2 This had implications for ways in which women theorised sexual inversion, for unlike those nineteenth-century New Women who explored female desire primarily in relation to questions such as economic emancipation and alternatives to conventional heterosexual marriage, a new type of independent women writer in the early twentieth century focused explicitly on issues of sexual identity and female same-sex desire. 1 Esther Newton, in her ground-breaking essay on the emergence of a modern lesbian identity, has examined this shift, explaining that for the new generation of twentieth century women, female ‘autonomy from family was, if not a given, a right’. Partly as a legacy of the new possibilities opened to women during the First World War, Britain in the 1920s experienced what appeared to be a moment of increased sex and gender tolerance.
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