest letter to Edward Carpenter for his advice on her sexual desire for women, describing a relationship with another woman that ‘never went further than a handshake’: ‘I was 28 when I again fell in love with a girl about my own age. I made it my business to cultivate her, but soon found that tho’ she was quite friendly and admirable, she cared less for me than I did for her. Often when alone with her, I had a strong desire to caress & fondle her; but I am naturally reserved & restrained and we never advanced further than the formal handshake. I had no sexual desire in connexion with her & I couldn’t quite understand my feelings towards her . . . but my attachment for this girl was quite emotional. I loved to be with her, to hear her talk, even though I seldom agreed with her.’163
Letters, accounts and fiction based on these lives emphasised a passionate, sentimental, not genital love between girls and women, which generated its own slang in words like ‘crush’ and ‘pash’: a shame-free enthusiasm and expression of single-sex love. The genre of fiction termed ‘school novels’ celebrated the passionate attachment of a young woman to an older mentor in a single-sex environment.164 These bonds between women could be described by authors and biographers without shame or self-consciousness. The books are clear that deep and passionate attachments between women were normal and healthy – and non-sexual. There was no shame, and no concealment – the fictional women were confident that they were better women for loving each other.165
These women were reacting against the separate spheres doctrine that had left women without education or opportunity. They saw themselves gaining an adequate education in order to become financially independent women, free from the limitations of their family homes and free from the dominance of men.166
As the new century began, the idea of sexual intimacies between women appeared in the pages of feminist journals like the gloriously named Shafts (1892–6) (no! referencing arrows) and Freewoman (1911–12).167 By this time a greater openness about women’s sexual desires in bohemian, progressive and cosmopolitan circles had created a breach among feminists: some wanted to openly acknowledge sexual interest and desire for men, some felt they had to keep their sexual desires secret as they were only directed to other women, and some continued to feel no desire for men or women.
The term ‘lesbian’ was not used until the twentieth century. Sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) called both homosexuality and lesbianism sexual ‘inversion’, a definition that – although it limited the imagination to only two genders – may have helped some women understand and name their desire for other women, as ‘normal’ womanhood ‘inverted’. But they would have had to be brave women to seek his diagnosis: Ellis believed that a ‘true invert’ came from a family with mental illness. He described one woman, Alice Mitchell, who had cut her lover’s throat, as ‘typical’. ‘Homosexual relationships are also a cause of suicide in women,’ he wrote.168 Ellis himself had an open marriage with writer Edith Lees, who was sexually active with women during their relationship, without murdering anyone.
The word ‘inversion’ or ‘deviant’ started to be widely used among progressive thinkers and theories also spread that there was an ‘intermediate sex’ in which one could be both male and female. Frances Wilder, writing to Edward Carpenter, said: ‘I concluded that I had . . . a dash of the masculine. (I have been told more than once that I have a masculine mind.)’169
Wilder’s letter may be typical of how a young woman who always preferred women to men as friends and companions came to understand her feelings as sexual – once she was able to attach a name, even an invented name, to her feelings. Carpenter wrote of same-sex desire as ‘Urania’ from ancient Greek writings and named those people who loved others of the same sex as ‘urnings’. Wilder wrote to him in the hope of meeting a woman who felt like her. Her letter, among his papers without a note as to whether he replied, is a rare example of the solitary voice of a single woman struggling with her feelings for other women:
I voiced my need in a little pacifist & socialist paper asking if any lonely woman rebel would care to correspond with another.
I had about 16 answers. The first was from a girl or woman – with whom I am at the present time in love – she is rather younger than myself & has all the characteristics which I most admire in women. She is delightfully self-reliant, capable & humorous. It was she who introduced me to your book, and somehow made me realise that I was more closely related to the intermediate sex, than I had hitherto imagined & she also I think (though I haven’t questioned her on the subject) is certainly not a normal female – she is much too nice! When I think of her, I have physical desire, and should love above all things to be able to live with her & be as intimate as it is possible to be & I don’t feel that this desire is at all immoral or degrading. It is not merely or chiefly physical desire – I cannot bear the idea of losing her friendship, even if the physical desire is never gratified & I don’t for a moment expect it will be. I should be intensely grateful if I could just hold her hand and tell her how much I love her. This may look awfully stupid on paper, but it is very real to me. I feel there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her that I could do.
