Lesbianism and Scientific Literature

The absence of legal sanctions against lesbianism and the impact of social taboos meant that representations of female homosexuality in popular literature and the media were extremely limited in postwar Britain. The press depicted lesbians only infrequently, and then within the scandalous contexts of divorce or murder, while literary portrayals, such as Radclyffe Hall's banned interwar novel The Well of Loneliness, republished in 1949, presented the fate of the lesbian in similarly shocking and bleak terms.Footnote 12 By the late 1960s, plays and films such as The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Fox (1967) were beginning to explore the issue of lesbianism, but they continued to present lesbians in the context of failed relationships and social isolation.Footnote 13 Such portrayals contributed to a steady proliferation of images of female homosexuality in the late 1960s and 1970s, but for much of the immediate postwar period, the years 1945–1965, representations of lesbianism in popular culture were rare and sporadic. Instead, scientific and quasi-scientific studies of lesbianism constituted the most widespread, detailed, and authoritative source of information about lesbians that lesbians themselves could consult in developing their own understanding of their desires.

Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific and popular thinking tended to regard schoolgirls' “crushes” on other girls and women as relatively harmless and insignificant, but same-sex desire became an issue of concern once a girl reached “maturity.” In the postwar decades, these attitudes were reinforced by the increasing influence of Freudian accounts of sexuality, which explained lesbianism as “arrested development”: a girl becoming fixed at an earlier stage of sexual development and failing to reach adult heterosexuality. Much of the literature of the time focused on this issue of maturity, presenting heterosexual—ideally, married—women as mature and lesbians as sexually and emotionally immature. This preoccupation reflected broader concerns with female sexuality in postwar Britain. Fears about the declining birthrate continued into the postwar years and encouraged a wider reassessment of marital sexuality and an emphasis on the importance of female sexual pleasure within marriage.Footnote 14 A growing literature on female sexuality and marital sex contrasted the ideal of the married mother, who gave and received sexual pleasure within marriage, with a pathologized single woman who lacked a healthy sexual outlet and whose suppressed maternal urges could be negatively expressed in depression, alcoholism, prostitution, or lesbianism.Footnote 15 Sex advice manuals and other literature aiming to bring scientific and medical thinking to a wider audience frequently conflated lesbians with single women, so that in addition to popular representations of lesbians as sexual predators who were liable to break up marriages or commit murder, scientific representations also characterized lesbians simply as immature, failed women.

Many women therefore sought out scientific or medical advice when their desires for women did not disappear in their late teens and early twenties. Women seeking an explanation of their desires for other women in the postwar scientific literature might also have consulted a range of both academic and more popular literature. The impetus that legal sanctions gave to academic research into the etiology and potential treatment of male homosexuals was absent from inquiries into lesbianism. Although the interwar work of Ernest Jones, Grace Pailthorpe, and others had added to the debate about lesbianism in the first part of the twentieth century, by the start of the period after the Second World War the academic field remained small compared to that concerning male homosexuals.Footnote 16 Albertine Winner, giving a paper on the subject of homosexuality in women to the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1947, observed, “The papers in this symposium so far have referred almost exclusively to male homosexuality, though the actual expression used is generally ‘homosexuality’ as though both sexes were being dealt with. The object of this short contribution is to emphasise the difference in the condition as seen in women, to point out the paucity of information on the subject and to plead for further research.”Footnote 17 Her complaint was echoed eight years later by the physician W. Lindsay Neustatter, who attributed the thinness of the literature to a lack of research subjects. In his chapter on medical aspects of homosexuality in women in They Stand Apart: A Critical Survey of the Problems of Homosexuality, Neustatter noted that in his own experience, “one is rarely consulted by women homosexuals, and in contrast to the difficulty I have had of knowing which of the plethora of male histories in my case book to omit in these pages, I find I have few histories concerning Lesbians.”Footnote 18 Little was done to remedy this situation in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was not until the late 1960s that new scientific research was undertaken to test theories concerning the etiology of lesbianism.Footnote 19 Instead, psychiatrists such as Neustatter relied upon interwar statistical studies, including Katherine Bement Davis's survey, published in 1929, of the homosexual experiences of twelve hundred U.S. women college graduates.Footnote 20 A number of detailed studies of female homosexuality were published in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, and despite differences in British and American approaches to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, these U.S. surveys were also occasionally referred to in the British literature.Footnote 21

