True Sex. Emily Skidmore
Wise quickly moves on to discuss the sexual nature of Lobdell and Perry’s relationship. Whereas earlier newspaper reports suggested that the pair posed as husband and wife to protect themselves while traveling, Wise makes clear that Lobdell assumed the sexual responsibilities of a husband and had “a vivid recollection of her late ‘married life.’ From this statement it appears that she made frequent attempts at sexual intercourse with her companion and believed them successful; that she believed herself to posses virility and the coaptation [sic] of a male; that she had not experienced connubial content with her husband, but with her late companion nuptial satisfaction was complete.”69 Wise then goes on to discuss Lobdell’s claim that he possessed a “peculiar organ that make me more a man than a woman,” which “had the power to erect … in the same way a turtle protrudes its head.”70 Although Wise explains that he had never seen this organ, he did confirm that Lobdell’s clitoris was larger than normal—an observation which would come to be standard within sexological definitions of lesbianism.71 Wise’s descriptions of Lobdell’s sexual relationship are significant here because they are written in such a way that seems to confirm that Lobdell’s deviant sexuality was caused by a mental disease; descriptions of Lobdell’s actions are prefaced by the phrase “she believed,” and sexual relations with Perry are referred to as “attempts” rather than definitive actions.72
Additionally, Wise’s inclusion of Lobdell’s claim of a “peculiar organ” gave rise to the suggestion that he was perhaps intersex, which was another hotly debated issue within the medical community in the late nineteenth century. As Elizabeth Reis has observed, the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a transition in the ways intersex bodies were viewed by the medical profession (and American society more broadly). Previously, intersex individuals were thought to be physically monstrous creatures; by the nineteenth century, however, Americans increasingly viewed an intersex individual as human, although “a repulsive and duplicitous one.”73 As the nineteenth century progressed, intersex bodies were increasingly associated with homosexuality and other forms of sexual “deviance” defined by the medical profession as immoral and perverse.74 Thus, Wise’s decision to include a description of Lobdell’s anatomy (regardless of whether it was accurate) was likely deliberate in that it aided in Wise’s depiction of Lobdell as deviant and pathological.
Wise’s “A Case of Sexual Perversion” was the first study of female sexual inversion published in an American medical journal, and he played a critical role in formulating American medical definitions of gender and sexual deviance (and normativity). Indeed, although the Alienist and Neurologist was a St. Louis medical journal with a relatively small circulation, its articles were frequently noticed by local newspaper editors, who reproduced or summarized them in columns compiling news items of interest.75 Such was the case with the Waupun Times in their reproduction of Wise’s study, but this reproduction should not be interpreted as acceptance of his sexological theories. Indeed, the general public did not immediately embrace the new concepts introduced by sexologists—they were deployed skeptically rather than embraced enthusiastically.
“A Case of Sexual Perversion” appeared in the Waupun Times in substantially edited form. Many of the details that would have been considered salacious were removed; there was no mention of Lobdell’s description of his “special organ,” for example, and no reference to his repeated advances toward female staff members at the hospital. Instead, the only portions that the Waupun Times reproduced were those that described Lobdell’s early life, his marriage to Henry Slater, and his decision to don male clothes to facilitate hunting, along with a brief description of his relationship with Mary Perry. On this last point, the excerpt explained, “The attachment became mutual which led to their leaving their temporary home and commencing life in the woods in the relation of ‘husband and wife.’ In 1876 she was arrested as a vagrant and lodged in jail in Pennsylvania. A petition is now on record there from the wife for the release of her husband Joseph Israel Lobdell from prison because of failing health. In compliance with this petition he (or she) was released, and for three years they lived quietly together until she had a maniacal attack that resulted in her committal to the Willard Insane Asylum.”76 Although this description of Lobdell’s relationship with Perry appears somewhat benign, it is followed immediately with the concluding sentence (which, significantly, was not included in Wise’s original article): “Several similar cases of ‘perverted sexual instinct’ have been reported in Germany, male as well as female.”77
The inclusion of Wise’s article within the Waupun Times reveals several important insights into popular understandings of gender and sexuality in the late nineteenth century. First, it illustrates that newspaper editors—even those in small towns such as Waupun—were aware of sexology from its earliest days in the United States. As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, Wise’s article on Lobdell was one of the first studies of sexual inversion in women published in the United States, and the article contains the very first usage of the term “lesbian” in a U.S. publication. The fact that within a few months of its initial appearance in the Alienist and Neurologist Wise’s article would go on to appear within a small-town newspaper like the Waupun Times illustrates that sexological theories did not remain isolated within elite publications, and that they very quickly began to circulate within the mass-circulation press, flowing to and from rural areas. However, the fact that readers and newspaper editors in rural areas were aware of sexological theories on sexual and gender deviance did not mean that they necessarily believed them.
Subsequent articles published in the Waupun Times suggest that the editors were unwilling to accept sexological theories on “perverted sexual instinct” as the final word on the Dubois case. On December 18, 1883, at the conclusion of an article republished from the Fond du Lac Commonwealth, the Times editors wrote, “The Dubois matter is getting tiresome. We have published many articles on the subject because the whole thing is so marvelously strange and without much plausible reason. We hope the article published today from the Commonwealth is the last chapter.”78 Thus, while the newspaper narratives produced around Frank Dubois in 1883 suggest some of the ways sexology was beginning to influence popular discourse on gender and sexuality, they also provide evidence that sexology was looked to as providing a possible explanation, but not the only one. Indeed, the Waupun Times, unlike virtually all the other newspapers nationwide, went out of its way to provide readers with antecedents to makes sense of Dubois’s story. This likely displays how much more invested Dubois’s friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Waupun were in the story than were typical readers of newspapers elsewhere in the nation. They desired not just to be titillated by the tale of an eccentric individual but also to understand the story and the possible rationale behind Dubois’s unusual decisions. Editors of the Waupun Times understood this but came up short in terms of being able to provide local readers with a definitive explanation because there was no definitive explanation for gender transgression or “female husbands” in 1883.
“Female Husbands”
As was mentioned above, the national press consistently used the ambiguous term “female husband” when discussing Frank Dubois’s case. This phrase was by no means new, but its resurfacing in relation to the Dubois case prompted some newspapers to ruminate on its meaning. For example, on November 4, 1883, the New York Times published a multivalent editorial titled “Female Husbands.” It began by reminding readers of the details of the Dubois case, and it almost mournfully reported that “public opinion will not tolerate the marriage of two women.”79 The paper then went on to carefully consider the potential benefit that such marriages might pose:
If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it? Such a marriage concerns the general public less than the normal sort of marriage, since it does not involve the promise and potency of children. It has been well established that if a woman chooses to wear trousers she has a right to wear them, and no one will venture to deny the right of any two women to live together if they prefer one another to solitude. Why, then, has not Mrs. Dubois the right to live with another woman who wears lawful trousers, and why should so much indignation be lavished upon Mrs. Dubois’s female husband?
There are many women who, if they had the opportunity, would select other women as husbands rather than marry men. The women who regard men as dull, tiresome creatures, incapable of understanding women, would find sympathy and pleasure in the society of female husbands.80