The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
rights movement. In the light of his reputation as a homosexual
revolutionary, as well as a friend to feminism, such comments
on lesbians and feminists strike a rather discordant note. What
they suggest, like the rest of his writings, is that his view of
women’s emancipation was that women should have equal rights
so long as they remained different, feminine and passionately
attached to men. The radical socialist circles in which Carpenter
and Ellis moved in the 1890s, such as the ‘Fellowship of the
New Life’, seem to have had a vision of womanhood similar to
that of the ‘emancipated’, long-skirted and beaded ‘hippy chick’
of the late 1960s, for whom men were still supposed to be the
pivot of existence.
Iwan Bloch is one of the three sexologists who, together with
August Forel and Havelock Ellis, were pinpointed at the 1929
Sex Reform Congress in London as the founding fathers of
sexology. 12 Bloch connects quite clearly the burgeoning of
lesbianism in the women’s movement and the ‘problem’ of
‘pseudohomosexuality’:
there is no doubt that in the ‘women’s movement’—that is,
in the movement directed towards the acquirement by women
of all the attainments of masculine culture—homosexual
women have played a notable part. Indeed according to one
author, the ‘Women’s Question’ is mainly the question
regarding the destiny of virile homosexual women…. For
the diffusion of pseudohomosexuality the Women’s Movement
is of great importance, as we shall see later. 13
The pseudohomosexual was characterised as a woman who
did not necessarily fit the masculine stereotype, had been seduced
by a ‘real homosexual’ and led away from a natural
heterosexuality, to which it was hoped that she would return.
Real homosexuality was seen to be innate, and
pseudohomosexuality a temporary divergence. Ellis described
pseudohomosexuality as a ‘spurious imitation’:
These unquestionable influences of modern movements cannot
directly cause sexual inversion, but they develop the germs
of it, and they probably cause a spurious imitation. This
spurious imitation is due to the fact that the congenital
anomaly occurs with special frequency in women of high
intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence
others. 14
The pseudohomosexual is shown to be not just easily led but
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