Reflecting on the then-current medical literature, Neustatter outlined three possible causes of homosexuality that scientists had proposed in exploring its etiology. The first, which Neustatter considered under the heading “the sexual hormones,” centered on the theory that a physiological imbalance between male hormones (androgens) and female hormones (estrogens) could result in same-sex desire. While considerable research during the interwar period had tested this theory in relation to homosexual men, little research had taken up lesbians. Neustatter referred to the second theoretical approach as “psychological factors” and surveyed a range of arguments, which had been variously proposed by a number of theorists, including opportunity, seduction in youth, broken homes and other poor relationships in childhood, fear of the opposite sex, and fear of venereal disease. Within this category, the theories of Sigmund Freud were the most complex and wide-ranging, situating the etiology of homosexuality within a broader theory of universal infant bisexuality. Freud explained homosexuality as the result of an inhibition of the “normal process” at one of three crucial stages in sexual development: the “oral,” or “autoerotic,” stage, during which the child's sexual pleasure is connected with its own body; the “Oedipus stage,” in which the child identifies with the parent of the opposite sex; and the “final stage,” during which this identification is transferred to the parent of the same sex. A number of environmental dangers occurring during the second stage of development could prevent a child from moving on to the final stage, thus causing homosexuality. The third group of possible causes of homosexuality discussed by Neustatter were hereditary and constitutional factors; for instance, statistical studies of the incidence of homosexuality in twins, which had been influential in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexological thinking, proposed genetic and other agents. All three theoretical approaches continued to be influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and psychiatrists frequently argued for a combination of factors; thus, the question of the etiology of lesbianism remained open to debate throughout the period. Nevertheless, Neustatter argued, in the absence of adequate research into the role of hormonal and constitutional factors, “psychological theories are more popular, as they at least open up possibilities that preventative or therapeutic measures can be taken.”Footnote 22

The dominance of these “psychological” approaches to the etiology of lesbianism is apparent in a number of American studies that were available in Britain in the postwar period. George W. Henry's U.S. study Sex Variants was published in the United Kingdom in 1950; he included detailed case histories of lesbians who had been interviewed for the research. Henry, a medical doctor, emphasized psychological or developmental factors that might explain the subjects' homosexuality, including poor relationships with parents, tomboyish or sporty behavior in childhood, and sexual histories.Footnote 23 Similarly, in his Toward an Understanding of Homo-sexuality, Daniel Cappon dismissed hereditary and constitutional explanations of homosexuality as a “hoax” and a “stewpot,” before outlining a psychological approach to the issue.Footnote 24

Psychological models were also increasingly apparent in definitions of the characteristics of lesbianism. Albertine Winner distinguished between two lesbian types in 1947. The first of these was a woman whose primary emotional attachments were with women and whose relationships were sincere and faithful but not necessarily sexual. She described this first lesbian type, who embodied the key postwar feminine ideals of domesticity and monogamy, as relatively “harmless” except to the extent that her relationships rendered both women “sterile.” However, this “harmless” lesbian was contrasted with a second, “more dangerous,” type: the “promiscuous Lesbian.” Motivated by sexual desire rather than affection, these women were described as “usually dominant and forceful personalities [who] … may often seduce weaker and more pliable women who are otherwise perfectly normal heterosexuals.”Footnote 25 Although her notion of the “promiscuous Lesbian” drew on earlier sexological models that had contrasted a sexually active, “constitutional” lesbian with a passive, opportunistic “pseudohomosexual,” Winner's description of lesbian characteristics was strongly influenced by recent psychoanalytic approaches. She claimed, “In dealing with large numbers of Lesbians one of the most striking things is the recurrent traits of immaturity, mainly emotional, but showing themselves in many unexpected ways, that one meets in women of high intellectual or artistic development. This certainly bears out the view that the homosexual relation is an immature one, an arrest of normal sexual development at an adolescent stage.”Footnote 26 Winner's analysis merged the psychoanalytic notion of lesbianism as a product of arrested sexual development with broader postwar notions of maturity. In this conceptualization, the lesbian's failure to achieve sexual maturity (i.e., heterosexual desire) was mirrored in her immature emotional and personality traits.

A proliferation of popular scientific work in the 1950s and 1960s reproduced for the wider public this combination of psychological explanations of the etiology of lesbianism and characterizations of lesbians as immature. Eustace Chesser, a Harley Street psychiatrist and gynecologist, was the author of several popular postwar sex manuals and also published a number of studies of lesbianism between 1958 and 1971.Footnote 27 In his 1959 work, Odd Man Out: Homosexuality in Men and Women, Chesser explained the etiology of lesbianism, in classic Freudian terms, as the result of “an undue delay at the clitoral stage” of sexual development.Footnote 28 This arrest in development might occur, he suggested, as a result of three possible causes: a failure to resolve penis envy, resulting in a continued attachment to the mother; an excessive attachment to the father, preventing the girl from finding a male substitute for him; or a hatred of the father, eventuating in a wider hatred of all men. In each of these cases, lesbianism was associated both with masculinity, exhibited in tomboyish behavior as a child and in an undue emphasis on careers in adulthood, and with a desire for sexual practices centered on the clitoris, rather than the vagina. His explanation of lesbianism as arising from penis envy or an unsatisfactory relationship with the father prompted Chesser to characterize lesbians as insecure and hostile to men. He asserted that “the overt Lesbian suffers from a basic insecurity and a constant fear that the loved one is seduced into heterosexuality. She enters into competition with men and often compensates for her sense of inferiority by imitating the dress and mannerisms of men. The persistence of an infantile male genital envy leads some to go to the length of employing an artificial penis.”Footnote 29 For Chesser, the key issue in lesbian sexual development was the girl's failure to achieve either feminine or masculine maturity: the resulting sense of insecurity locked her in an unwinnable competition with authentic men.

