The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
and was not in the medical profession, it is tempting to conclude
that these women were her friends or at least close acquaintances.
She assumed that most of her subjects did not engage in
genital sexual expression or see themselves as homosexual.
The evidence she advanced for these women’s homosexuality
was in some cases bizarre and did not include any suggestion
of emotional let alone physical feelings for women. Case D is
labelled homosexual because of her appearance and habits and
because she was fond of children. She is described as follows:
A decided turn for carpentry, mechanics and executive manual
work. Not tall; slim, boyish figure; very hard, strong muscles,
singularly impassive face, with big magnetic eyes. The
dominating tendency is very strong here, and is not held in
leash by a high standard of either delicacy or principle. 39
Her fondness for children which one might have expected to be
used to prove her maternalism and absence of homosexuality, is
here used, rather surprisingly, to demonstrate that she is
homosexual:
Is professionally associated with children and young girls,
and shows her innate homosexual tendency by excess of petting
and spoiling, and intense jealousy of any other person’s contact
with, or interest in the children. I do not definitely know if
there is any physical expression of her feelings, beyond the
kissing and embracing which is normal, and even, in some
cases conventional, between women or between women and
children. But the emotional tone is quite unmistakable; will
rave for hours over some ‘lovely kiddy’, and injure the children’s
own best interests, as well as the working of the establishment,
by unreasonable and unfair indulgence. 40
Browne seems here to be confusing lesbians with child molesters.
Browne was prepared to go further than any other writers of
her time in prescribing that these women should engage in overt
sexual expression with other women. But what looks at first
sight like a radical and progressive suggestion, turns out on
examination to be based on Browne’s horror of feminists,
particularly their lack of enthusiasm for heterosexual sex, and
on her fear that lack of genital sex caused women to be hostile
to men. She wrote of the dangers of repression thus:
No one who has observed the repressed inverted impulse
flaring into sex-antagonism, or masked as the devotion of
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