The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
dependence of women on sexual intercourse for their physical
health for want of any more cogent arguments against
lesbianism. Women were asked to have faith and carry on with
heterosexuality.
The writings of Stella Browne and Marie Stopes, since they
are by women at a time when the vast majority of literature
prescribing how women should relate to men was by men, could
be seen as validating the prescription of the sexologists. Stopes
and Browne could be regarded as promoting what women
‘really’ wanted, what was ‘really’ in women’s interests. This
cannot be a realistic picture. They were writing at a time which
was a watershed in the history of the construction of women’s
sexuality. It was a time when the male sexologists were calling
upon women to repudiate their love for each other and pour
their energies into men. Browne and Stopes form part of a
generation of women who had to twist themselves into knots by
rejecting their own experience of loving women. From this time
on the sex reformers would have had a less difficult task. In
later generations women’s love for women would not appear as
a conceivable choice, which they would then have to reject.
Women’s friendships and lesbianism in British novels in the
1920s
As with any other set of ideas, there seems to have been a gap
between the promotion of sexological theories on lesbianism
and their filtering across to a more general readership. Some
1920s novels by women indicate that this was the period in
which these ideas gained public acceptance. What we see in
1920s novels is a process by which passionate friendship between
women, which was still being written about as unexceptional
in the early 1920s is transformed by the intrusion of the lesbian
stereotype. Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924) and Winifred
Holtby’s The Crowded Street (1924) have as their theme the
plight of middleclass unmarried daughters who seek to escape
the stifling atmosphere of the family and find some means of
personal fulfilment. In both books the spinster heroines engage
in passionate friendships with other women. The most powerful
and lengthy of such relationships is that between Joan and
Elizabeth described in The Unlit Lamp. The relationship
remained unfulfilled in terms of commitment because, despite
Elizabeth’s efforts, she cannot separate Joan from her mother in
order to live with her. The relationship is described as one of
intense emotional attachment, which includes physical caresses.
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