Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 · Chapter 28Chapter IV.—Sexual Inversion in Women. (7)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
[178] Roux, Bulletin Société d'Anthropologie, 1905, No. 3. Roux knew a Comarian woman who, at the age of 50, after her husband's death, became homosexual and made herself an artificial penis which she used with younger women.
[179] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, p. 47.
[180] There are few traces of feminine homosexuality in English social history of the past. In Charles the Second's Court, the Mémoires de Ghrammont tell us, Miss Hobart was credited with Lesbian tendencies. "Soon the rumor, true or false, of this singularity spread through the court. They were gross enough there never to have heard of that refinement of ancient Greece in the tastes of tenderness, and the idea came into their heads that the illustrious Hobart, who seemed so affectionate to pretty women, must be different from what she appeared." This passage is interesting because it shows us how rare was the exception. A century later, however, homosexuality among English women seems to have been regarded by the French as common, and Bacchaumont, on January 1, 1773, when recording that Mlle. Heinel of the Opera was settling in England, added: "Her taste for women will there find attractive satisfaction, for though Paris furnishes many tribades it is said that London is herein superior."
[181] "I believe," writes a well-informed American correspondent, "that sexual inversion is increasing among Americans—both men and women—and the obvious reasons are: first, the growing independence of the women, their lessening need for marriage; secondly, the nervous strain that business competition has brought upon the whole nation. In a word, the rapidly increasing masculinity in women and the unhealthy nervous systems of the men offer the ideal factors for the production of sexual inversion in their children."
[182] Homosexual women, like homosexual men, now insert advertisements in the newspapers, seeking a "friend." Näcke ("Zeitungsannoncen von weiblichen Homosexuellen," Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1902, p. 225) brought together from Munich newspapers a collection of such advertisements, most of which were fairly unambiguous: "Actress with modern ideas desires to know rich lady with similar views, for the sake of friendly relations, etc.;" "Young lady of 19, a pretty blonde, seeks another like herself for walks, theatre, etc.," and so on.