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Saturday, June 21, 2025 - 20:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/06/21 - listen here)
Usually when I put together a podcast essay, I have a number of sources to draw on and am able to create my own synthesized understanding of the topic. In the case of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a long-term romantic couple living in Vermont in the early 19th century, I am entirely reliant on a single publication: Rachel Hope Cleves’ Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. As a result, I feel like today’s podcast is more in the line of a book report than an original essay, and in consequence it’s somewhat shorter than usual. And yet—given that I’m in the middle of blogging this book for the Project, and because the story is so fascinating—I can’t resist putting together this episode about them.
We often think of American romantic friendships and “Boston marriages” as belonging entirely to the later 19th century. But such relationships can be found earlier, as we see here. We also often find opinions divided between positions such as Lillian Faderman’s that 19th century romantic friendships were never sexual—that women of that era were so steeped in the stereotypes about women’s sexual passivity that they couldn’t even imagine engaging in sex together—and the equally suspect wishful thinking that treats every romantic friendship as solidly lesbian in sexual terms. But Cleves teases out a more nuanced understanding—that women in romantic friendships fully understood there were boundaries to what would be publicly acceptable, and showing us the process of self-censorship that women engaged in, both in terms of subtly coding the nature of their desires and activities in the records they left, and the physical censorship of destroying records they felt would cause problems for their reputation or the reputation of their families. It was this understanding and careful management that allowed Charity and Sylvia to share their lives in what was acknowledged publicly to be a marriage-like bond, celebrated by their families and community, without provoking a degree of backlash or condemnation that would have destroyed their place in those networks.
Both women were born in Massachusetts either during or in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolutionary War. Charity was the elder, while Sylvia was born 7 years later. They had a number of things in common. Both came from large families that lived in rural towns, both aspired to a higher level of education than was common for young women, both were poets and copious letter writers, and both came into young adulthood with an understanding that they were completely uninterested in a conventional marriage.
Their differences are also striking. Charity’s family was comfortably well off, and when her siblings left home it was for person freedoms, not out of necessity. Charity’s mother died shortly after her birth and she sought in vain all her life for parental support and approval. In contrast, Sylvia’s family, though close and loving, had lost their land and were desperately poor. Even at her birth the family had scattered either to find support with relatives or seek employment. In a pattern that was fairly normal for unmarried young women in New England at the time, both found themselves moving between the households of various relatives, not always by choice.
Charity found both a certain degree of economic independence and a circle of like-minded young women by becoming a teacher. As schoolteachers were often female (because they could be paid less) and were required to be unmarried, and because casual socializing between men and women was heavily scrutinized, a teacher’s life was ideal for someone like Charity who found herself romantically attracted to other women. In her early 20s, Charity went through a series of emotionally charged intimate friendships with other women, celebrated in the poems she wrote, but also the most likely cause of the malicious gossip she alludes to in many letters.
The specific nature of the gossip is never recorded, but it caused her to return to her parents’ home for a time, and complicated relations with two of the siblings that she boarded with at various times. Cleves points out that the social problems generated by Charity’s intimate friendships need not indicate that her community was concerned specifically about sexual relationships. It could be enough that the women’s close bonds were felt to make them less likely to marry. Marriage was not simply a social expectation, but a critical economic status. In the absence of employment that paid well enough to support an independent household—and remember what we said about women being paid less than men for the same work—a single woman would always require financial assistance or material support from others. The alternative to living with a family member was usually becoming a domestic servant in some other household. So a woman like Charity who disdains marriage and appears to encourage other women to feel the same, can be seen as a disruption to the economic stability of entire families.
Sylvia didn’t have the same opportunities to support herself that Charity did. Family necessity resulted in her moving to an even more rural area of Vermont, which not only eliminated her chance for more advanced schooling, but also greatly limited the options for female employment. Despite this, she too was still unmarried when she hit her 20s, and her family was beginning to accept that the state was permanent and groom her to be a lifelong companion for her aging mother.
And then Charity moved to Vermont. In a blazing stroke of serendipity, at a time when Charity wanted to get out of an increasingly fraught situation where she was living with the family of one of her girlfriends and they were getting very suspicious, she received an invitation to visit friends in Vermont for several months. The husband was a distant relative of Charity’s mother, and she had gotten to know the wife during one of her teaching stints and Charity had even been named godmother to two of their children. And the wife was Sylvia’s sister.
