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Not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking cigarettes…but a…toleration for cigars. There is also a dislike of needlework, and domestic occupations while there is some capacity for athletics…brusque energetic movements…direct speech…[and] an attitude towards men, free from any suggestion of shyness…these will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer.

Ultimately in the late 1920s, lesbianism began to take on its modern denotation: two women in a romantic and sexual pairing. No longer was the word used as a universal term gathering together schoolgirl smashes, the living situations of women in settlement houses, and heterosexual women who suffered subnormality and inversion. Lesbianism was, in sexological terms, about as bad as it got. As early as 1902, the Pacific Medical Journal had declared that “female boarding schools and colleges are great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality…. If carried into life, such learned perversities would lead to permanently skewed relations with men.” By 1925, the situation was much worse. Commented a woman sexologist that year: “Such a fate is so contrary to the fullness of female human development little can be said to express its horror.”

Statistics on lesbians, as so defined, are difficult to find, but one can find a bizarre number of estimates concerning frigidity. In 1925 leading sexologists estimated that 40 to 50 percent of all women were frigid, the highest numbers to be found among the more educated classes. According to experienced sexologist Weith Knudson, there were five categories of frigidity. Twenty percent of all women had turned out to be “cold,” 25 percent could be called “indifferent,” 30 percent “compliant,” 15 percent “warm,” and just 10 percent “passionate.”

From a sexological point of view, women living alone, especially those who made no effort to find a husband, were to blame. Knudson wrote angrily, “I have emphasized repeatedly that dysparunia”—the technical label for frigidity—“signals an inner negation…. obstinacy cancels the will to submission…. There are women who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything.”

But readers were assured that such an ungrateful unwed female would suffer for her obstinacy.

Walter Heape, an active commentator on sexological matters, called spinsters—all varieties—the “waste products of our female population…vicious and destructive creatures.” He suggested that like wounded dogs, they might, with the slightest provocation, snap entirely. “A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside,” he declared. “It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff…. As the number of these women increases every year and, in systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women.”

In other words, the single idea was contagious, and as it spread these women became increasingly scary. By 1929, the vicious psycho-spinster, a frustrated, vindictive harridan, had debuted as an American character. Walter Heape was one of many who characterized the evolving nightmare. Here is a part of his 1928 study of “inherently frustrated women who have failed to marry by the 25th year”: “She is…the guardian…[seated] in every auditorium of every theatre…haunt[ing] every library…in our schools, she takes little children and day by day they breathe in the atmosphere of her violated spirit.”

Sexology promoted itself as a salvation, a means for innately shy, prudish young girls—or girls who’d been wrongly swayed while at school—to marry and to enjoy a natural womanly sex life that led to many wonderful babies. There was the promise of great joy, if only a woman cooperated and did it right. Even the frigid might be brought back to life. But it was also true that some new spinsters were so deeply frigid, so mentally scarred, that there was no hope