[166] An interesting ancient example of a woman with an irresistible impulse to adopt men’s clothing and lead a man’s life, but who did not, so far as is known, possess any sexual impulses, is that of Mary Frith, commonly called Moll Cutpurse, who lived in London at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith appeared in 1662; Middleton and Rowley also made her the heroine of their delightful comedy, The Roaring Girl (Mermaid Series, Middleton’s Plays, volume ii), somewhat idealizing her, however.  She seems to have belonged to a neurotic and eccentric stock; “each of the family,” her biographer says, “had his peculiar freak.”  As a child she only cared for boys’ games, and could never adapt herself to any woman’s avocations.  “She had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children.”  Her disposition was altogether masculine; “she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk freely, whatever came uppermost.”  She never had any children, and was not taxed with debauchery:  “No man can say or affirm that ever she had a sweetheart or any such fond thing to dally with her;” a mastiff was the only living thing she cared for.  Her life was not altogether honest, but not so much from any organic tendency to crime, it seems, as because her abnormal nature and restlessness made her an outcast.  She was too fond of drink, and is said to have been the first woman who smoked tobacco.  Nothing is said or suggested of any homosexual practices, but we see clearly here what may be termed the homosexual diathesis.

[167] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 137.

[168] S. Weissenberg, Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1892, Heft 4, p. 280.

[169] This case was described by Gasparini, Archivio di Psichiatria, 1908, fasc. 1-2.

[170] Bringing together ten cases of inverted women from various sources (including the three original cases mentioned above), in only four were the sexual organs normal; in the others they were more or less undeveloped.

[171] Homosexual persons generally, male and female, unlike the heterosexual, are apt to feel more modesty with persons of the same sex than with those of the opposite sex.  See, e.g., Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 76.

[172] Kryptadia, vol. vi, p. 197.

[173] The term “cunnilinctus” was suggested to me by the late Dr. J. Bonus, and I have ever since used it; the Latin authors commonly used “cunnilingus” for the actor, but had no corresponding term for the action.  Hirschfeld has lately used the term “cunnilinctio” in the same sense, but such a formation is quite inadmissible.  For information on the classic terms for this perversion, see, e.g., Iwan Bloch, Ursprung der Syphilis, vol. ii, p. 612 et seq.

[174] Casanova, Memoires, ed.  Gamier, vol. iv, p. 597.

[175] Hirschfeld deals in a full and authoritative manner with the differential diagnosis of inversion and the other groups of transitional sexuality in Die Homosexualitaet, ch. ii; also in his fully illustrated book Geschlechtsuebergaenge, 1905.