Charity and Sylvia hit it off almost immediately. While there, Charity began a tailoring business—a skill she’d picked up some years earlier—and Sylvia pitched in as assistant. Half a year later, Sylvia moved on to go live with her mother, as previously planned, but within a month, Charity enticed her back with the promise of a place of their own to live in, and the two were never again separated.
The tailoring business was what made the success of their relationship possible. By the end of the year, they were earning enough to lease property and build a combined home and shop. Having a separate and independent household that was not reliant on the generosity of a relative, and that afforded personal privacy meant that the stresses and pressures that had undermined Charity’s previous relationships were absent.
Over the decades, the business expanded, both in terms of volume and in building on to their home. They were able to hire assistants and apprentices. Charity and Sylvia became pillars of the community, founding a women’s charitable organization, supporting their local church, and both called “aunt” by their numerous nieces and nephews—as well as by many other children in the town. Their relatives and neighbors acknowledged their relationship even likening it to “a marriage”.
Charity and Sylvia shared a home and their lives for 44 years. After Charity died at age 74, Sylvia wore widow’s black for the rest of her life. And after she died at age 83, their families buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.
I’ve omitted many of the details that Cleves includes in the book. She provides an extensive historical and social background as the context for their lives, as well as delving into their religious, economic, and medical backgrounds. But for now, let’s leave the story as the bare bones of their romantic life. As is so often the case when we have records of female romantic couples who achieved a “happy ever after” ending, we should not see them as unique or isolated, but rather as uniquely well documented. The historic and social conditions that enabled their successful relationship existed for many other women, and it’s not inappropriate to extrapolate that there were many other similarly happy couples who never made it into the pages of history.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- The lives of two women in early 19th century Vermont whose marriage-like relationship was accepted and even celebrated by their community
- Sources mentioned
- This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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Saturday, June 21, 2025 - 15:00
I can still write, record, edit, and post a podcast from scratch today, right? (Or I can finish up on Sunday, like I so often do.) You'd think that in my leisurely retirement I'd no longer find myself pushing podcast deadlines, but there's still so much on my schedule! And--I confess--today I meant to get right to work on it, but I've been hyperfocusing on a different research/writing project (on the history of the "Best Related Work" Hugo category) and have been having a hard time pulling out of that to work on anything else. This is a known failure mode for me. The trick is to aim my hyperfocus on the thing with the immediate deadline, not the fuzzy long-term one.
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LHMPFull citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Chapter 7 & 8
Chapter 7: Never to Marry 1800
In 1800, Charity—finding her welcome wearing out in her sister’s household, which was beset with illness—returned to her brother’s household, which she had previously left due to gossip about her intimate friendships. Yet in the letter announcing her intent, she explicitly laid out her plan never to marry, stating that it was a matter of principle and that marriage would not be “productive of happiness.” (The rest of the chapter spends a lot of time exploring the possibility that Charity’s position could be due to a failed/impossible m/f romance, only to dismiss the theory.)
Chapter 8: Charity and Mercy 1805
The concern that Charity and her girlfriends had about the nature of their relationships shows up in letters talking about the need for keeping those letters secret, or the advisability of destroying them, despite their sentimental value.
[Note: This also sheds light on why documentation of women’s intimate relationships can seem so rare, if women understood there was a boundary of acceptability beyond which the details must be kept secret. If that self-awareness meant that documentary evidence of relationships “beyond the pale” was selectively more likely to be destroyed, it creates the illusion that more passionate relationships didn’t exist. Later in the book, we’ll see the efforts Charity went through to try to manage her legacy by retrieving and destroying letters.]
Not all Charity’s intimate friends were from the educated circle of teachers. Mercy Ford lived with a controlling mother and hired out to do domestic service, leaving her little free time for her romance with Charity. (Earlier, Charity’s friendship with Nancy Warner had formed over a shared interest in religious philosophy, but Nancy’s religious sensibilities were part of why she distanced herself when Charity began courting her.)
Mercy and Charity did destroy most of their correspondence, due to concerns over the content becoming public. Some that do survive make clear they had a dual letter stream: one for public consumption, and one containing material “so particular…it will do by no means for the world.”
Other surviving letters express passionate feelings and language that may be coded terms for sex, but certainly express a desire to share a bed alone together. Their continued devotion and disinterest in marriage (along with previous gossip about Charity) eventually resulted in Charity’s parents forbidding Mercy to visit, and Mercy’s mother to make her life such a misery that Charity decided she must move elsewhere. This was when she left home the second time to go live with a brother.
