For ‘advanced’ women the search for a new language of sexuality was part of a wider struggle for a self-defined cultural space. Between 1885 and 1889, the female members of the Men and Women Club in London found themselves confronted by a group of radical men, who had adapted Darwinian evolutionary theories in an abstract and distanced manner to the discussion of sexual questions. The men set the terms of debate. One woman member, Maria Sharpe, reflected that she and the other women ‘even in general discussion . . . had to learn a partially new language before they could make themselves intelligible’.41 While the women in the club expressed frustration in curbing their subjectivity, they also discovered that ‘objectivity’ could provide a useful cover for personal feelings. Yet Sharpe still felt embarrassed when she returned the books she was reading on prostitution in the British Museum.
The free thinkers and anarchists in the US created a similarly hard-won space for the study and discussion of sexuality. In 1891 Lizzie Holmes affirmed the value of the voice Lucifer gave to radical women, and upheld women’s own experiences against received knowledge:
It is the mouthpiece, almost the only mouthpiece in the world, of every poor, suffering, defrauded, subjugated woman. Many know they suffer, and cry out in their misery, though not in the most grammatical of sentences. . . . A simple woman may know nothing of biology, psychology, or of the evolution of the human race, but she knows when she is forced into a relation disagreeable or painful to her. Let her express her pain; the scientists may afterwards tell why she suffers, and what are the remedies, if they can.42
The creation of an explicitly female counter-cultural space in which to articulate wants and desires continued to preoccupy early twentieth-century women writers seeking to understand and alter sexual customs and behaviour. The editor of the Freewoman, Dora Marsden, deplored ‘the failure of language’ to express a new sexual awareness among women.43 She spoke for a group of rebel feminists who believed in tackling sex head-on, rejecting what she dubbed ‘the great soporifics – comfort and protection.’ Echoing the heroic individualism of the anarchists, she declared that free women would stand alone, convinced of their own strength, and claim all experience. For Marsden this could involve being ‘content to seize the “love” in passing, to suffer the long strains of effort and to bear the agony of producing creative work’. She believed that through asserting their power as individuals, women would learn ‘that their own freedom will consist in appraising their own worth, in setting up their own standards and living up to them’.44 Similar ideas circulated in Greenwich Village where Mabel Dodge Luhan, too, was demanding the right ‘to encompass all experience’.45
This mixture of aggressive will and sexual appetite appalled some women. Olive Schreiner complained to Havelock Ellis that the Freewoman ‘ought to be called the Licentious Male . . . It is the tone of the brutal self-indulgent selfish male.’46 Conflict erupted on the Freewoman’s letters page with a feminist, Kathlyn Oliver, expressing the view that ‘freewomen’ would not be ‘slaves of our lower appetites’.47 When a ‘New Subscriber’ wrote in defending women’s right to sexual experience, Oliver assumed the correspondent to be male. But it was the Canadian birth control campaigner, Stella Browne, quoting Havelock Ellis on ‘auto-eroticism’.48
Ellis’s diligent observation documented a wide range of sexual practices and wants – including his wife Edith’s attraction to women. Ellis’s method of case studies, combined with his stance as a scientific observer, established an idiom for talking about sex. Instead of appealing to either morality or an ideal of free love, he had devised a standpoint from which he could catalogue and consider what his subjects declared as their wants. The study of sex psychology created a platform of ‘objectivity’ which could provide a reference point beyond subjectivity and be a means of comprehending feelings and behaviour which did not ‘fit’. However, in creating a new terrain for sexual expression he, along with other sex psychologists, also defined and constrained women’s varied experiences and desires; both by imposing their own categories and by the ponderous scientific terminology which pinned down individuals according to type, rather in the manner of nineteenth-century natural science’s specimens of butterflies. Nevertheless, Ellis’s assumption of the role of the distanced expert gave a new, secular, scholarly significance to personal testimony. He helped to establish a conduit for sexual observation which broke with the confessional and the peep show: observation of sexual feelings and behaviour was transmuted into a field of study. An important space had been opened.
Even Ellis had found that his writing on homosexuality and lesbianism could be castigated as ‘obscene’, and any public assertion of same-sex desire remained well-nigh impossible. Instead women tentatively expressed their emotions in private correspondence. Edith Ellis, an anonymous witness in her husband’s volume on ‘inversion’, confided in the socialist and sexual radical Edward Carpenter, whose openly lived homosexuality gave him a kind of gender neutrality. Following the death of her lover, Lily, in 1905, Edith Ellis wondered why she was getting headaches after years without them, and concluded that ‘the need of the lusts of the flesh – like mine – was the reason.’49
Edith Ellis (Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Archives)
Women communicated their own responses to sympathetic male friends, explicitly distinguishing those who evinced a capacity to observe and listen, and they made a selective use of the writings of male sexologists in relation to their own perceptions. When in 1915 Stella Browne gave a paper at the newly formed British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology on ‘The Sexual Variety and Variability among Women’, she explained carefully:
I have tried to say nothing in this paper, that was not known to me, either through my own experience, or the observation and testimony of persons I know well. My conclusions are based on life, not on books, though I have been confirmed in my personal opinions and conclusions by some of the greatest psychologists, especially Dr Havelock Ellis, whose immense research is fused and illuminated by an inspired intuition.50
Stressing the need to relate experience and theory, Browne also explicitly addressed the need for women to devise a new discourse. ‘The realities of women’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary. While her brother has often learned all the slang of the street before adolescence, the conventional “decently brought-up” girl, of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences.’51
Like the rebel free lovers, Browne challenged the idea that women did not possess a ‘sex impulse’, arguing instead that women’s desires were diverse, differing not only between individuals but in the same individual over time. She did not believe their varied sexual needs could be expressed or satisfied within either patriarchal marriage or its corollary, prostitution. While Browne, the modern woman, absorbed earlier arguments from the sex-radical tradition, she was well read in contemporary European sexual theory, and familiar with the new philosophic trends which stressed energy and flux. Like her counterparts in Greenwich Village, she was aware of the new context psychoanalysis was creating for personal testimony.