failure of language’ to express a new sexual awareness among women.43 She spoke for a group of rebel feminists who believed in tackling sex head-on, rejecting what she dubbed ‘the great soporifics – comfort and protection.’ Echoing the heroic individualism of the anarchists, she declared that free women would stand alone, convinced of their own strength, and claim all experience. For Marsden this could involve being ‘content to seize the “love” in passing, to suffer the long strains of effort and to bear the agony of producing creative work’. She believed that through asserting their power as individuals, women would learn ‘that their own freedom will consist in appraising their own worth, in setting up their own standards and living up to them’.44 Similar ideas circulated in Greenwich Village where Mabel Dodge Luhan, too, was demanding the right ‘to encompass all experience’.45
This mixture of aggressive will and sexual appetite appalled some women. Olive Schreiner complained to Havelock Ellis that the Freewoman ‘ought to be called the Licentious Male . . . It is the tone of the brutal self-indulgent selfish male.’46 Conflict erupted on the Freewoman’s letters page with a feminist, Kathlyn Oliver, expressing the view that ‘freewomen’ would not be ‘slaves of our lower appetites’.47 When a ‘New Subscriber’ wrote in defending women’s right to sexual experience, Oliver assumed the correspondent to be male. But it was the Canadian birth control campaigner, Stella Browne, quoting Havelock Ellis on ‘auto-eroticism’.48
Ellis’s diligent observation documented a wide range of sexual practices and wants – including his wife Edith’s attraction to women. Ellis’s method of case studies, combined with his stance as a scientific observer, established an idiom for talking about sex. Instead of appealing to either morality or an ideal of free love, he had devised a standpoint from which he could catalogue and consider what his subjects declared as their wants. The study of sex psychology created a platform of ‘objectivity’ which could provide a reference point beyond subjectivity and be a means of comprehending feelings and behaviour which did not ‘fit’. However, in creating a new terrain for sexual expression he, along with other sex psychologists, also defined and constrained women’s varied experiences and desires; both by imposing their own categories and by the ponderous scientific terminology which pinned down individuals according to type, rather in the manner of nineteenth-century natural science’s specimens of butterflies. Nevertheless, Ellis’s assumption of the role of the distanced expert gave a new, secular, scholarly significance to personal testimony. He helped to establish a conduit for sexual observation which broke with the confessional and the peep show: observation of sexual feelings and behaviour was transmuted into a field of study. An important space had been opened.
Even Ellis had found that his writing on homosexuality and lesbianism could be castigated as ‘obscene’, and any public assertion of same-sex desire remained well-nigh impossible. Instead women tentatively expressed their emotions in private correspondence. Edith Ellis, an anonymous witness in her husband’s volume on ‘inversion’, confided in the socialist and sexual radical Edward Carpenter, whose openly lived homosexuality gave him a kind of gender neutrality. Following the death of her lover, Lily, in 1905, Edith Ellis wondered why she was getting headaches after years without them, and concluded that ‘the need of the lusts of the flesh – like mine – was the reason.’49
Edith Ellis (Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Archives)
Women communicated their own responses to sympathetic male friends, explicitly distinguishing those who evinced a capacity to observe and listen, and they made a selective use of the writings of male sexologists in relation to their own perceptions. When in 1915 Stella Browne gave a paper at the newly formed British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology on ‘The Sexual Variety and Variability among Women’, she explained carefully:
I have tried to say nothing in this paper, that was not known to me, either through my own experience, or the observation and testimony of persons I know well. My conclusions are based on life, not on books, though I have been confirmed in my personal opinions and conclusions by some of the greatest psychologists, especially Dr Havelock Ellis, whose immense research is fused and illuminated by an inspired intuition.50
Stressing the need to relate experience and theory, Browne also explicitly addressed the need for women to devise a new discourse. ‘The realities of women’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary. While her brother has often learned all the slang of the street before adolescence, the conventional “decently brought-up” girl, of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences.’51
Like the rebel free lovers, Browne challenged the idea that women did not possess a ‘sex impulse’, arguing instead that women’s desires were diverse, differing not only between individuals but in the same individual over time. She did not believe their varied sexual needs could be expressed or satisfied within either patriarchal marriage or its corollary, prostitution. While Browne, the modern woman, absorbed earlier arguments from the sex-radical tradition, she was well read in contemporary European sexual theory, and familiar with the new philosophic trends which stressed energy and flux. Like her counterparts in Greenwich Village, she was aware of the new context psychoanalysis was creating for personal testimony. Browne and her contemporaries not only invoked reason; they were seeking a space for a more complex cultural expression of contradictory feelings.
Interest in sex psychology and psychoanalysis was part of the wider contemporary preoccupation with self-observation. In 1916 Elsie Clews Parsons, reflecting on subjective knowledge, noted: ‘At times testimony about the private life takes on a sufficiently public significance to free it from ridicule or the charge of bad taste.’52 Greenwich Village bohemians, male and female, were fascinated by the dual processes of self-examination and self-revelation. Intimacies were common knowledge, corresponded about, written about in novels and plays and openly discussed. Christine Stansell comments on how their ‘talking about sex’ was created by an ‘amalgam of feminism, cross-class fascination with working-class mores, and a belief in the power of honesty between the sexes’.53 The bohemian and anarchist Hutchins Hapgood, who had pioneered the impressionistic documentation of ‘outsiders’ in the 1890s by writing on immigrant life, wanted to apply the same conscious scrutiny to sex. He and the novelist Neith Boyce set out to be sexual chums. ‘I begin to feel we are a couple of sports’, Boyce declared in 1899.54 But when they had children, it was to be Hapgood who retained the freedom to roam in a quite conventional manner. ‘Varietism’, Boyce concluded in 1905, using the free lovers’ terminology, was so ‘crude and unlovely – and besides it takes the zest out of sinning.’55
Emma Goldman, whose eclectic openness caught the mood of the Village perfectly, acted as a crucial intermediary between free lovers and twentieth-century bohemians. Goldman possessed a unique capacity to look backwards, outwards and forwards. She was familiar with the little clusters of American free-thought and free-speech groups, as well as Russian writers such as Chernyshevsky, while being equally well versed in Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, Carpenter, Ellis and Freud.56 Even as the Villagers took over some of the watchwords and demands of the free lovers, they re-routed and transposed the old ideals, shaping them into the new set of assumptions about sexuality which would surface in mainstream culture during the 1920s. Confident in the infinite possibility of ‘being’ amidst a booming America vibrant with energy, the bohemian rebels stressed release and expression rather than the conservation of energy, Slenker-style. The free lovers’ ‘self-control’ morphed into Margaret Sanger’s term ‘birth control’, and their interest in therapeutic cures and closeness to nature fed into a concern to manage the body through diet and exercise, in accord with the early twentieth-century American ‘can-do’ approach to mind and body.
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