[Note: The timeline in the book keeps looping back and jumping ahead, which is hard to keep track of.] At this point, Charity was 28 years old.
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Friday, June 20, 2025 - 07:00
In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate? No one generalization will hold for all times and places, but when examining the lives of Charity and Sylvia and the several other women that Charity had relationshps with, a common thread is an active disinterest in marriage, to the point where people who knew them had concluded that they'd end up "spinsters" entirely separate from any awareness of their romantic interest in women.
Now one might point out that, in a society with compulsory heterosexuality, a woman who is open to the idea of relationships with men is likely to go ahead and get married, even if she also has desires for women. And there are always women who resist heterosexual marriage for philosophical or health reasons. So a strict one-to-one connection between marriage resistance and sapphic desire isn't accurate. And I sometimes think the motif gets overused in fiction. But it isn't exactly wrong.
When I glanced at the calendar the other day and realized OMG I need a podcast topic for this Saturday, it was easy to decide that I'd write up a mini-bio of Charity and Sylvia this month. Usually, even when my essay research focuses around a specific publication or researcher, I have multiple sources to use, but this isn't the case for C&S. Pretty much there's just Cleves' book, so I'll introduce the topic with a lot more emphasis that I'm basically just doing a book report.
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LHMPFull citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Chapter 5 & 6
Chapter 5: So Many Friends 1799
Teaching brought Charity into contact with many like-minded young women. “Like-minded” included some women who were specifically attracted to teaching because they had little interest in marriage and whose primary romantic interests were with other women. In addition to their intellectual connections, it was normal for women friends to shar a bed and to openly record their enjoyment of embraces and kisses. Such women also recorded dreams of setting up housekeeping with an intimate friend. More rarely, private writings survive that describe genital sex and orgasm. Intimate friendships had a wide range of expressions and cannot be generalized.
Passionate friendships between single female teachers were unremarkable. Charity’s sister used the potential for one such relationship with a friend of hers to encourage Charity to join her household. Surviving documents trace a series of attachments for Charity. Their correspondence and poems express a strong physicality—wishes to embrace, to share a bed, expressions of longing and physical excitement. The peripatetic lives of teachers also meant these relationships were disrupted by separations and jealousies, again expressed in letters.
Social concerns about such relationships were not typically associated with their sexual potential, as sex and romance were not automatically considered to be linked. But if intimate same-sex friendships appeared to interfere with marriage prospects, it could be a source of concern.
In Charity’s case, concern seemed to revolve around a certain behavioral masculinity in her interactions with other women, combined with a stated disinterest in marriage. But the particulars of what generated gossip about her are difficult to identify due to the vague language used to describe the situation. Charity recorded suffering from malicious gossip, but did not give specifics. Talk was sufficient in some cases to induce Charity to move to a different community.
In some cases, initial friendships were ruptured when Charity initiated something more like courtship when the degree of feeling was not reciprocated. Eventually, only one of her previous intimates remained in correspondence with her.
Chapter 6: Discontent and Indifferent 1800
Sylvia pursued education past what was typical for a woman—or even a man—in her economic situation. Her location in rural Vermont meant reduced opportunities for advanced schooling, though she followed with interest news of academies for girls opening elsewhere. Despite some recovery in finances when the family moved to Vermont, there was no money to send Sylvia away to school.
Sylvia’s family approved of her ambitions, despite not always understanding them and not being able to do more to support them. Schooling provided a reason for Sylvia’s indifference to marriage, which her family commented on. She sought out female friends, but the pickings among unmarried women were few and not sustainable. Her family sometimes warned her against the dangers of “unsuitable” friendships. This may have come, in part, from her sister Polly, who was acquainted with Charity back in Massachusetts and may have had her in mind as a cautionary tale.
By 1804, when Sylvia was 20, comments in correspondence suggested that the family was accepting that Sylvia’s single state might be permanent, and she was urged to look forward to being a companion to her aging mother. Unlike Charity, Sylvia’s disinterest in marriage didn’t extend to refusing to learn domestic skills.
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Thursday, June 19, 2025 - 08:00
I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Chapter 3 & 4
I have become fascinated with the cyclicity of historical trends--not necessarily the "big stuff" like wars and forms of government, but the way certain concepts and reactions cycle over and over again, in different forms, but with similar shapes and consequence-chains. We see this in Valerie Traub's idea of "cycles of salience" where specific manifestations of female homoeroticism have dominated social awareness at different times. We see this in the "waves" of feminism, which began long before "first wave" feminism, where women agitate against the specific injustices of their time, make progress to address those injustices, then are hit by backlash that recurs in similar forms, time and time again.