. . . I long more than I can say to love a woman completely and absolutely and to have it returned. The world would say that a physical relationship between two of the same sex is an unspeakable crime.
But after a few weeks consideration I have come to the conclusion that this relationship can never be as degrading as the normal sex relationship can be and usually is. I know it is a big thing to say that the normal sex relationship of men and women is more degrading than the other but it will be true wherever & so long as women are in economic slavery to men & I think you will agree.170
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the greater visibility of women who expressed themselves in masculine ways, in either dress or behaviour, and the numbers of women who openly desired other women increased abuse about female love and open criticism of ‘tommies’, though there was no outright persecution of women who loved women.171 In 1919, a libel trial pursued by Maud Allan, a dancer, brought the question of female sexuality with women to the newspapers and public notice.
Maud Allan (1873–1956), a musician and designer, gained international fame for her dancing and acting, especially her Vision of Salome based on Oscar Wilde’s play, which included the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’. An English independent MP published an article entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, in his own magazine, claiming that Allan was not only a lesbian but also (indeed therefore) a German spy – he alleged that there were 47,000 homosexual men and lesbian women vulnerable to blackmail by German agents. He suggested that the former prime minister’s wife Margot Asquith was Maud Allan’s lover – since Margot Asquith indeed paid for Allan’s London apartment. The dancer sued him for libel, and his defence argued that since she knew the meaning of the word ‘clitoris’, she must be a lesbian. The jury agreed: Allan lost her case; the accusation that she was a lesbian was held to be true.172 The slur that Margot Asquith was friends with a lesbian dancer shadowed her reputation, but there were no subsequent trials. Maud Allan taught dance and lived with her lover Verna Aldrich, moving to Los Angeles and working as a draughtswoman for Macdonald Aviation.
In 1921, a law to criminalise lesbian sexual activity was proposed in the House of Commons. Lesbianism had not been banned before, and the majority of legislators thought it safer not to draw the attention of chaste women to such possibilities. Conservative MP John Moore-Brabazon instructed ignoring lesbians: ‘Leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them. That is the method that has been adopted in England for many hundred years.’ MPs agreed that sex between women was too dreadful to describe and there was total official silence on women loving women even when other sexual acts were openly discussed.173
Female Husbands
Lillias Barker (1895–1960) was born into a middle-class family and volunteered for the Voluntary Aid Detachment of nurses and the Women’s Royal Air Force during the First World War. She married her husband at the end of the war but left him after only six weeks of marriage. She lived with a male lover in Paris, giving birth to two children before the family moved back to an English farm, where she met Elfreda Haward in 1922 and persuaded her that she was a man, injured in the war, only dressing as a woman to oblige her family. The two women moved into the Grand Hotel, Brighton, under the name of Sir Victor Barker and, pressured by Elfreda’s parents, they married – Sir Victor declaring himself a bachelor on the marriage certificate.
Victor acted with Brighton Repertory Company and joined the cricket club as ‘Captain Barker’, but he left Elfreda in 1926. He joined the National Fascisti movement, and lived at its headquarters in London, training recruits and boasting of his past: street-fighting with ‘reds’. He named himself as ‘Colonel’ in 1928, opening a café with his new partner, an actress. When the café went bankrupt he was prosecuted for fraud and this led to his discovery as a woman in Brixton Prison. He was convicted of perjury – false information on the marriage certificate – and sentenced to nine months in the women’s prison at Holloway.174 After his release, he lived as a manservant and was later prosecuted for theft.
Some men lived as ‘male wives’ in single sex couples. From the 1800s, men were recorded identifying as women, forming partnerships, engaging in marriage ceremonies and pregnancy rituals, with one of the couple taking the role of the wife and mother.175
Colonel Victor Barker, one of their many aliases, who was charged with fraud, perjury and later theft
