The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
their peers interpreted their relationship as lesbian and
ostracised them. 7
In contemporary society women are only expected to feel a
controlled and non-physical level of fondness for their women
friends and to wonder if they are ‘lesbian’ if they feel more.
Why and how did this change occur?
Faderman explains that women’s same-sex friendships came
to be seen as a threat in the late nineteenth century as the women’s
movement developed to challenge men’s dominance and new
social and economic forces presented middle-class women with
the possibility of choosing not to marry and be dependent on
men. She sees the sexologists who classified and categorised
female homosexuality, including within it all passionate
friendships, as having played a major role in discouraging love
between women for all those who did not want to adopt the
label of homosexuality. Another American feminist historian,
Nancy Sahli, shows how the outlawing of women’s friendships
was put into operation. 8 In American women’s colleges up until
the late nineteenth century, the practice of ‘smashing’, in which
young women would pursue their beloveds with gifts and
declarations until their feelings were returned and they were
‘smashed’ was perfectly acceptable. These friendships were
gradually outlawed and rendered suspicious by college heads
who were often living with women they loved in passionate
unions themselves. By the 1890s it was seen as necessary to
root out these friendships as unhealthy practices.
Lesbianism
As part of their self-imposed task of categorising varieties of
human sexual behaviour, the sexologists of the late nineteenth
century set about the ‘scientific’ description of lesbianism. Their
description has had a momentous effect on the ways in which
we, as women, have seen ourselves and all our relationships
with other women up until the present. They codified as
‘scientific’ wisdom current myths about lesbian sexual practice,
a stereotype of the lesbian and the ‘pseudohomosexual’ woman,
categorising women’s passionate friendships as female
homosexuality and offered explanations for the phenomenon.
Male writers of gay history have tended to see their work as
sympathetic and helpful to the development of a homosexual
rights movement since they explained male homosexuality in
terms of innateness or used psychoanalytic explanations which
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