Today's chapters from Charity and Sylvia touch on one of those cycles: the "generation gap" (my label, not the author's). Some sort of social or political disruption occurs that leads a younger generation to have sufficiently different understandings of society that disrupts the idea of learning from and following the lead of the older generation. I'm not talking about a constant background radiation of "kids these days!" but the points at which a generation has literally grown up in an entirely different world from their parents, affecting expectations and assumptions. For Charity and Sylvia, that disruption was the American Revolution, not only due to the physical and economic hardship, but because of embracing the principles that you didn't have to accept "the way things are." That you can make drastic changes in your relationship to authority structures. Authority structures like family hierarchies.
One of the pervasive threads in this book--and an aspect of history that can be hard for modern people to grasp entirely--was the essential interconnectedness of communities. For queer people, that interconnectedness has often been a threat: the need to hide or conform in order to not lose that essential economic stability the community and family provide. The quintessential American archetype of the independent loner who rejects society's demands has always been mostly an illusion. When Sylvia's brother struck out for the "wilds" of Vermont, his success was not that of an independent loner, but of someone who identified key social structures and wove himself into them. (Marrying the boss's daughter has always been a useful strategy.) and when he achieved that success, his first thought was to pull in the loosened strands of his family and weave them back into cloth again.
Charity's family was badly disrupted by autocratic and controling parents, with the result that their children took any opportunity to get out from under their thumb. (A "generation gap" that might have been harder to implement without the general atmosphere of liberatoin.) But those threads were still tangled. Charity's professional life was made possible by the anchors of various siblings who hosted her during her teaching years, allowing her to move between communities while still being tied to them. On the other side, for a single woman to be able to make a living as a teacher was made possible by significant attitude shifts regarding public education that emerged out of the Enlightenment and the disruption of Colonial era attitudes toward the relationship between government and the public good.
Did Charity and Sylvia come to the conclusion that their fantasy of a female "marriage" was possible because of those disruptions to social patterns? It's always hard to distinguish the larger patterns from the particular cases. In several places, Cleves draws parallels between Charity & Sylvia and the similar relationshps of Ponsonby & Butler and Lister & Walker. Yes, they lived in a similar era, but their socio-political contexts were quite different. To what extent is it reasonable to consider them part of a larger pattern of queer possibility and to what extent is the urge toward queer partnerships a constant with individual cases popping into visibility for random reasons and then given undue weight because of that visibility?
Ok, I'm starting to ramble now. But since one of the goals of the Project is to identify larger patterns in history that can help root characters and stories into the particularity of a time and place, these questions are always on my mind.
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Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787
The Revolution had inspired something of a “generation gap” as younger people took seriously the ideals of liberty and independence and were less inclined to reflexively bow to parental and employer authority. Another legacy of the Revolution was the valorization of intimate same-sex friendships among both men and women. These friendships had the potential to displace the familial bonds that had previously been the essential basis for economic success. Such friendships had the same potential as m/f relationships for both joy and tragic break-ups. One of Charity’s brothers suffered greatly from the destruction of one such friendship, which may have affected some of her ambivalence about intimate relationships.
Another of her brothers also had an intimate friendship with that same man, and there was conflict between the brothers over contrasting loyalties. [Note: Although the author doesn’t make the connection at this point, these close same-sex friendships may have been a model for Charity’s own socializing later. Also note: I’m using “intimate friendship” in the sense of a highly particular, intensely emotional bond, without necessarily implying an erotic component.]
Resistance to parental attempts to dictate their lives led to most of Charity’s siblings eventually distancing themselves from their father and step-mother. Her sisters struggled harder to find a path other than marriage. One had poetic aspirations, but chose marriage at 20. Another married even younger. Both moved away from the family neighborhood at marriage. That left Charity as the only child at home at age 15. Charity clashed regularly with her stepmother, perhaps over her distaste for the endless housework, preferring literary activities. These gave her a common focus for close friendships with other young women in the community.
At age 20, after a conflict with her father, he threw Charity out of the house and she went to live with one of her married sisters. In the next decade, Charity moved between several communities, living with relatives, and formed a number of close friendships with women who were drawn by her intellect and bold spirit. But the admiration she attracted also sparked gossip and tension within those communities.
