Moreover, inversion is as likely to be accompanied by high intellectual ability in a woman as in a man.  The importance of a clear conception of inversion is indeed in some respects, under present social conditions, really even greater in the case of women than of men.  For if, as has sometimes been said of our civilization, “this is a man’s world,” the large proportion of able women inverts, whose masculine qualities render it comparatively easy for them to adopt masculine avocations, becomes a highly significant fact.[138]

It has been noted of distinguished women in all ages and in all fields of activity that they have frequently displayed some masculine traits.[139] Even “the first great woman in history,” as she has been called by a historian of Egypt, Queen Hatschepsu, was clearly of markedly virile temperament, and always had herself represented on her monuments in masculine costume, and even with a false beard.[140] Other famous queens have on more or less satisfactory grounds been suspected of a homosexual temperament, such as Catherine II of Russia, who appears to have been bisexual, and Queen Christina of Sweden, whose very marked masculine traits and high intelligence seem to have been combined with a definitely homosexual or bisexual temperament.[141]

Great religious and moral leaders, like Madame Blavatsky and Louise Michel, have been either homosexual or bisexual or, at least, of pronounced masculine temperament.[142] Great actresses from the eighteenth century onward have frequently been more or less correctly identified with homosexuality, as also many women distinguished in other arts.[143] Above all, Sappho, the greatest of women poets, the peer of the greatest poets of the other sex in the supreme power of uniting art and passion, has left a name which is permanently associated with homosexuality.

It can scarcely be said that opinion is unanimous in regard to Sappho, and the reliable information about her, outside the evidence of the fragments of her poems which have reached us, is scanty.  Her fame has always been great; in classic times her name was coupled with Homer’s.  But even to antiquity she was somewhat of an enigma, and many legends grew up around her name, such as the familiar story that she threw herself into the sea for the love of Phaon.  What remains clear is that she was regarded with great respect and admiration by her contemporaries, that she was of aristocratic family, that she was probably married and had a daughter, that at one time she had to take her part in political exile, and that she addressed her girl friends in precisely similar terms to those addressed by Alcaeus to youths.  We know that in antiquity feminine homosexuality was regarded as especially common in Sparta, Lesbos, and Miletus.  Horace, who was able to read Sappho’s complete poems, states that the objects of her love-plaints were the young girls of Lesbos, while Ovid, who played so considerable a part