Five years later, in 1964, Anthony Storr offered a similar account of lesbianism in his book Sexual Deviation. Published by Penguin under the Pelican imprint, which sought to introduce topics in the social sciences to the general public, Sexual Deviation was one volume in the series Studies in Social Pathology.Footnote 30 Storr dismissed hormonal and constitutional factors as possible causes of lesbianism, arguing that homosexuality is the result of “a mixture of many psychopathological factors” that may prevent a girl from achieving full sexual development.Footnote 31 While all girls, he argued, experience crushes on other girls or women during childhood as part of a normal process of learning femininity, a few are unable to complete this process successfully and move on to the next stage. Those who cannot

As Chesser had done in his account, Storr linked the development of lesbianism with a woman's insecurity about her femininity and characterized lesbians as failed heterosexual women. He observed: “There is no doubt that for women who, for whatever reason, have been unable to get married, a homosexual partnership may be a happier way of life than a frustrated loneliness; but this is not to say that it can ever be fully satisfying.”Footnote 33

This notion of lesbianism as inevitably unsatisfying and inherently a failure of development influenced lesbian readers’ attitudes toward their own sexual desires. Diana Chapman, a young student who was attempting to make sense of her feelings of same-sex desire in the late 1940s and early 1950s, described her engagement with the medical literature as a disheartening experience: “Yes, I thought I was a lesbian. But then, I thought that it was ridiculous and awful and every book on psychology I ever read—and I had a stack of those blue Pelicans—told me that it was immature and that I should really get my act together and reconcile myself to my femininity and find myself a good man and have children. And so I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, I must try to simply get on with being a normal woman,’ which I tried to do without very much success.”Footnote 34 Another young middle-class woman, Julie Switsur, came across a number of references to homosexuality when she worked in a library in the late 1950s. She also found the books “mostly … dreadful psychoanalytic things—awful” and concluded that homosexuals were “a dreadful lot.” Despite this discouraging start, Julie persisted in her reading, spurred on by her unrequited love for her female boss.Footnote 35 These accounts suggest that some women consulted the literature when they were in their late teens or early twenties, either in response to wider social pressures or in hope of making sense of desires that were becoming increasingly problematic in their daily lives. However, in this context many women found their reading unhelpful, simply reinforcing a broader cultural message of conformity to marriage and motherhood.

These women's responses to their reading may have been further shaped by the circumstances of social isolation in which they approached the literature. The publication of paperback works in the social sciences, such as those produced by Pelican, rendered the literature readily accessible, at least to educated, middle-class women, and Julie was able to borrow a number of relevant books from her public library. This represented a significant change from the early decades of the twentieth century, when literature on the sexual sciences was often expensive and accessible only to medical and legal professionals or others in the know. However, whereas the early twentieth-century lesbian readers Laura Doan has studied were members of a community of lesbian writers and intellectuals with whom they could share and discuss their reading, Diana and Julie did not approach the literature communally. Doan suggests that Radclyffe Hall understood how important collective reading was to her contemporaries and that in her novel, The Well of Loneliness, Hall warned against the dangers to the novice of reading sexological literature alone, representing it as an encounter that could lead those who did not know how to negotiate it into self-disgust and despair.Footnote 36 Approaching psychiatric literature in isolation in the 1950s and early 1960s, without a community of lesbians with whom to share their reactions, Diana and Julie may have lacked the confidence and skills to read these texts creatively and to assimilate the ideas they found useful while dismissing the rest.

Face-to-Face Encounters with Medical Professionals

Therapeutic practice in the postwar period reflected the diversity of medical thinking expressed in the literature. A broad range of medical professionals were operating in this field in postwar Britain. In addition to the psychiatrists and psychologists who had dominated the scientific discussion of sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a growing number of counselors and psychotherapists were claiming expertise in the field. Moreover, the postwar establishment of the welfare state had created a newly organized body of experts in the form of social workers, who sought to address postwar anxieties about juvenile delinquency and the nuclear family by intervening in “problem families.” Thus, a variety of routes existed in this period through which medico-scientific professionals encountered and treated individual women, many of whom were referred to psychiatrists by general practitioners or social workers. Similarly, the lack of any clear consensus on the causes and nature of lesbianism meant that the attitudes expressed and therapeutic regimes offered by professionals varied enormously.

Just as a number of women had regarded the medical literature as a key source of information on lesbianism during the postwar decades, oral history sources and written accounts suggest that women's face-to-face encounters with general practictioners, psychiatrists, and counselors were relatively common. Although homosexual men were frequently referred by the courts for medical treatment in this period, many women were prompted to seek medical assistance on their own as a result of social pressures. Some women hoped simply for an explanation of their sexual desires, while others wanted help with finding and living a “normal” life of marriage and motherhood. In response to an article that appeared in 1964 in the lesbian magazine Arena Three on the search for a cure for lesbianism, a number of readers wrote in, describing their own experiences. One reader commented, “All my life I have been trying to resolve this problem, and am now convinced, after 18 sessions under lysergic acid, that it is practically congenital, but may easily be united to a strong maternal instinct.”Footnote 37 Although the writer of the comment does not discuss her motivations in detail, her desire to “resolve” the “problem” suggests that she had originally hoped to be changed, perhaps in order to have children, but that she ultimately concluded that her sexual desires for women were innate and unchangeable. Another reader was much clearer in outlining both her desire to be cured and her apparent success, writing, “I had a period of several years of homosexual relationships, which produced considerable emotional distress. … As this was just a part of my more general emotional disturbance I underwent a course of intensive psychotherapy. … I am now heterosexual.”Footnote 38 Both letter writers identify their desires for other women as problematic or distressing and indicate a willingness to seek assistance from the medical profession in resolving their dilemma. Age and social pressures were often factors prompting women to seek medical or psychiatric help. Rene Sawyer, a working-class girl from Ealing, visited her doctor in 1952, at the age of sixteen, after her girlfriend ended their relationship because Rene was not a boy. As was the case with many women who consulted doctors or medical literature at this age, Rene's puberty was a crucial moment in her sense of sexual selfhood, impelling her to consider for the first time her desire for other girls in the context of social disapproval and to seek medical help. Rene's doctor sent her to a psychiatrist, an encounter that Rene experienced as both frightening and confusing. This was the first time she had heard the words “lesbian” and “homosexual,” and she did not understand what the psychiatrist was talking about.Footnote 39

