F. W. Stella Browne: "Studies in Feminine Inversion," 1923

"Truth and . . . human dignity are incompatible with things as they are"

by Jonathan Ned Katz. Copyright (c) by Jonathan Ned Katz. All rights reserved. Reedited by Katz from Gay American History (1976).

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The publication in the United States of this paper, first read to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, is evidence of the influence of that sexual emancipation discussion group upon a small audience of thoughtful Americans. Browne's, paper appeared in-the New York Journal of Sexology and Psychology in 1925. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, founded in 1914, is called by historian Timothy d’Arch Smith "the only official organization" of English homosexuals in the early part of the twentieth century. Among the pamphlets published by the society were Edward Carpenter's forthright statement on Whitman's homosexuality, Some Friends of Walt Whitman: A Study in Sex-Psychology (19241, and F. W. Stella Browne's Sexual Variety & Variability Among Women and their Bearing upon Social Reconstruction (1915). Margaret Sanger, the pioneering American birth control advocate, and Dr. William Robinson, an American sexologist and reformer, are said to have been in communication with the British society, and an American branch is said to have been planned.

Browne's "Studies in Feminine Inversion," although including much that is extremely negative by current standards, was doubtless perceived in its own time as a fairly advanced Lesbian defense: Browne placer the burden of the Lesbian's .problems on a repressive society and argues for the positive effect of physically expressed female-female affection. Here, Browne's case studies have been deleted; the focus is on her “comments and conclusions!” Browne begins by explaining to her audience that her presentation is based

on only very fragmentary data, and suggestions on a peculiarly obscure subject. They have, however, this validity, that they are the result of close and careful observation, conducted so far as I am consciously aware, without any prejudice, though they would probably be much more illuminating had they been recorded by an observer who was herself entirely or predominantly homo-sexual.

After presenting her case histories, Browne says:

This problem of feminine inversion is very pressing and immediate, taking into consideration the fact that in the near future, for at least a generation, the circumstances of women's lives and work will tend, even more than at present, to favor the frigid [sexually repressed] and next to the frigid, the inverted types. Even at present, the social and affectional side of the invert's nature has often fuller opportunity of satisfaction than the heterosexual woman's, but often at the cost of adequate and definite physical expression. And how decisive for vigor, sanity and serenity of body and mind, for efficiency, for happiness, for the mastery of life, and the understanding of one's fellow-creatures-just this definite physical expression is! The lack of it, "normal” and "abnormal," is at the root of most of what is most trivial and unsatisfactory in women's intellectual output, as well as of their besetting vice of cruelty. How can anyone be finely or greatly creative, if one's supreme moral law is a negation! Not to live, not to do, not even to try to understand.

In the (Lesbian) cases which I have called A. and B., sexual experience along the lines of their own psychic idiosyncrasy would have revealed to them definitely where they stood, and as both are we11 above the average in intelligence, would have been a key to many mysteries of human conduct which are now judged with dainty shrinking from incomprehensible folly and perversity.

I am sure that much of the towering spiritual arrogance which is found, e.g., in many high places in the Suffrage movement, and among the unco' guid generally, is really unconscious inversion.

I think it is perhaps not wholly uncalled-for, to underline very strongly my opinion that the homo-sexual impulse is not in any way superior to the normal; it has a fully equal right to existence and expression, it is no worse, no lower; but no better.

By all means let the invert-let all of us-have as many and varied 'channels of sublimation" as possible; and far more than are at present available. But, to be honest, are we not too much inclined to make "sublimation" an excuse for refusing to tackle fundamentals? The tragedy of the repressed invert is apt to be not only one of emotional frustration, but complete dislocation of mental values.

Moreover, our present social arrangements, founded as they are on the repression and degradation of the normal erotic impulse,' artificially stimulate. Inversion and have thus forfeited all right to condemn it. There is a huge, persistent, indirect pressure on women of strong passions and fine brains to find ad emotional outlet with other women. A woman who is unwilling to accept either marriage-under present laws--or prostitution, and at the same time refuses to limit her sexual life to auto-erotic manifestations, will find she has to struggle against the whole social order for what is nevertheless her most precious personal right. The right sort of woman faces the struggle and counts the cost well worth while; but it is impossible to avoid seeing that she risks the most painful experiences, and spends an incalculable amount of time and energy on things that should be matters of course. Under these conditions, some women who are not innately or predominately homosexual do form more or less explicitly erotic relations with other women, yet these are makeshifts and essentially substitutes, which cannot replace the vital contact, mental and bodily, with congenial men.

No one who has observed the repressed inverted impulse flaring into sex-antagonism, or masked as the devotion of 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. Let us recognize this force, as frankly as we recognize and reverence the love between men and women. When Paris was devouring and disputing over Willy and Colette Willy's wonderful Claudine stories, another gifted woman-writer, who had also touched on the subject of inversion, defended not only the artistic conception and treatment of the stories (they need no defense, and remain one of the joys and achievements of modern French writing), but also their ethical content: Mme. Rachilde wrote "une amoureuse d'amour n'est pas une vicieuse" [a woman in love with love is not depraved].

After all: every strong passion, every deep affection, has its own endless possibilities, of pain, change, loss, incompatibility, satiety, jealousy, incompleteness: why add wholly extraneous difficulties wd burdens? Harmony may be incompatible with freedom; we do not yet know, for few of us know either. But both truth and the most essential human dignity are incompatible with things as they are.