Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [74]
And there was worse in store for the new spinster.
SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE GIRL
The response, or backlash, came in the form of sexology, a pre-Freudian system designed to scientifically classify types of sexual behaviors. Sexology was often confused with “free love,” the thrilling, somewhat baroque concept popularized in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. In fact, sexology, a conservative response to new women workers, concerned just the opposite. It reworked elements of phrenology (the categorizing of persons according to skull differentiations) and eugenics, the study of superior human breeding, to codify acceptable sexual practices, and then to regulate it.
An antivalentine to the single women of America, sexology propounded that sex was good, wondrous, life-affirming—if it was the right kind of sex. That meant married sex, as performed in the missionary position, either for the purpose of procreation—that most erotic aspect of female sexuality—or to make marriage stronger, more “companionate.” Women who were awkward, embarrassed, or for whatever reason uninterested, were diagnosed as cold or, a new and frightening word, frigid. Single women, who were presumed to miss out on intercourse entirely, were thus automatically considered frigid.
As far back as 1910, when “race suicide” was a familiar and threatening term, bookstores had been stocked with antisingular tracts condemning the “social worker” or “New Woman.” They had titles like Antipathy and Coldness in Women and The Poison of Prudery. Now sexology made the point specific to the flapper and the new spinster and any other variation of single working women. What Should We Do with Our Daughters?, a 1921 compendium of expert commentary, featured many viewpoints, although most may be summarized by one Dr. Ely Van de Warker, who declared, “The effort of women to invade all the higher forms of labor is a force battling with the established order of sexual relations.”
From another doctor: “Discovering…her innate feminine charm in the selling of dry goods [treating it] as a more alluring expression of her female self than that of the homely status of wife and mother, the girl exposes the grave crisis of the modern age…. This bounding into the world represents a futile struggle against nature…it touches on disease.”
The experts were very precise about the origins, symptoms, and lasting effects of this disease. There were several different strains among unmarried women.
First, there was the “war working woman,” the woman who’d bravely pitched in during the Great War and was thus also referred to as “a warrior maid.” More commonly she was called an intersexual, a single woman who because of her odd experience somehow had fused with a male inner soul and who, though she appeared female, acted like a man. Charlotte Haldane, writer and antifeminist, viewed this “specimen” as a “significant enemy of motherhood.” As she explained, “The development through the experience of war work [led to] the phenomenon of the war working woman,” also the “more or less unsexed or undersexed specimen.”
Next came the so-called “mannish lesbian” or “mannish woman” who took things further by dressing the part. (The definition of “lesbian” as we know it still had not settled and the term was often used to describe a woman who dressed like a man.) In medical journals and many popular articles—the word warning often appeared in the headline—these women were referred to as subnormal or inverts. Inversion, as described by Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology, matched precisely