Such accounts suggest that in the immediate postwar decades—the second half of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s—women tended to regard both psychiatric literature and medical professionals as sources of information on the subject of lesbianism. However, these encounters were not necessarily positive: they often left women feeling confused or alienated and often resulted in attempts to “cure” women of their lesbianism. The nature of the encounter experienced by women was dependent on a range of factors, including class and the wide variation in therapeutic approaches. Although it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions from the small number of personal testimonies available, it seems clear that a woman's class background was important in shaping both her attitude toward the medical profession and the treatment options offered to her. As Diana Chapman and Julie Switsur's encounters with the literature suggested, middle-class women, whose educational background rendered medico-scientific literature and ideas more accessible, appeared more ready to engage with these ideas and to regard them as useful tools in making sense of their sexual desire. Often sharing a common class identity with the professionals they consulted, these women were also more likely to exhibit a belief in the value of scientific research and knowledge and thus to seek treatment voluntarily. Women from a working-class or a less well-educated background, however, sometimes expressed greater fear or hostility toward the medical profession. Lacking a personal or educational investment in scientific knowledge, women like Rene Sawyer could experience scientific terms as confusing and alienating. Social workers and other such professionals tended to assume that “problem families” or “problem individuals” were from the working class, and as a result more working-class women may have been referred involuntarily to psychiatrists and treated within the national health system rather than privately.

In their oral history study of the treatment of homosexuality in the National Health Service (NHS) in postwar Britain, Michael King, Glenn Smith, and Annie Bartlett found that therapeutic responses varied widely.Footnote 40 In several articles, based on interviews with thirty professionals—primarily psychiatrists and psychologists—this research team demonstrated that in this period a range of treatments were developed to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the most common of which were behavioral therapies, reaching a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Behavioral treatments were offered to NHS patients in a number of clinics around the United Kingdom, including the Maudsley Hospital in London and clinics in Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast, but the absence of any general protocol or ethical guidelines meant that regional variations were common. The majority of patients treated by the professionals that King, Smith, and Bartlett questioned were men who had usually requested the treatment under pressure from family members or had been referred by the courts as a voluntary alternative to prison. The most common behavioral treatments offered to homosexual men in this period were aversion therapy and covert sensitization. Aversion therapy was conducted in a series of sessions on both residential patients and outpatients and involved showing them a series of pictures of attractive men while simultaneously administering either electric shocks or some form of emetic. Other therapies included estrogen treatment to reduce lReference Poweribid., which was used in the 1950s, and psychoanalysis and hypnotherapy, although King, Smith, and Bartlett suggest that these last two were more widely used in the private sector than in the NHS. Few studies were conducted into the efficacy of these treatments, and subsequent research suggests that they not only failed to effect a conversion from homosexuality to heterosexuality but also produced significant negative side effects, including depression, suicidal tendencies, and, in some cases, death.

Although behavioral treatments such as aversion therapy were most commonly applied to homosexual men, there is evidence of their use on lesbian subjects in the 1960s and earlier.Footnote 41 A 1967 study of the use of aversion therapy in forty-three cases of homosexuality, published in the British Medical Journal, included two women among its subjects. The women were both eighteen years of age and had been partners in a lesbian affair. The study reported that, after treatment, neither showed any interest in homosexual practice and that one of the women was now practicing heterosexual intercourse “with great pleasure and a high regard for her partner.”Footnote 42 Janice, an oral history interviewee, described her experience of aversion therapy administered in a private mental hospital to which she had been admitted in 1964 for agoraphobia. During a session with her psychiatrist, Janice confessed to having an affair with another female patient and, as Janice was twenty years old and therefore below the age of consent, the psychiatrist and Janice's parents agreed that she should be treated for homosexuality. Janice explained,

Psychosurgery, which was first used to treat diagnosed mental illness in Britain in 1941, became common in the late 1940s and 1950s, and surgical interventions, such as lobotomy, were also considered as a treatment for lesbianism in some cases. Alkarim Jivani has recorded the experience of Luchia Fitzgerald, an Irish emigrant working in a Lancashire cotton mill, who, after committing a minor juvenile offense, was referred by her probation officer to a psychiatrist in Manchester in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The two professionals apparently agreed that Luchia's lesbianism was at the root of her behavioral problems and that this was the issue that needed to be addressed. Luchia explained, “They were discussing how they could put it right and he made some suggestions of a part of my brain not being developed right and that really … the only way forward was to have surgery. … I was thinking to myself maybe these people are right because they’re professionals, they know what they’re doing. … I thought maybe if I was heterosexual, I could go home, settle down and be like everybody else. So I thought, well, if these people can cure me, I’m going to let them.” Luchia did not ultimately go through with the procedure; she discussed the proposed treatment with a lesbian friend at Manchester's gay pub, the Union, and her friend's horrified response persuaded Luchia against it.Footnote 44 However, experiences such as these, recounted to other lesbians in bars and lesbian organizations, were undoubtedly important in contributing to the growing perception of psychiatrists as a potential threat, which was voiced in the Gay Liberation Front protests of the early 1970s.

