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Sexologists Examine Lesbians and Prostitutes in the United States, 1840-1940
This article illustrates correlations that sexologists made between prostitutes and lesbians in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Examining medical writing and sexological discourse in both the United States and abroad, the author creates a tentative framework in which to understand shifts between 1840 and 1940 in sexologists' specific concerns and questions about prostitutes and lesbians as well as changes in sexological research methodologies and social and medical explanations for relationships among these two groups of "deviant" women. Ultimately, however, the article concludes that sexologists--and society's--underlying fears about female sexual deviance remained static, fueling continued discussion about potential parallels between prostitutes and lesbians in the mid- to late twentieth century.
In the world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sex work, heterosexual sex acts may have been the commercial norm but they did not encompass the wide variety of sexual behaviors in which prostitutes engaged for both pay and pleasure. In fact, many extant diaries of prostitutes and madams from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries make explicit mention of same-sex female relationships among brothel workers. Polly Adler, who ran an infamous New York brothel from the 1920s until 1945, noted that "inevitably I had a few Lesbians" (1953, 85). In her autobiography, prostitute and madam Nell Kimball referred often to lesbian activity in the brothel, most notably the actions of Emma Flegel, a well-known madam for whom she worked in the late nineteenth century and who possessed a reputation among the demi-monde for numerous love affairs with "her girls" (Kimball 1970; Nestle 1987, 238). And, madam Beverly Davis explained that "`just about all prostitutes are lesbians and tribades'" (Wolsey 1944, 241). 1 Same-sex behavior among prostitutes not only existed but, perhaps, proliferated.
Scientists and doctors throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also drew significant parallels between lesbians and prostitutes, often arguing that many prostitutes were indeed lesbians. These predominantly male scientists lumped women who had sex with multiple heterosexual partners and those who preferred homosexual relationships into a theoretical "sisterhood" on the margins of "normal" female sexuality. Scientists of sex from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries found much of interest in both prostitutes and lesbians, conflating the two categories and offering, among other things, descriptions of and...