The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
the period, because if offered no possibility of a ‘cure’, and
attributed no blame or individual responsibility. She suggests
that, as a result, those women who were determined to assume a
lesbian identity, based upon the sexological definitions, could do
so and demand public tolerance on the grounds that they could
not help themselves. As an example of this process Faderman
cites Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an impassioned
plea for tolerance in which the heroine is fashioned into a ‘masculine’
homosexual as in Ellis’s definition. In the novel, sexological works
such as that of Ulrichs, which the heroine’s father has read, enable
him to have pity for his teenage daughter’s condition. Radclyffe
Hall makes it clear that she is making a public demand for this
pity in the following last few words of the novel, in which Stephen
addresses her dead father:
You knew! All the time you knew this thing, but because of
your pity you wouldn’t tell me. Oh, Father—and there are
so many of us—thousands of miserable unwanted people
who have no right to love, no right to compassion because
they are maimed, hideously maimed and ugly. God’s cruel;
He let us get flawed in the making. 23
Some historians suggest that explanations in the form of
innateness helped in the formation of a proud self-conscious
homosexual sub-culture in the post-First World War period. But
we must remember that the necessity for this form of ‘defence’
was the result of the sexologists’ work in stigmatising and
isolating the lesbian in the first place.
The lesbian amendment
The changing climate in attitudes to lesbianism is illustrated
by the way in which female homosexuality was almost made
illegal in 1921. An amendment to the bill to make the age of
consent 16 for indecent assault was added in committee and
subsequently passed in the house. The amendment read as
follows: ‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons
shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner
as any such act committed by male persons under section 11 of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885.’ 24
The amendment failed to pass into law because the bill to
which it was attached was an ‘agreed’ bill, meaning that the
government would only find time for it if it was not significantly
altered. The amendment destroyed the bill. The debate gives us
an opportunity to sample the attitudes of MPs towards lesbianism
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