Abstract
In 1929, Victor/Valerie Barker was prosecuted and imprisoned as a female husband. The trial came just a year after the Well of Loneliness prosecution, in which the suppression of a lesbian novel ironically brought wider public awareness of sex between women. Barker’s conviction, then, might seem to mark a new visibility and an end to silencing in the criminal courts. In fact, case disrupts any idea of a simple move from female husband prosecutions to a new focus on indecent assault and the age of consent: silencing would prevail into the 1950s and beyond.
The Barker case is also contrasted with its predecessors, exploring legal and social differences in its prosecution and reporting. In particular, the chapter identifies the highly gendered and racialised sexological concept of female inversion, which newly encompassed middle-class women. Its consequences for medical, legal, and societal perceptions of lesbians are analysed.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Barker was born Lillias Irma Valerie Barker and changed surname to Arkell Smith on her marriage in 1918. As a woman, Barker was known as Valerie; as a man, Victor Barker although he would later use the names John Hill (Daily Express 1934) and James Hunt (Vernon 2000, p. 44). For clarity, ‘Barker’ is used throughout this chapter. As elsewhere in the book, I use ‘he’ or ‘she’ according to whether Barker was presenting as a man or woman; this also reflects the force or even excess with which Barker claimed each identity at different times, as discussed further below.
- 3.
The foreword was written by Henry Havelock Ellis, while Hall also referred in the text to Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and drew upon the work of Edward Carpenter (Doan 2001, chap. 5).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
This was not the only British sexological work, or approach (e.g. see Carpenter 1908), but it was the most influential, including in the legal context. When the Justice of the Peace commented on the field in 1938, it compared Ellis’s work favourably with the ‘pseudo-Latin scientific jargon’ emanating from Germany (Vernon 2000, p. 45).
- 7.
This approach can be contrasted with Symonds’ appeal to the Hellenic past in A Problem of Greek Ethics eleven years earlier (Symonds 1883).
- 8.
Dr Kiernan, Ellis’s informant, was ‘[t]he most prolific and influential U.S. sexologist, James G. Kiernan’ who had ‘a particular interest in female sexual inverts’ (Duggan 2000, pp. 172–73).
- 9.
Krafft-Ebing in particular significantly expanded later editions of his Psychopathia Sexualis in this way, and to some extent changed his own views (Weeks 2001, p. 501).
- 10.
See, for example, Alison Neilans’ use of sexological ideas discussed in Chap. 4.
- 11.
The fear of miscegenation which pervaded both this anecdote and Ellis’s discussion of female inversion was also to be found in press reports of the period (Oram 2016, p. 176).
- 12.
He was similarly hostile to women sitting on juries for male homosexual offences (Davenport-Hines 1990, p. 297).
- 13.
For detailed consideration of gender-crossing in popular culture, see Oram (2007).
- 14.
It is only fair to mention that he was unimpressed by men, too.
- 15.
This organisation did not attract a huge membership, but was visible and skilled at publicity (Wheelwright 1990, p. 43). It had broken away from the British Fascisti, of which Barker had originally been a member alongside the Earl of Glasgow and Viscountess Downe (Collis 2001, p. 115). The founder of the British Fascisti, Rotha Lintorn-Orman, was herself known as the ‘Man-woman’ for her habit of wearing men’s clothes and enthusiasm for unfeminine skills such as changing tyres (Pugh 2005, pp. 51 and 64).
- 16.
His approach nonetheless had strong echoes of earlier centuries when he argued that ‘self-abuse … leads naturally to the greater perversion’ , and that ‘[f]or both purposes special instruments are actually manufactured’; the consequences of their use included loss of ‘robust appearance’ (Bishop 1931, pp. 163–64).
- 17.
Doan suggests broader differences of opinion among ‘the Establishment’ and posits that those involved in suppressing The Well of Loneliness were an atypical minority (2001, pp. 20–24). However, they were not so atypical as to be prevented from rising to high office; and it is their virulent, activist response rather than the underlying hostility to lesbianism which was unusual. Most of her counter-examples, while members of gentlemen’s clubs, were writers rather than lawyers or legislators.
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Derry, C. (2020). Victor/Valerie Barker: Sexology and Challenges to Silencing. In: Lesbianism and the Criminal Law . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_5
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