The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 by Laura L. Behling

Laura L. Behling shows how a fearful society recast the suffrage movement's push for women's independence as a movement of unnatural 'masculinized' women and dangerous 'female sexual inverts.' Examining literature and the popular press, she describes the strategies used to eliminate the 'sexually inverted' woman: punishing her with prison or death, 'rescuing' her into heterosexuality, mocking her, or removing her to some remote place. She also shows how same-sex relationships in the fiction of Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Stein and others conformed to heterosexual models, and how the new woman, though enfranchised, was disenfranchised socially through science, illustration and fiction.