Chapter 4: Mistress of a School 1797
Charity worked as a school teacher, which fit well with her skills and interests, though she had a low opinion of many of her students. Like several of her siblings, she was a poet. At first, she boarded with her sister Anna. After some problems with gossip (more on which later), and a minor medical crisis, she moved back in with her parents until that became untenable. Then she went to live with a brother in western Massachusetts, where she resumed teaching. Then back to join Anna in a different locations. Despite these various moves and occasional breaks from teaching, the profession gave her freedom and economic independence, if not a very substantial income.
Post-revolutionary America encouraged general education, creating new employment opportunities for educated women (as they could be paid less than male teachers). Young female teachers often wrote about their “liberty” from parental oversight and restrictions (and the expectation of domestic labor if they remained at home).
Charity became a prolific letter writer, as well as a poet, often describing her life in dramatic and sentimental terms, as if narrating a novel.
She often wrote poems as gifts to friends, and was considered talented. She and her correspondents sometimes had pet names for each other used in their letters.
In her writing, Charity praised the virtues of modesty and sincerity, though she didn’t always recognize her own failings in those areas. Others viewed her pride and self-confidence as deviating from feminine ideals.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - 08:00
Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives. "Here is this thing that someone else felt; they could have felt this too." We know that this person was writing poetry about love between women in England at the same era, they might possibly have been familiar with it." Interspersed with quotations from their surviving correspondence, we also get descriptions of things they are asserted to have done, thought, and felt that are not cited to a specific source and that I interpret as being drawn from the author's imagination. I'm of two minds about this approach. One the one hand, it makes for a clearer storyline, in the same way that tv or movie presentations of people's lives fill in or omit details, or rearrange timelines, in order to present a more coherent story. But as someone who is looking for the verifiable facts of history in order to better be able to do similar extrapolations, I'd rather have a clear distinction made in my history books between fact and imagination.
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LHMPFull citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Chapter 1 & 2
Chapter 1: A Child of Melancholy 1777
Charity’s mother died of consumption shortly after Charity’s birth in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War. She was the last of 10 children. Death haunted the family with three of Charity’s grandparents and her oldest brother also dying within the same 2-year period.
Charity felt the absence of her mother keenly (as documented in poems on the subject), despite never having known her. Charity was named for a “spinster” aunt, famed as a seamstress, who may have served as something of a role model. Both due to her mother’s illness during pregnancy and the lack of mother’s milk, Charity was a sickly infant and considered unlikely to survive. She was supported through it by a hired nurse who became a family friend, and by the care of a slightly older sister, Anne. Charity’s father remarried (the date of the marriage is not given here) but her stepmother evidently had little affection for her.
Chapter 2: Infantile Days 1784
Sylvia’s childhood was a contrast to Charity’s. She had a loving mother and family, neither war nor illness devastated the family, but the disruptions of the Revolution did leave them bankrupt and homeless. (In contrast, Charity’s family was well off.) Like Charity, Sylvia was the youngest of a large family.
[Note: The book often digs deeply into the historic context of the women’s lives, as with the post-war economic crisis in Massachusetts. There is also a lot of social history background to provide context for how people understood the women’s lives and affections. I’m not going to take notes on those aspects in detail, but simply stick to the outlines of the couple’s lives.]
The town Sylvia’s family lived in was poor and crime-ridden. When her grandfarther’s death meant selling off their property to settle debts, the family split up to live with or work for various relations. Because of Sylvia’s youth, she stayed with her mother and invented fantasies in her poetry of the comfortable togetherness that she had never actually known.
One of her brothers moved to Vermont for better opportunities and found trhem in plenty, marrying his employer’s daughter and becoming a land holder. This allowed him to invite the rest of the family to join him (except for the father, who died on the journey). Vermont was far less developed than Massachusetts, providing more opportunities for men, but fewer for women.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 - 17:00
I'm blogging a new book starting today, which will probably run for about ten days worth of posts. The early 19th century romance of Charity and Sylvia is "unique" only in how well documented it was, due to both being prolific correspondents, both being poets (a context for recording their emotional lives in more detail than might otherwise have happened), and due to their families being supportive enough of their "marriage" to have turned their papers over to a local historian rather than destroying them (though much of their correspondence had been destroyed at various crucial points in their lives). Like many other iconic f/f couples, studying their lives is important not simply for the particularity, but also for what it says about the possibilities for women generally. (And--as with Anne Lister--for the incidental documentation of a wider informal network of women whose romantic interests were for other women.)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Preface
The book opens with a description of a pair of cut silhouettes, framed with a lock of hair and labeled with the names of the two women. There follows an overview of their lives (which are then covered in much more detail in the chapters). Both women had determined not to marry. Both came from large families, though of different character. They met in 1807 and set up a household together where the continued as an acknowledged couple for 44 years. All their neighbors and relatives knew they were a couple and used the language of marriage for them, though the law treated them as two single women, e.g., for tax purposes. They lived gender-coded roles, with Charity taking on the husband-coded activities and Sylvia the wife-coded ones. After death, their relatives buried them together with a single headstone.
