Winnifred Wygal’s Flock

This chapter follows the life and personal relationships of Winnifred Wygal (1884–1972), a career Young Women’s Christian Association worker. Wygal forged an erotic life that challenged both the conventions of heterosexual “companionate marriage” and the concomitant emergence of homosexual “pathology” that characterized early twentieth-century domestic relations. Her perception of the boundless capacity of God’s love emboldened Wygal to engage romantically with a number of different women, including Frances Perry, her companion from 1910 to 1940, as well as multiple other women who became, as she sometimes put it, part of her “fold.” Wygal’s diary provides a rare window on a Christian’s negotiation of her sexuality and underscores a central contribution of this book: religious faith played a shaping role in validating same-sex desire in the first half of the twentieth century.