prudish, and there was
strong testimony to her chaste and modest character by clergymen,
club women, and local magnates. The victim of her sadistic
passion was a girl she had adopted from a Home, but whom she half
starved. On this girl she inflicted over three hundred wounds.
Many of these wounds were stabs with forks and scissors which
merely penetrated the skin. This was especially the case with
those inflicted on the breasts, labia, and clitoris. During the
infliction of these she experienced intense excitement, but this
excitement was under control, and when she heard anyone
approaching she instantly desisted. She was found sane and
responsible at the time of these actions, but the jury also found
that she had since become insane and she was sent to an Insane
Hospital, after recovery to serve a sentence of two years in
prison. The alleged insanity, Dr. Kiernan adds, was of the
dubious manic and depressive variety, and perhaps chiefly due to
wounded pride.

The inverted woman is an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty,
especially of the statuesque beauty of the body, unlike, in this, the
normal woman, whose sexual emotion is but faintly tinged by esthetic
feeling. In her sexual habits we perhaps less often find the degree of
promiscuity which is not uncommon among inverted men, and we may perhaps
agree with Moll that homosexual women are more often apt to love
faithfully and lastingly than homosexual men. Hirschfeld remarks that
inverted women are not usually attracted in girlhood by the autoerotic and
homosexual vices of school-life,[179] and nearly all the women whose
histories I have recorded in this chapter felt a pronounced repugnance to
such manifestations and cherished lofty ideals of love.

Inverted women are not rarely married. Moll, from various confidences
which he has received, believes that inverted women have not the same
horror of normal coitus as inverted, men; this is probably due to the fact
that the woman under such circumstances can retain a certain passivity. In
other cases there is some degree of bisexuality, although, as among
inverted men, the homosexual instinct seems usually to give the greater
relief and gratification.

It has been stated by many observers--in America, in France, in Germany,
and in England--that homosexuality is increasing among women.[180] There
are many influences in our civilization today which encour