to suicide.  Thus in Philadelphia, a few years ago, a girl of 19, belonging to a very wealthy family, beautiful and highly educated, acquired an absorbing infatuation for Miss Mary Garden, the prima donna, with whom she had no personal acquaintance.  The young girl would kneel in worship before the singer’s portrait, and studied hairdressing and manicuring in the hope of becoming Miss Garden’s maid.  When she realized that her dream was hopeless she shot herself with a revolver. (Cases more or less resembling those here brought forward occur from time to time in all parts of the civilized world.  Reports, mostly from current newspapers, of such cases, as well as of simple transvestism, or Eonism, in both women and men, will be found in the publications of the Berlin Wissenschaftlich-humanitaeren Komitee:  the Monatsberichte up to 1909, then in the Vierteljahrsberichte, and from 1913 onward in the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen.)

Yet, until recently, comparatively little has been known of sexual inversion in women.  Even so lately as 1901 (after the publication of the first edition of the present Study), Krafft-Ebing wrote that scarcely fifty cases had been recorded.  The chief monographs devoted but little space to women.

Krafft-Ebing himself, in the earlier editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, gave little special attention to inversion in women, although he published a few cases.  Moll, however, included a valuable chapter on the subject in his Kontraere Sexualempfindung, narrating numerous cases, and inversion in women also received special attention in the present Study.  Hirschfeld, however, in his Homosexualitaet (1914) is the first authority who has been able to deal with feminine homosexuality as completely co-ordinate with masculine homosexuality.  The two manifestations, masculine and feminine, are placed on the same basis and treated together throughout the work.

It is, no doubt, not difficult to account for this retardation in the investigation of sexual inversion in women.  Notwithstanding the severity with which homosexuality in women has been visited in a few cases, for the most part men seem to have been indifferent toward it; when it has been made a crime or a cause for divorce in men, it has usually been considered as no offense at all in women.[145] Another reason is that it is less easy to detect in women; we are accustomed to a much greater familiarity and intimacy between women than between men, and we are less apt to suspect the existence of any abnormal passion.  And, allied with this cause, we have also to bear in mind the extreme ignorance and the extreme reticence of women regarding any abnormal or even normal manifestation of their sexual life.  A woman may feel a high degree of sexual attraction for another woman without realizing that her affection is sexual, and when she does realize this, she is nearly always very unwilling