While some women underwent extreme forms of behavioral therapy or surgical intervention in this period, the most common therapeutic approach to lesbianism in the 1950s and 1960s appears to have been some form of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis had had a limited impact on mainstream medical thinking in Britain in the interwar period, with psychiatrists put off by the jargon and the lack of scientific evidence to support theorizing, the treatment's ineffectiveness in chronic psychotic cases, and distaste for Freud's theories on sexuality.Footnote 45 However, the successful use of psychotherapy to treat some soldiers during the Second World War, publicized by a number of articles in leading medical journals, advanced its scientific standing in the postwar period. A limited number of psychotherapy specialists were appointed to psychiatric positions within the NHS, and some forms of therapy, such as group and occupational therapy, were adopted. Nevertheless, psychotherapy continued to develop slowly in a national health system dominated by budget constraints, so time-consuming treatments such as individual psychotherapy were more commonly offered in the private sector.Footnote 46 As a result, this less invasive form of therapy was more likely to be offered to middle-class, educated lesbians with financial access and the motivation to seek private treatment.

In the 1950s, this form of analysis could be combined with the use of a drug, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which was intended to facilitate expression in reluctant or repressed patients. In a study published in the Journal of Psychology in 1955, H. A. Abramson described the application of LSD in the case of a woman who had exhibited a fear that she might be homosexual. During a session in which this patient was under the influence of the drug, it became apparent that she had formed this impression after reading literature that associated enjoyment of clitoral orgasm and masturbation with lesbianism. The therapist was able to assure her that those forms of enjoyment were not necessarily connected with lesbianism, and the patient apparently resumed satisfying heterosexual intercourse with her husband. Abramson emphasized the need to counter patients’ concerns about the LSD treatment by discussing it carefully with them in advance, and he offered further suggestions on possible dosage levels of the drug and aftercare issues, such as the need to advise patients to remain at home with a relative or friend and not to drive until the morning after treatment.Footnote 47 However, because dosage levels and applications of the drug varied significantly, women's experiences of the treatment differed considerably. For example, a woman who wrote to the lesbian magazine Arena Three describing her experiences of psychiatric treatment in a London teaching hospital from 1959 onward reported that she did not find the treatment helpful. She explained, “On one of the early visits, I was given an injection. I was not, however, told why, or even what the injection was supposed to do. I found much later that it was intended to lower all barriers and make me talk more freely. It might have done so, had it been given earlier in the day. At the time, it only made me feel sick and faint[,] … but when I returned to [work], I talked—and talked—and talked—for over an hour. Mercifully, I don’t remember a word of it!”Footnote 48

Despite this broad range of therapeutic options, medical practitioners in the postwar period did not necessarily regard lesbianism as an intrinsically pathological condition requiring treatment. In a 1949 review of Eustace Chesser's Sexual Behaviour: Normal and Abnormal, the Lancet observed, “His approach to deviation, from the practitioner's point of view, is a sound one: where it is a handicap, or part of a major personality disorder, seek psychiatric advice: otherwise disregard it.”Footnote 49 This comment, appearing in an influential medical journal, suggests that in the early postwar years mainstream medical practitioners may have regarded homosexuality in women as requiring treatment only when it was accompanied by other psychological problems. This approach continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and a study of doctors’ attitudes carried out in the early 1970s shows that, although 69 percent of psychiatrists regarded homosexuality as an aberrant behavior pattern, and 8 percent regarded it as a disease, 80 percent claimed that they would help a patient adjust to his or her homosexual condition rather than attempt to cure it.Footnote 50 This attitude may reflect the influence of psychological and psychoanalytic theories of lesbianism during the postwar decades. Although Freud himself tended to avoid any suggestion that homosexuality should be seen as inferior to heterosexuality, many U.S. Freudians were extremely enthusiastic about the possibilities of psychoanalytic cures; the British medical profession, however, had been slower to take these ideas on board and was generally more skeptical.Footnote 51

A number of women in the 1960s who sought medical assistance regarding their lesbianism were therefore advised simply to “adjust” to their sexual identity. Pat Arrowsmith, who was put in touch with an analyst when she became concerned that her lesbianism would hinder her work as a social worker, was told that there was no point in undergoing psychoanalysis unless she felt “out of accord with herself” for being a lesbian. Sandy Martin received a similar response when, as a teenager in the early 1960s, she was taken by a social worker to see a psychiatrist. Sandy explained that she had come to see him because she was a lesbian, adding, “I think I’m supposed to be cured or something.” His reply, she recalled, was, “Well, it's more about accepting who you are really.”Footnote 52 These accounts suggest that those psychiatrists and psychotherapists who did not advocate attempted cures for lesbianism, focused their therapy, if they considered it necessary at all, on enabling a woman to accept and adjust to this sexual identity. One aspect of this approach was the emergence of sex therapy as a form of treatment in the postwar period. Julie Switsur offered an account of her experience with sex therapy in the early 1960s, when she approached a counselor to help her clarify whether or not she was a lesbian. She had requested a referral to a psychiatrist, but the counselor suggested she undergo a course of “sex counseling” with him instead, to which Julie agreed. She then underwent a process in which the counselor discussed sex with her, showed her pictures of female genitalia, and finally arranged for her to have sex, blindfolded, with another of his “lesbian” patients. The experience, she claimed, “gave [her] the certain knowledge that [she] was gay.”Footnote 53

