[176] Havelock Ellis, “Auto-erotism,” in vol. i of these Studies; Iwan Bloch, Ursprung der Syphilis, vol. ii, p. 589; ib., Die Prostitution, vol, i, pp. 385-6; for early references, Crusius, Untersuchungen zu den Mimiamben der Herondas, pp. 129-30.

[177] I have found a notice of a similar case in France, during the sixteenth century, in Montaigne’s Journal du Voyage en Italie en 1850 (written by his secretary); it took place near Vitry le Francois.  Seven or eight girls belonging to Chaumont, we are told, resolved to dress and to work as men; one of these came to Vitry to work as a weaver, and was looked upon as a well-conditioned young man, and liked by everyone.  At Vitry she became betrothed to a woman, but, a quarrel arising, no marriage took place.  Afterward “she fell in love with a woman whom she married, and with whom she lived for four or five months, to the wife’s great contentment, it is said; but, having been recognized by some one from Chaumont, and brought to justice, she was condemned to be hanged.  She said she would even prefer this to living again as a girl, and was hanged for using illicit inventions to supply the defects of her sex” (Journal, ed. by d’Ancona, 1889, p. 11).

[178] Roux, Bulletin Societe d’Anthropologie, 1905, No. 3.  Roux knew a Comarian woman who, at the age of 50, after her husband’s death, became homosexual and made herself an artificial penis which she used with younger women.

[179] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 47.

[180] There are few traces of feminine homosexuality in English social history of the past.  In Charles the Second’s Court, the Memoires de Ghrammont tell us, Miss Hobart was credited with Lesbian tendencies.  “Soon the rumor, true or false, of this singularity spread through the court.  They were gross enough there never to have heard of that refinement of ancient Greece in the tastes of tenderness, and the idea came into their heads that the illustrious Hobart, who seemed so affectionate to pretty women, must be different from what she appeared.”  This passage is interesting because it shows us how rare was the exception.  A century later, however, homosexuality among English women seems to have been regarded by the French as common, and Bacchaumont, on January 1, 1773, when recording that Mlle. Heinel of the Opera was settling in England, added:  “Her taste for women will there find attractive satisfaction, for though Paris furnishes many tribades it is said that London is herein superior.”

[181] “I believe,” writes a well-informed American correspondent, “that sexual inversion is increasing among Americans—­both men and women—­and the obvious reasons are:  first, the growing independence of the women, their lessening need for marriage; secondly, the nervous strain that business competition has brought upon the whole nation.  In a word, the rapidly increasing masculinity in women and the unhealthy nervous systems of the men offer the ideal factors for the production of sexual inversion in their children.”