Sapphism and Sedition: Producing Female Homosexuality in Great War Britain

In early 1918, as British military forces were in retreat and the country expected humiliating military defeat at the hands of Germany, two events simultaneously raised rhetorical concern over female sexual representation in Britain. In one instance, a novel by pacifist Rose Allatini was quickly and relatively quietly banned under the Defense of the Realm Act. Written under the pseudonym "A. T. Fitzroy," Despised and Rejected recounts the wartime trials of a female homosexual and a pacifist homosexual man. The other event was the far more notorious "trial of the century" in which well-known dancer Maud Allan sued Member of Parliament Noel Pemberton Billing for libel. Allan's attorney claimed that an article in Billing's newspaper headlined "The Cult of the Clitoris" implied that Allan was a lesbian. Spurred by wartime concerns over British masculinity, these two representational and juridical stories together map rapidly transforming relations of gender to sexuality in emergent early-twentieth-century constructions of homosexuality.

By reading Despised and Rejected and Maud Allan's trial together and in the context of the Great War's home front, this essay argues that twentieth-century lesbian representations were produced not only through the medical discourse of late-nineteenth-century sexology and female homosocial traditions, as much of modern scholarship has discussed, but also through discourses of xenophobic nationalism and ideological affiliations with homosexual male figures during World War I. Critical attention to the intersections of xenophobia, nationalism, and home front homophobia illustrate the intractable relation of the emergence of British lesbian identity to the politics of the nation. It is not simply that discourses of wartime nationalism created the conditions for the interwar emergence of a coherent lesbian subject but also that the cultural anxiety surrounding sexual deviance in turn shaped ideas of the nation itself through debates over women's citizenship, roles, and desires.

This essay seeks to draw together work in the history of sexuality and on women's early-twentieth-century cultural productions with studies of the gendered politics of the Great War. Current scholarship in the history of sexuality generally plots the emergence of lesbian identities in the West a generation after that of male homosexuality. Laura Doan and others have suggested that the obscenity trials of Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness may be analogous to Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials as a benchmark of a newly visible and culturally coherent homosexual identity. Doan writes: "The highly publicized obscenity trial of Hall's novel, which is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian subculture, marks a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian."¹ Doan artfully maps the emergence of this "visible modern English lesbian subculture" in the 1920s through detailed attention to literature, legal texts, sexology, and fashion, focusing specifically on their interwar representational impacts. This essay seeks to parse a slightly earlier literary, juridical, and cultural moment in the 1910s that, in an important way, enabled the more legible cultural transformations of the 1920s.²

Literary critics such as Angela K. Smith and Claire M. Tylee focus specifically on the impact of women's war writings on the emergence of modernism and the transformation of gender ideologies.³ Work on the gendered politics of the Great War itself, such as the excellent work of historian Nicoletta Gullace, illustrates the gendered renegotiation of citizenship during the Great War.⁴ Whereas work in the history of sexuality often takes the category of Englishness for granted or as a stable backdrop against which lesbian identity emerges, and whereas work on the gendered politics of the Great War's home front may elide the politics of women's sexual deviance, it is essential to illustrate the mutually constitutive and rapidly changing discourses of women's sexual and national roles on the home front.

Representations of female homosexuality changed qualitatively during the Great War. In the prewar period, while female homoerotic relationships existed, British culture lacked any coherent narrative of female homosexual identity. Indeed, such a publicly legible...