From the late 1950s onward, there is evidence that some psychiatrists and counselors encouraged individual women to integrate into a wider lesbian community as a means of facilitating their adjustment to a lesbian identity. A number of accounts suggest that these professional therapists performed an important role in providing individual women with information about the lesbian subculture in this period. Cynthia Reid, a middle-class Londoner who visited a number of psychiatrists after the breakup of her first lesbian relationship in the mid-1950s, received a range of information about the lesbian subculture. The first psychiatrist she consulted gave her this advice: “I’ve heard that people like that meet down at the Pier Hotel in Chelsea. You could try standing out there one night.” Dispirited by his suggestion that she stand around on street corners, Reid asked to swap psychiatrists. This second doctor introduced Reid to another lesbian patient, who took her to Gateways and a number of other lesbian clubs.Footnote 54 Julie Switsur was less fortunate in this instance: her psychiatrist also informed her of the existence of lesbian bars but refused to give her more precise information, observing that they were “quite rough” and that he “didn’t want to upset her.”Footnote 55 When lesbian organizations, such as the Minorities Research Group, began to form in the mid-1960s, medical and social work professionals frequently referred isolated lesbians to such groups, and this type of social work became one of their central activities in the late 1960s. Lesbian organizations also began to develop contacts with sympathetic practitioners to whom they were able to refer lesbians requesting medical advice. Jean White, a middle-class former missionary, was put in touch with a counselor by the editor of Arena Three in the 1960s; the counselor in turn introduced her to some other lesbians, who then took her to the Rehearsal Club on Archer Street in London.Footnote 56 Such accounts suggest not only that medical professionals were in a position to acquire information about the lesbian subculture from their patients but also that they were frequently willing to pass that information on to other women patients.

This evidence suggests that lesbian encounters with the medical profession in the postwar decades could result in a range of responses and treatment options, shaped by the class and educational background of the patient and variations in clinical practice between regions, the public and private sectors, and individual practitioners. The lack of extensive research into the causes or potential treatments for lesbianism meant that no clear consensus on the subject existed within the medical profession and that, as a result, some practitioners appear to have conducted experimental therapies, with which they had little or no experience, on their patients. Patients who against their will were referred to psychiatrists by probation officers or by social workers, as well as patients from less well-educated backgrounds, were often more vulnerable to invasive therapies that they either did not fully understand or were unable to refuse. Such encounters inevitably fostered lesbians’ hostility toward and fear of psychiatry. More time-consuming and expensive psychological therapies appear to have been more widely used in the private sector, in which predominantly well-educated, middle-class patients sought medical assistance voluntarily in order to make sense of their sexual desires and could change doctors voluntarily if uncomfortable with the treatment offered. In these circumstances, a more collaborative relationship was fostered between lesbians and psychiatrists, further encouraged by a growing tendency on the part of some practitioners to recommend adjustment rather than treatment for lesbianism.

The Minorities Research Group and Lesbian Community Interaction with Psychiatry

The emergence of lesbian organizations in the mid-1960s initiated a new collective phase in lesbians' interaction with the psychiatric profession. In 1964, the first lesbian social organization in Britain, the Minorities Research Group (MRG), was formed and began to publish a monthly magazine under the title Arena Three.Footnote 57 The MRG aimed “to conduct and to collaborate in research into the homosexual condition, especially as it concerns women.”Footnote 58 This goal indicated that the group's middle-class founders believed that the medico-scientific profession played a central role in shaping understandings of lesbianism and could be instrumental in changing social attitudes toward homosexuality. This collaborative relationship should also be understood as part of a broader international trend. Homophile organizations in the United States had been cooperating with scientific researchers since the mid-1950s, and Jennifer Terry has argued that the U.S. lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis “advocated scientific research and education about homosexuality as a strategy for combating homophobia in American society.”Footnote 59 The founders of the MRG in the United Kingdom collaborated closely with their U.S. counterparts from the outset, and Alison Oram has suggested that the MRG also hoped to use research projects as a means of redefining the public image of lesbianism in more positive terms.Footnote 60

Interest from the scientific community was considerable; nine researchers from the United Kingdom and the United States undertook research with the MRG and Arena Three subscribers.Footnote 61 The easy access to lesbian research subjects, which the organization and its magazine represented, was significant in prompting a renewed academic interest in lesbian sexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s and marked an important shift in medical research into lesbianism. The MRG represented a lesbian community drawn from the wider lesbian population, rather than the psychiatric patients previously available to researchers, and thus provided new opportunities for statistical research. Debates about the Wolfenden Report's proposals for the reform of laws on homosexuality had also renewed media and legal interest in male homosexuality in the late 1950s and 1960s, reaching a height in the late 1960s with the enactment of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.Footnote 62

