The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
all other’, betake themselves to a joint flat, to maintain which
their own industries should furnish the means, was an idea
which would have consigned the holder of it to Bedlam. For
one thing, there were no flats, and if there had been, for any
female thing under fifty to occupy one without a chaperon
would have condemned her to utter ostracism. 22
A section in Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp in which she describes
a circle of women engaged in passionate friendships with each
other living in rooms in London in the 1890s, suggests that
opportunities for women to live together existed at that time.
We have seen in the chapter on spinsters that the number of
women in excess of men in the population was steadily rising
in the last half of the nineteenth century. When this ‘surplus’ of
women had the possibility of living and working outside the
structures of heterosexuality they became a threat to the
maintenance of men’s control. This threat was particularly
serious when independent women were engaged in passionate
friendships with each other and were in a position to form a
strong female network which could bond against men. It was
this last danger that the development of a strong feminist
movement appeared to be creating in the late nineteenth century.
It is clear from the writings of the sexologists that they were far
from enthusiastic about feminism, and particularly its lesbian
manifestations. An attack upon passionate emotional
involvement between women served to undermine the link
between them and dilute their potential strength. As we have
seen in the earlier part of this chapter, American historians of
women’s friendships have suggested that it was precisely
women’s lack of any possibility of an independent life which
made their passionate friendships acceptable as no threat to the
heterosexual structure in the early nineteenth century.
Explanations for lesbianism
Two explanations for homosexuality were advanced in the period.
One form of explanation was to attribute homosexuality to a
hereditary, unchangeable cause. Havelock Ellis saw homosexuality
as innate, Krafft-Ebing cited a hereditary taint and Edward
Carpenter favoured the theory of a third or intermediate sex. The
other form of explanation, developed in the work of the
psychoanalysts from Freud onwards, was to see homosexuality
as a result of childhood trauma. Lillian Faderman explains how
the first form of explanation was more attractive to lesbians in
112