Adjustment of Homosexual and Heterosexual Women

The traditional psychiatric belief that homosexual women are emotionally unstable (3, 10, 21) has been challenged by Armon (1), Freedman (11), and Hopkins (13). The contention that such women are neurotic has typically been voiced by clinicians reporting on their own therapy patients (3, 10, 19). One exception is the recent psychometric investigation by Kenyon (15) who studied a non-clinical group of English homosexual women, and concluded that they were higher in neuroticism than a comparison group of heterosexuals. In contrast to the ‘illness' notion of homosexuality, the authors of three psychometric studies (1, 11, 13) dealing with non-clinical homosexuals and heterosexuals reported that heterosexual women were not better adjusted than homosexuals. The paucity of research in this area is exemplified by the fact that a total of only four studies, noted above, have been found to date by this author. Even the clinical literature, which is replete with case studies and therapeutic discussions concerning male homosexuality, is strikingly sparse in the area of lesbianism (19). The present study was therefore conducted to add to the small body of data we now have on the adjustment of homosexual versus heterosexual women.