The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
time at which he was writing did have the characteristics he
describes. None the less it is likely that the majority of women
who loved women at that time, when there was a poorly
developed lesbian sub-culture, did not. The masculine stereotype
which provided a model for later generations of lesbians was
not in wide circulation. Ellis included within his six case studies
of lesbians, women who had had no overt sexual contact with
other women, who were in fact involved in ‘passionate
friendships’ which, as we have seen, were not previously
considered bizarre or out of the common experience of women.
He also included in the case studies his wife, Edith Lee Ellis,
who does not seem from other descrip tions, to have matched
up to his stereotype.
Pseudohomosexuality
As a counterpart to the ‘butch’ masculine stereotype of the
lesbian which the sexologists were creating, they provided a
model for the ‘pseudohomosexual’. They made it clear that
their concern about the pseudohomosexual stemmed from what
they saw as the spread of homosexuality within the feminist
movement. Edward Carpenter expressed in 1897 his alarm at
the phenomenon of lesbianism within the women’s movement,
combined with a quite obvious horror at the extent to which
feminists were abandoning the constraints of the feminine sex
role:
[feminists were] naturally drawn from those in whom the
sexual instinct is not preponderant. Such women do not
altogether represent their sex; some are rather mannish in
temperament; some are ‘homogenic’, that is inclined to
attachments to their own sex rather than the opposite sex;
such women are ultra-rationalising and brain-cultured; to
many, children are more or less a bore; to others, man’s sexpassion
is a mere impertinence, which they do not
understand, and whose place they consequently misjudge. It
would not do to say that the majority of the new movement
are out of line, but there is no doubt that a large number are;
and the course of their progress will be correspondingly
curvilinear. 11
Edward Carpenter, like Havelock Ellis, is currently seen as a
founding father of sexual enlightenment, and as a male
homosexual who, in writing about men’s love for each other
positively, was an inspiration to the burgeoning male homosexual
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