The author asserts that their sexuality must have been an “open secret” as “marriage was considered an inherently sexual institution.” In small communities, social harmony relied on people quietly overlooking facts that would disrupt society. And it may be noteworthy that female couples of that era usually dreamed of rural retreats rather than longing for urban anonymity. Charity and Sylvia’s lives were deeply intertwined with their families and community. They were accepted even when not entirely approved of. They were active with church and charities, supported their relations in sickness and hardship, and supported the local economy in the structure of their tailoring business. They were considered pillars of the community. Their remarkable union was even documented in a newspaper during their lifetimes, though without giving their names.
Charity (the elder) had numerous romantic relationships with women before meeting Sylvia, and her earlier life was the subject of gossip and rumor. Perhaps for that reason, she arranged for most of her writings, memoirs, and letters written to intimate friends to be destroyed. Sylvia, who survived her, had no such attitude and preserved all their documents after Charity’s death, though some items may have been weeded out. After Sylvia’s death, their papers were given to a local historian.
Stories like this one emphasize how spotty the historic record is for f/f couples, as so many women did destroy their papers (or their surviving relatives destroyed them out of a concern for the family’s reputation).
This introductory chapter concludes with a review of the available documentation.
[Note: A couple of observations that apply to the entire book. The chapters are numerous but very short, which is why I’ll be clustering them for the blog. Cleves often assigns thoughts, feelings, reactions, and actions to her subjects that are note cited to specific documentation, but neither are they explicitly framed as rooted in the author’s imagination. It is sometimes difficult to tell when she is speculating and when she may be summarizing actual data that isn’t supported by quoted material. She brings in contextual material about female same-sex relationships that are more explicit regarding sexuality, such as details from the lives of Anne Lister and from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then speculates that Charity and her various intimate friends may have engaged in similar practices. These approaches make for better storytelling and provide a richer picture of what their lives may have been, but at the expense of historical clarity. The undiscerning reader can easily come away with the impression that these various interpolations are factual rather than imaginative.]
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Monday, June 16, 2025 - 07:00
Sometimes I envision a broad-scope historical understanding of the dynamics of gender and sexuality as being like a collage of scraps of colored paper. Each individual book or article has a specific take on the question, and they don't always align with each other, but as each is pasted in place, a larger picture develops that is independent of the precise nature of each piece of paper. And--of course--I must never lose sight of the fact that the person pasting them in place (that is, me) has a vision for the overall work that affects how the collage is put together. History is never simple and coherent. We must move back and forth between standing at a distance to see that composed picture and zooming in to read the writing on the individual scraps.
With this post, I'm caught up on the rather large set of articles I'd managed to write up in advance. I've been working on a fascinating book, which I'll post in smaller pieces (though probably not one chapter at a time, as the chapters are very short). Then I have three more books on US topics lined up. One thing I'm finding is that even in books specifically focusing on American queer history, there's a lot of reliance on British material and examples. It makes me curious about the overall similarities and differences between the British and American lesbian experiences have been (during the centuries when both existed to compare). I don't feel like I'm there quite yet, but it's a note to jot down in my outline for the book project.
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LHMPFull citation:
LaFleur, Greta. “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America.” Early American Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2014, pp. 469–99.
This article challenges the strict version of “social construction” of sexuality by reviewing the evidence that 18th century Americans had an extensive vocabulary for identifiable and categorizable variations in sexual behavior and gender presentation. At the same time, the author does not claim a multi-century continuity of certain gender/sexuality concepts, rather than certain concepts have recurred at different times. [Note: compare Valerie Traub’s “cycles of salience.”]
One question she examines is whether “gender” (as a concept of performative presentation distinct from anatomy) existed as a concept in 18th century America. A relevant context is that scientific advances at that time had developed an elaborate vocabulary for describing sexual and gender differences among plants and animals, that could be available for applying to humans. (Note: the gender theories of Joan Scott, Judith Butler, and Denise Riley are credited as background for the discussion.) This article is not a study of specific texts, but rather a higher-level consideration of 18th century gender concepts as a whole.