Many of the research projects undertaken with the MRG were primarily conceived as an opportunity to test earlier hypotheses. Eva Bene, the first researcher to approach the MRG, compared the questionnaire responses of a group of lesbians with a control group of married women in an attempt to test the claims made in psychiatric—and, particularly, psychoanalytic—literature concerning the role of parent-child relations in the genesis of female homosexuality.Footnote 63 The second project, conducted in 1965 by June Hopkins, an American psychologist based at Cambridge University, also sought to test established theories of lesbianism. Hopkins had apparently met lesbians during her service in the U.S. women's forces and “couldn’t understand what the difference was [between homosexual and heterosexual women]—what all the fuss was about.”Footnote 64 Her research was therefore devised as an attempt to dispel the notion of lesbians as neurotic; she used a “Personality Factor” questionnaire to analyze personality variables among lesbian and heterosexual women. She concluded that lesbians were not neurotic but that they did possess distinct personal traits: they were more independent, resilient, reserved, dominant, bohemian, self-sufficient, and composed than their heterosexual counterparts.Footnote 65 Other research projects were more ambitious in their conception and sought to move the medical debate about lesbianism in new directions. One aspect of these studies was a growing interest in the role played by hormones in the choice of sexual partners. Sex hormone research had a longer history in relation to male homosexuals, since the criminalization of male homosexuality had given a greater impetus to the search for treatments, but there had been very little recognition of sex hormones in the literature on female homosexuality.Footnote 66 However, with increased access to groups of lesbians drawn from Arena Three and the MRG, new research projects were beginning to test hormone levels in their subjects, and a number of studies published in the early 1970s considered both male and female homosexuals.Footnote 67

In agreeing to collaborate with researchers in studies of lesbianism, the MRG and Arena Three facilitated a new form of interaction between lesbians and medico-scientific professionals. Present as volunteers, rather than patients, the lesbians who took part in these studies not only enabled new research to be undertaken but also arguably reconfigured the relationship between lesbians and medico-scientific discourse. Diana Chapman offered a fascinating description of the experience of participating in one such project, which sought to discover whether there were any measurable anatomical or physiological differences between lesbians and heterosexual women:

This account is very revealing of the different attitudes that researchers and the group of women themselves brought to the study. The study was designed as an attempt to explain the origins of lesbianism, and the researchers approached their topic with an assumption that, in their terms, the lesbian research subjects were “abnormal.”Footnote 69 The published results of the research reflected this expectation, for the authors claimed to have found lesbians to be significantly more neurotic than the heterosexual women who were examined but not measurably different hormonally.Footnote 70 The women who participated in these research projects, however, apparently did not view themselves in the same way. Many stated their reason for participating in the study as a desire to find a physical, rather than a psychological, basis for their sexuality, and Diana Chapman's account of the women's reactions supports this. Her comment “And somebody remarked that it was the most uninhibited party they’d ever been to” demonstrates the commitment of the MRG's members to a view of themselves as ordinary, respectable women—in contrast to the researchers, who were keen to stress the women's bohemianism, neuroticism, and difference. Significantly, the shared joke centers on the issue of undressing, highlighting the irony that the experts have innocently asked a group of lesbians to take all their clothes off in front of other women.

This ambivalent reaction to medico-scientific research and literature is apparent throughout the 1960s in the pages of Arena Three. Although Arena Three and the MRG encouraged the interest of such researchers as an important aspect of their work, they nevertheless adopted a stance of critical distance both to individual projects and to medico-scientific discourse more generally. Commitment to promoting medico-scientific research in general did not imply automatic trust in individual researchers; in consequence, the editorial boardwomen of Arena Three acted as gatekeepers to their lesbian community, assessing the integrity of each researcher before allowing access to the wider body of MRG members. Similarly, an agreement to participate in a specific research project did not necessarily indicate endorsement of its aims or conclusions: research results were subjected to critical review in the magazine, and many of the later studies received a mixed or overtly hostile reaction.

Despite these precautions, the MRG community was divided on the issue of scientific research, again apparently as a result of variations in the members' educational background. At least three of the founders—Diana Chapman, Cynthia Reid, and Julie Switsur, all of whom were middle-class professionals—were strongly committed to this aspect of the MRG's work.Footnote 71 However, not all subscribers shared this view. An article by Reid published in April 1965 indicates that she considered many subscribers to be reluctant to support this aspect of the MRG's commitments: “This article is prompted by the attitudes I have met towards the subject of psychology among homosexuals in general, and among MRG members in particular. This was illustrated by reactions last year to Dr. Eva Bene's research on family relationships during childhood, the first project in which our co-operation was sought. While most of those we approached offered their services willingly, many others expressed uneasiness, and some, outright horror, at the idea of being involved in psychological research.”Footnote 72 Reid's comments suggest that some subscribers did not share her commitment to research collaboration even though they had signed a statement endorsing this aim. Reid attributed this reluctance to a widespread fear either that researchers would attempt to “cure” volunteers of their homosexuality or that participation in research carried with it the implication that volunteers were mentally ill. She assumed that a lack of understanding of the medico-scientific world was at the root of these fears and hoped that by educating Arena Three readers, she would persuade subscribers to participate in research projects. With this aim, she outlined the distinction between psychologists, who sought to observe and explain behavioral phenomena such as homosexuality, and psychiatrists, who aimed to “[adjust] the individual to society and to himself,” emphasizing the psychological nature of the projects in which the MRG was involved.

