The Masculine Degenerate: American Doctors' Portrayals of the Lesbian Intellect, 1880-1949

Abstract

Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American medical writers first attempted to define the troubling specter of the lesbian. As a central part of this endeavor, medical professionals tried to pinpoint the lesbian's status in the intellectual hierarchy of the era. Given the assumptions of the time that masculine intellect was superior and that lesbians were masculine, medical writers had to respond to the possibility of a "superior" lesbian intellect. The resulting tension between prevailing medical images of the lesbian as both "degenerate" and "intellectual" played a significant role in the explosive controversies surrounding women's higher education, and in debates about the proper place of homosexuals in society. Furthermore, discussions of the lesbian intellect indicated the lack of a single unified medical evaluation of "masculinity" and "deviance" in this time period, producing a diversity that should be considered by historians of gender and sexuality.

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