The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
It is possible to infer from the way in which Browne writes
about passionate friendships between women that her
sympathetic knowledge comes from her own experience. If
Browne did have such relationships and felt it necessary to
repudiate them in the light of the stigmatising of lesbianism
and the promotion of the heterosexual imperative by male
sexologists such as Ellis, this would explain the extravagance
of her anti-lesbianism. She was determined that women should
have ‘real’ love only for men and her own possible guilt and
ambivalence might have led her to overcompensate in favour
of men:
Careful observation and many confidences from members of
my own sex, have convinced me that our maintenance of
outworn traditions is manufacturing habitual auto-erotists
and perverts, out of women who would instinctively prefer
the love of a man, who would bring them sympathy and
comprehension as well as desire. I repudiate all wish to
depreciate or slight the love-life of the real homosexual; but
it cannot be advisable to force the growth of that habit in
heterosexual people. 36
She backs up her assertion that women require men with a list
of the dreadful physical consequences which will befall them if
they are independent:
I would even say that after twenty-five, the woman who has
neither husband nor lover and is not under-vitalised and
sexually deficient, is suffering mentally and bodily—often
without knowing why she suffers; nervous, irritated, anaemic,
always tired, or ruthlessly fussing over trifles; or else she has
other consolations, which make her so-called ‘chastity’ a
pernicious sham. 37
Stella Browne remained interested in lesbianism after the war.
In 1924 she presented a paper to the British Society for the
Study of Sex Psychology entitled ‘Studies in Feminine Inversion’.
This fascinating paper tends to confirm that Browne had
experience of homosexuality. She explains that her case studies
‘would probably be much more illuminating had they been
recorded by an observer who was herself entirely or
predominantly homosexual’. 38 The careful wording here leaves
plenty of room for Browne to see herself as at least partly
homosexual. She describes the five cases, four single and one
couple, as well-known to her, and since she did not have clients
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