The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
daughter or cousin, or the solicitude of teacher or nurse, or
perverted into the cheap, malignant cant of conventional
moral indignation, can deny its force. 41
Suffragists were singled out for attack. ‘I am sure that much of
the towering spiritual arrogance which is found, e.g. in many
high places in the Suffrage movement…is really unconscious
inversion.’ 42 She thought that it was repressed inversion which
fuelled feminism, and that the women’s feminist zeal would be
undermined if they had sexually fulfilling relationships with
each other.
Browne remained seriously confused about lesbianism. At
one point in the article she writes of ‘inverted impulse’: ‘Let us
recognise this force, as frankly as we recognise and reverence
the love between men and women.’ In the neighbouring
paragraph she rails against the social pressures, i.e. the
‘repression and degradation of the normal erotic impulse’ which
forced women of ‘strong passions and fine brains’ into
relationships with women which were ‘makeshifts and essentially
substitutes, which cannot replace the vital contact, mental and
bodily, with congenial men’. 43 It seems that Browne was in a
real agony of mind. She was unable to condemn love affairs
between women, perhaps because she was one of the women of
‘fine brains’ who were forced into them, but she saw them as
really inferior to heterosexuality. She could only justify such
relationships on the grounds that genital contact was involved
so that they might serve to undermine the aggressive feminism
which she saw as based on women’s frigidity.
Marie Stopes was a fervent missionary in the cause of
heterosexual love and sex. Her biographer, Ruth Hall, shows
her importance, by pointing out that her most famous book
Married Love was accorded sixteenth place out of twenty-five
in a list of the most influential books of the previous fifty years
by a group of American academics in 1935. It was placed just
behind Das Kapital and Ellis’s Psychology of Sex but ahead of
Einstein’s Relativity, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and
Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Stopes invested heterosexual sex and
specifically sexual intercourse, with mystical, religious
exultation in a book she wrote when she had not even
experienced sexual intercourse herself (Married Love). One might
well be tempted to think that the lady did protest too much.
Ruth Hall points out that Marie was indifferent to men and
formed intense emotional relations with women until well into
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