Free Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman Page A

term; there was only the rare woman who behaved immorally, who was thought to live far outside the pale of decent womanhood. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the category of the lesbian—or the female sexual invert—was formulated. Once she was widely recognized as an entity, however, relationships such as the one Bryant described took on an entirely different meaning—not only as viewed by society, but also as viewed by the two women who were involved. They now had a set of concepts and questions (which were uncomfortable to many of them) by which they had to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days.
    Throughout much of the twentieth century those concepts and questions about the “true meaning” of a woman’s love for other females were inescapable and demanded responses and justifications such as would have been undreamt of before. Unlike her earlier counterparts, through most of our century a woman who found herself passionately attached to another female was usually forced to react in one of four ways:
     
    1). She could see her own same-sex attachment as having nothing to do with attachments between “real lesbians,” since the sexologists who first identified lesbianism and brought the phenomenon to public attention said that lesbians were abnormal or sick, “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and she knew that she was not. Whether or not her relationship was sexual was insignificant. What was significant was that she could not—or she refused to—recognize her love for another woman in the sexologists’ descriptions of lesbianism.
    2). She could become so fearful of her feelings toward other women, which were now seen as unnatural, that she would force herself to repress them altogether, to deny even to herself that she was capable of passionate attachment to another female. She would retrain her psyche, or society would help her do it, so that heteroaffectionality alone would be attractive to her, and even the mere notion of physical or emotional attachment between females, such as her grandmothers and their ancestors enjoyed as a matter of course, would be utterly repulsive to her.
    3). She could become so fearful, not of her own emotions but of her community’s reaction to them, that she would spend her whole life in hiding (“in the closet,” as that state came to be described in the mid-twentieth century), leading a double life, pretending to the world—to everyone but her female friend—that she was a stranger to the feelings that in fact claimed the better part of her emotional life.
    4). She could accept the definitions of love between women that had been formulated by the sexologists and define herself as a lesbian. While such definitions would set her apart from the rest of womankind (even apart from other females who felt no differently emotionally and sometimes even physically about women than she did), they would also privilege her: acceptance would mean that she could live her attachment to women for the rest of her life, without having to acknowledge that a heterosexual relationship had precedence over her same-sex love; it would mean that she could—in fact, must —seek ways to become an economically and socially independent human being, since she could not rely on a male to support and defend her; and it would mean that she was free to seek out other women who also accepted such an identity and to form a lesbian subculture, such as could not have existed before love between women was defined as abnormal and unusual.
     
    For most women, who were of course socialized not to challenge their culture’s ideology about acceptable behavior, with the turn of the century began not only the death knell of romantic friendship (which might have been too simple to survive in our complex times anyway), but it was also the beginning of a lengthy period of general closing off of most affectional possibilities