, a
few years ago, a girl of 19, belonging to a very wealthy family,
beautiful and highly educated, acquired an absorbing infatuation
for Miss Mary Garden, the _prima donna_, with whom she had no
personal acquaintance. The young girl would kneel in worship
before the singer's portrait, and studied hairdressing and
manicuring in the hope of becoming Miss Garden's maid. When she
realized that her dream was hopeless she shot herself with a
revolver. (Cases more or less resembling those here brought
forward occur from time to time in all parts of the civilized
world. Reports, mostly from current newspapers, of such cases, as
well as of simple transvestism, or Eonism, in both women and men,
will be found in the publications of the Berlin
Wissenschaftlich-humanitaeren Komitee: the _Monatsberichte_ up to
1909, then in the _Vierteljahrsberichte_, and from 1913 onward in
the _Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen_.)

Yet, until recently, comparatively little has been known of sexual
inversion in women. Even so lately as 1901 (after the publication of the
first edition of the present Study), Krafft-Ebing wrote that scarcely
fifty cases had been recorded. The chief monographs devoted but little
space to women.

Krafft-Ebing himself, in the earlier editions of _Psychopathia
Sexualis_, gave little special attention to inversion in women,
although he published a few cases. Moll, however, included a
valuable chapter on the subject in his _Kontraere
Sexualempfindung_, narrating numerous cases, and inversion in
women also received special attention in the present Study.
Hirschfeld, however, in his _Homosexualitaet_ (1914) is the first
authority who has been able to deal with feminine homosexuality
as completely co-ordinate with masculine homosexuality. The two
manifestations, masculine and feminine, are placed on the same
basis and treated together throughout the work.

It is, no doubt, not difficult to account for this retardation in the
investigation of sexual inversion in women. Notwithstanding the severity
with which homosexuality in women has been visited in a few cases, for the
most part men seem to have been indifferent toward it; when it has been
made a crime or a cause for divorce in men, it has usually been considered
as no offense at all in women.[145] Another reason is that it is less
easy to detect in women; we are ac