Changes to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality occurring in the 1790s shook up social attitudes, but this was part of a larger shakeup that considered class inequities, colonial dynamics, religious attitudes especially concerning Christianity vs. Islam, and differing governmental structures. Many issues were being re-examined and gendered norms and expectations were shifting drastically. (As background, the author notes the work of Laqueur and Trumbach.)
An example is given from an English conduct manual republished in America in 1791 that inveighs against behaviors framed as crossing gender lines, such as make-up on men and male-coded dress styles on women (such as tailored riding habits). Also relevant is the popularity of cross-dressing narratives involving women such as Hannah Snell (British) and Deborah Sampson (American) who demonstrated a cultural category that was understood to have certain characteristics and scripts. When race intersected gender, popular opinion distinguished degrees of “womanliness” that were not available to racialized women, essentially creating alternate gender categories.
The “legibility” of gender was a concern—that is, the ability to identify what gender category someone belonged to based on consistent and universal cues. Ways in which women were labeled as being “masculine” were evaluated in inconsistent ways, with arguments for women’s education and political participating praising “manliness” in women, while in other behavioral fields even feminists decried male-coded activities such as sport and hunting. Satire and caricature used masculinity to attack women in certain fields, such as writing. Individuals who failed to fit neatly into binary gender categories (most notably the Chevalier d’Eon) became celebrities, indicating a fascination with a pluralistic understanding of gender.
Conduct literature pushed the idea that men and women should stick to their “natural state” but there was no clear consensus as to exactly what those states were. Feminists such as Wollstonecraft argued that a woman’s state could hardly be “natural” if society had to work so hard to keep her in it.
The existence of an elaborate vocabulary for gender/sexuality argued for the existence of conceptual categories matching that vocabulary, for women, such as: sapphists, tribades, amazons, female husbands, viragos, tommies, and “unsexed females.”
The article’s conclusion returns to Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance, noting that the development of gender theorizing in the later 20th century has misled historians to dismiss the possibility that similar concepts could have existed earlier. Instead, LaFleur argues that cycles of “gender trouble” have recurred, with societies experiencing parallel periods of gender disruption without the existence of a continuous through-line connecting those periods.
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Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 10:00
How much do general social anxieties around demographics and sexuality interact with each other? I've seen a number of historians connect early 19th century concerns about falling birthrates with increasingly controlling attitudes towards non-procreative sex. But is there cause and effect? We could look around today's America and ask "is the nativist anxiety about white birthrates tied in any way to surges of hostility against marginalized genders and sexualities? To be sure, I've occasionally seen anti-trans comments to the effect of "they're destroying their reproductive protential." And it definitely feels like there's a connection between anxieties around white birthrates and anti-abortion forces. But the current picture is far more complex than that. The dynamics were likely to have been similarly complex in the 19th century. The cyclical recurrence of "sex/gender panics" and the ways in which they manifest would be worth studying as a topic on its own, just as the cyclicity of feminist progress and repression is worth studying. Once you see it, the whole illusion of unidirctional social progress evaporates. We may start each cycle from a different status quo, but we never seem to solve the underlying issues and anxieties that generate the next cycle.
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Freedman, Estelle B. 1982. “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics” in Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects: 196-215
This article mostly concerns attitudes toward m/f sex, so my summary is going to focus fairly narrowly on the high-level basic premise and the specifically f/f parts.
Freedman examines three parallel but separate topics in sexual history: ideology (prescriptive opinions), behavior (evidence for what people were actually doing), and “politics” (by which she means activities intended to change sexual practice or attitudes, as distinct from simple statements about what was considered correct behavior). These three topics interact, but historians have often assigned causation between them in ways not supported by the evidence. For example, looking at declining fertility rates in certain populations and ascribing it to conduct literature that prescribes control of sexuality, rather than looking for changes in sexual practice that avoided pregnancy. Another example involves conduct literature that asserted 19th century women’s disinterest in sex, while ignoring both rational reasons women might be less than enthusiastic (such as fear of pregnancy and lack of sexual satisfaction) and evidence from surveys that contradicted the claim that women had low sexual desire.
A decline in fertility in the later 19th century was paralleled by an increase in public concerns about female masturbation and lesbianism. (Male anti-masturbation literature had become prevalent a century previous.) There was a rising suspicion toward girls’ same-sex crushes at school, while a survey (taken in the 1920s among adult women about their younger experiences) reported that of women born after 1850, a majority had masturbated to orgasm and 20% of college-educated women had been involved in lesbian relationships. Did an increase in non-procreative sex cause a decline in birthrates that then created anxiety about the causes? Or did the decline in birthrate leave authorities casting about for a correctable cause, who then pointed the finger at pre-existing that had made no difference?
