The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
undermined the view of male homosexuality as criminal
behaviour. 9 Female homosexual behaviour was never illegal in
Britain, though there were attempts to make it so in 1921, so
the sexologists’ contribution cannot be seen as positive in that
way.
Havelock Ellis provided a classic stereotype of the female
homosexual in his Sexual Inversion (1897):
When they still retain female garments, these usually show
some traits of masculine simplicity, and there is nearly always
a disdain for the petty feminine artifices of the toilet. Even
when this is not obvious, there are all sorts of instinctive
gestures and habits which may suggest to female
acquaintances the remark that such a person ‘ought to have
been a man’. The brusque energetic movements, the attitude
of the arms, the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the
masculine straightforwardness and sense of honour, and
especially the attitude towards men, free from any suggestion
either of shyness or audacity, will often 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 toleration for cigars.
There is also a dislike and sometimes incapacity for
needlework and other domestic occupations, while there is
some capacity for athletics. 10
The importance of his description is that it classified as
‘homosexual’ precisely those forms of behaviour for which
spinster feminists, the ‘New Women’ of the 1890s were criticised
by antifeminists. In the 1890s some women were trying to escape
the ‘effeminate’ stereotype of woman. These feminists were neatly
slotted into a picture of lesbian women who were really
pseudomen. Using the accusation of lesbianism to subvert
women’s attempts at emancipation is a form of attack with
which women involved in the contemporary wave of feminism
are all too familiar. Ellis’s Sexual Inversion was the first volume
in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Contemporary male
gay historians have seen him as performing a service to male
homosexuals by breaking down the stereotype that they were
effeminate. For women the service he performed was quite the
reverse.
Havelock Ellis was not the first to create such a stereotype
of lesbians, and it could be argued that some lesbians at the
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