However, there is also evidence that an increasingly hostile and dismissive attitude toward the medico-scientific project began to develop among lesbians in the late 1960s. Although the editorial team responded encouragingly to researchers who contacted Arena Three in the first two or three years of its publication, by 1966 the journal referred to the profession in less positive terms. An editorial in the June 1966 issue blamed the “muddled thinking” of psychiatrists for the harassment of the MRG by heterosexual men “under the erroneous impression that lesbians are looking to set up home with a man.”Footnote 73 In the October issue of the same year, an article by Esmé Langley commented on the “acute shortage” of qualified people in the “medico-social” world who really understood what homosexuality was about. Outlining the MRG's future plans, she claimed:

Langley's article points to a significant shift in the MRG's objectives in this area, from a commitment to collaborating with medico-scientific researchers to a determination to publish “MRG's own findings” directly in the public domain. Although the proposed book was never published, such observations indicate a growing disillusionment both with the claims to expert knowledge made by medico-scientific professionals and with their interest in furthering such “knowledge.”

This hostility seems to have emerged for a number of reasons. As the results of the early research projects in which the MRG had been involved were published, it became increasingly apparent that the involvement of lesbians in studies did not prevent researchers from repeating long-standing negative stereotypes. In the face of this disappointment, MRG members began to lose faith in the group's initial strategy of contributing lesbian bodies and ideas to inform the so-called experts. At the same time, as the community centering on the MRG and Arena Three became more established, a more confident sense of lesbian identity was fostered. As readers developed a stronger sense of themselves as members of a recognizable and assured community, they became increasingly indignant in responding to perceived external hostility. An exchange in the Mailbag section of the magazine in the May 1967 issue illustrates this: a reader with three sisters and a brother, all of whom were heterosexual, wrote, “I do want emphatically to say how much I dislike the outlook of the so-called ‘experts’ who say we are not ‘born this way’ but made like it by one parent or the other whether the mother or the father. It mostly seems to be ‘Mother’ who gets the blame. … My mother is the sweetest, gentlest woman in the world, and I very deeply resent any suggestion that it might be her fault I am what I am, that she singled me out for some kind of ‘special’ mismanagement and not my sisters.”Footnote 75 The language used in the letter, referring to the medical professions in terms of derision as “the so-called ‘experts’” and asserting “I very deeply resent,” points to an emerging confidence and anger. As this confidence grew, the MRG and Arena Three began both to challenge the right of psychiatrists and other professionals to claim expertise in this area and to set lesbians themselves up instead as the true authorities. Finally, this breakdown in lesbian organizations' cooperative relationship with scientific researchers coincided with a decline in the wider cultural influence of psychiatry. Psychiatry's authority to define and sanction forms of social behavior was being challenged in the 1960s by the antipsychiatry movement in Britain. At the same time, a successful public relations campaign by the MRG resulted in a proliferation of media representations of lesbians as ordinary women and, combined with other sympathetic cultural portrayals in film and television, challenged the scientific discourse on lesbianism in particular and homosexuality in general. Lesbians were no longer reliant on psychiatrists to put their case to a wider society.

In the summer of 1971, the MRG and Arena Three folded as a result of financial and other pressures. However, many of the former members and subscribers continued to be active in the burgeoning political and social lesbian community of the early 1970s. When the London GLF was founded later the same year, the sociologist Mary McIntosh was among its first lesbian members. A subscriber to Arena Three in the 1960s, Mary had actively engaged in Arena Three's debates about psychiatry, contributing an article on the causes of lesbianism in the June 1964 issue.Footnote 76 The increasingly hostile views expressed in the magazine and the published accounts of individual women's encounters with psychiatrists may have not only influenced her decision to cofound the GLF's Counter-Psychiatry Group but also informed the demonstrations against Harley Street psychiatrists and the Maudsley Hospital and the Tavistock Clinic that the group carried out.

In conclusion, this essay maintains that the Gay Liberation Front activists’ anger at psychiatrists represented a shift away from an earlier rapprochement. In the early postwar decades, medical literature and ideas constituted an influential discourse in the absence of alternative representations of lesbianism. Individual lesbians could use these sources as points of reference in making sense of their sexual desires. At critical moments such as puberty or young adulthood, it was predominantly middle-class lesbians who consulted such literature in public libraries and sought out medical practitioners in an attempt to explain or alter their desire for other women. When the first British lesbian organization, the Minorities Research Group, was founded in the early 1960s, its members recognized the social influence of scientific discourse and volunteered their own bodies and experiences to research projects in an attempt to reshape scientific and public notions of lesbianism in more positive terms. However, as the lesbian community gained confidence and a stronger sense of collective identity in the 1960s, these women became increasingly hostile toward external attempts to define their identity. This resentment, combined with anger over the controversial use of behavioral therapies and other invasive treatments to “cure” some women's homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s, emerged in the Gay Liberation Front's Counter-Psychiatry Group protests of the early 1970s.