The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
in the day when no one was there we sat as close together as
we wished, which was very close. We kissed each other as
often as we wanted to kiss each other, which was many times
a day.
The results of this, so far as I can see, have been wholly
good. We love each other warmly, but no temptation to
nastiness has ever come, and I cannot see now that it is at all
likely to come. With custom, the localised physical
excitement has practically disappeared, and I am no longer
obsessed by imagined embraces. The spiritual side of our
affection seems to have grown steadily stronger and more
profitable since the physical side has been allowed to take
its natural place. 20
This woman’s precautions did protect her from being classified
as a true invert in Ellis’s studies. It would be interesting to see
how contemporary lesbians would define this woman today.
The case study demonstrates the effect which sexological
literature was already having upon what was in the 1890s
probably only the very small group of women who had access
to this literature. These women were having to make choices
and instead of living out their love for other women in whatever
ways seemed appropriate to them, they had to decide whether
they were female homosexuals or just friends.
The social and economic background
American lesbian feminist historians suggest that female
homosexuality and all strong emotional expression between
women was stigmatised by the sexologists in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century in response to a concatenation of
social and economic circumstances which offered a real threat
to men’s domination over women. 21 Increased job opportunities
for middle-class women in the steadily growing spheres of
education, after the 1870 Education Act in Britain, in clerical
work and shop work, provided opportunites for women to
maintain themselves independently of men. Changes in social
attitudes allowed for single women to live together outside their
families without being regarded with suspicion. Suitable living
space in the form of rooms and flatlets was becoming available
in the 1890s. Here, a spinster novelist, Rhoda Broughton, looks
back on her youth in the 1850s:
That a couple of girls would find an affinity in each other
which their own family circle did not provide, and ‘forsaking
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