In the mid-nineteenth century, a few working-class women who “passed” as men in order not only to seek employment but also in some instances to pursue romantic relationships with other women came to the attention of authorities. Stories appeared in newspapers about cross-dressing lesbian women such as “Bill” in Missouri who became the secretary of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. One report read: “She drank…she swore, she courted girls, she worked hard as her fellows, she fished and camped, she even chewed tobacco.”3 As it was virtually unheard of for women to wear trousers, especially in urban environments, almost nobody suspected the identity of an androgynous woman dressed as a man. Not all of these passing women were lesbians; some were seeking equality with men and freedom from raising children. Performing men’s work for men’s wages, owning property, holding bank accounts in their own names, and voting were among the many benefits these women accessed that were typically available to men only. But a fair number of these passing women did get married to other women, occasionally more than once, as newspaper headlines of the day announced: “A Gay Deceiver of the Feminine Gender,” “Death Proves ‘Married Man’ a Woman,” and “Poses, Undetected, 60 Years as a Man.”4 Union Army doctors recorded at least four hundred women who served surreptitiously as men during the Civil War.5
It was not until the 1880s, when sexual relationships between women in the United States were more openly acknowledged, that they were repressed. Laws against “perversion” and “congenital inversion” were applied to women as well as men for the first time. In Britain, though, lesbianism was left out of the criminal code because Victorian prudery dictated that women had no desire for sex, and legal authorities feared that including sanctions against women having sex with others of their gender would actually promote homosexuality among them. Lord Desart, who had been the director of public prosecutions when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy, said this about including lesbianism in the 1921 criminal code: “You are going to tell the whole world that there is such an offense, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it. I think it is a very great mischief.”6
For American women of the middle class, access to higher education provided the first opportunity to break free from their families and experience life surrounded by other young single women, especially for those attending all-female institutions. Between 1880 and 1900, 50 percent of college women remained single, as opposed to 10 percent of non-student women their age.7 For those college graduates who sought professional careers, which usually meant eschewing marriage, the phenomenon of cohabitating “spinsters” or “Boston marriages” developed. These same-sex relationships, often referred to at the time as “romantic friendships,” were not always sexual, but letters, novels, and occasionally even shared beds indicate they often were. The statistics that sexologist Alfred Kinsey gathered among women born in the late nineteenth century show that 12 percent of them had had orgasms from sexual contact with another woman.8
However, some of these women, including radicals like Emma Goldman, didn’t always perceive their intimate relationships with other women as lesbian relationships. Despite erotic correspondence between Goldman and Almeda Sperry, a woman with whom she’d reputedly had a sexual affair, Goldman expressed the common notion that lesbians were man-haters, and since she was not antagonistic toward men she didn’t categorize herself that way. In one letter, Goldman expressed her dismay about a woman friend who ran off with another woman: “Really, the Lesbians are a crazy lot. Their antagonism to the male is almost a disease with them. I simply can’t bear such narrowness.” 9 What’s striking is that this negative perception of lesbians was echoed by a woman who campaigned on behalf of gays and lesbians and who denounced all legal punishment against homosexuality.
The number of women entering the U.S. labor force between 1870 and 1900 tripled from 1.8 million to 5.3 million, double the rate of increase of women in the population overall.10 For many of these women leaving their families in rural areas for urban industrial centers, it was the first time they would have an opportunity to live independently, and often they shared housing to save costs. Not all or even most of them experimented with lesbian sex, but anecdotal accounts from some of these women along with the popularity of novels and proliferation of articles about female “inverts” and their “disorders,” reveal that lesbianism was on the rise. Prior to 1895, only one article on lesbianism existed in the Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, which covered the previous 150 years. By 1916, there were nearly 100 books and 566 articles covering women’s sexual “perversions.”11 With social mores hovering between Victorian sexual stultification and the urban lesbian chic of the roaring twenties, early twentieth-century lesbians were construed as gender-bending and even hypersexualized. As Faderman explains, “Lesbianism and masculinity became so closely tied in the public imagination that it was believed that only a masculine woman could be the genuine article.”12
As industry grew, so did the gap between the lives of the wealthy classes and the impoverished working class. In the late nineteenth century, upper-and middle-class men often sought out casual encounters with younger working-class men whom, they believed, were indifferent to anti-homosexual mores. Aside from bourgeois prejudice, this belief was also based on the real-life conditions of working-class people, who were crowded into one-room tenements and slums where middle-class social rules against sexual promiscuity and alternative sexual activities often did not apply.
The bourgeois family and its moral codes of sexual control and hard work held the upper classes to strict rules of conduct—at least outwardly. They believed that sexual purity among women was essential for them to carry out their domestic roles as teachers and disciplinarians of their children, and sexual control among men allowed them to be successful in business. Men were allowed their occasional discreet trysts, unlike women, but stepping over the line was harshly punished. Oscar Wilde, whose writings were widely read and respected by the middle class, may not have been convicted if he hadn’t publicly flaunted his sexual activities with much younger men, amid loud outcries over the corruption of youth and the importance of the family to the maintenance of the British Empire. Lust and sexual perversion were cited by social-purity advocates as enemies of the empire. “Rome fell; other nations have fallen; and if England falls it will be this sin, and her unbelief in God, that will have been her ruin,” wrote one advocate of sexual purity.13
New patterns of living, however, defied the puritanical calls to abstain from homosexuality. Gays and lesbians invented ways of meeting, and by the early twentieth century virtually every major American and European city—and some small towns—had bars or public places where gays could find one another. Berlin was the global center of a gay subculture, with hundreds of bars and cafés that catered to a largely homosexual clientele until the early thirties rise of the Nazis that laid waste to gay lives and culture. The revolutionary legacy of France made it the only industrial country without laws against homosexuality, and Paris became a magnet for expatriate American lesbian literary figures fleeing repression. Riverside Drive and the Bowery in New York City, Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., YMCAs and public bathhouses in St. Louis and Chicago all served as gathering spots and cruising spaces for gays. Poet Walt Whitman, the most famous nineteenth-century American homosexual, called Manhattan the “city of orgies, walks and joys” and bragged of New York’s “frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love.”14
Popular songs among Blacks in the 1920s and 1930s with lesbian and gay themes and titles such as “Sissy Man Blues” and “Fairey Blues” provide evidence of an African-American gay community.15 Black lesbian butch/femme couples even married in large wedding ceremonies in Harlem during the 1920s. By altering the first name of the butch lesbian, these couples actually obtained legal licenses from the city.16 Writer Sherwood Anderson popularized these post–First World War marriages in his collection of short stories, Winesburg,