Women’s intimate same-sex relationships had long been considered acceptable and not considered “lesbian” (regardless of whether individual relationships had an erotic component) until sexologists began pathologizing them. [Note: I’m grateful to Freedman for challenging Faderman’s assumption that 19th century women were incapable of experiencing sexual desire and that therefore Boston Marriages were never erotic.]
Although the preceding discussion is included in the introductory part of the article, the remainder is entirely focused on m/f sex.
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Saturday, June 14, 2025 - 20:30
Psychoanalyzing the fiction of earlier ages has been a popular, if often misguided sport. In particular, when characters' intimate friendships are analyzed from contemporary angles, while ignoring the context when the work was written, we find out more about the literary critic's mind than the minds of the author or the characters. The "social constructionist" approach needs to cut both ways: if a character cannot properly be labeled "lesbian" because orientation categories hadn't been invented yet, then neither can that character be dismissed as "perverted" if the social constructions of their own day would not frame them as such. These are the debates playing out in analysis of the novel Ormond.
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Comment, Kristin M. 2005. “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic” in Early American Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 57–78.
The novel Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) maybe the earliest American literary depiction of a passionate romantic relationship between women. Criticism of the work has tended to reflect the attitudes toward women’s same-sex relationships prevalent in the critic’s own era, rather than considering it within its own context.
This literary analysis situates it within the cultural debates and anxieties prevalent in the Anglophone world around 1800, including the “sex panic” in the wake of the French revolution that led to something of a backlash in England (and to a lesser extent in America) around women’s sexuality in general, but in turn led to some interesting explorations in fiction of the nature and limits of women’s intimate relations with each other.
Ormond focuses around several prominent female characters, in particular the intimate friendship between Constantia and Sophia, but also including the “male-identified” Martinette (who is held up as something of a bad example, due to a somewhat bloodthirsty enthusiasm for revolution) and others. The generally positive and supportive relationships between the female characters are contrasted with more destructive dynamics between the male characters.
American reactions to the French revolution differed in certain aspects from English reactions, with Americans initially celebrating the French cause and American women leveraging debates over women’s rights. However with the turn of the century, enthusiasm for the excesses of the revolution waned, and some of the momentum for women’s rights with it.
Despite American and English differences, the two strands of literature both saw women’s virtue as reflecting the strength and morality of the state, manifesting as a debate around controlling women’s bodies. This is the context in which Ormond depicts the specter of the most extreme version of female autonomy: women so closely bonded to each other that male interests are excluded entirely.
The 18th century had seen something of an explosion of literature (English and French) depicting lesbian interactions, generally with a sense of titillation but in some cases for satiric purposes. But the absence of similar literature in America cannot be taken as an absence of interest, either literary or real. The article quotes French travel writer Moreau de St. Méry discussing in the 1790s how Philadelphian women might be averse to hearing sexual language, but “are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex.”
The romantic relationship between Constantia and Sophia in Ormond is described and acted out in line with the ideals of romantic friendship, but it includes a physicality that is less common. And the central conflict of the novel is the competition between Sophia and Ormond for Constantia’s affection. Ormond’s reaction is hostile and jealous, establishing for the reader that there is a potential reason for jealousy in the strength of the women’s bond. The novel’s author uses various motifs to contradict the sapphic potential, again, recognizing that potential.
The potential for female same-sex erotics was certainly in the public awareness in the 18th century. The lesbian rumors/slanders about Marie Antoinette were rife. Military cross-dressing narratives and female husband stories felt the need to deny any sexual element when a female-bodied person living as a man flirted with women or married, as when a news account of Continental Army soldier Deborah Sampson’s romantic interactions with women commented that they were inspired by “sentiment, taste, [and] purity” and that “animal love, on [Sampson’s] part was out of the question.” Clearly it wasn’t entirely out of the question if there was a need to deny it.
Thus, readers of Ormond would have been well aware of the potential for such an intense and intimate love between two women to take an erotic turn. If such a possibility had been unthinkable, there would have been no need for the author to deny it.
The character of Martinette in Ormond helps to situate non-normative sexuality as a “foreign” element—a common theme in the early modern period—both by her birth and by her association with France. This was another way of acknowledging sapphic possibilities while insulating the “virtuous” characters from any taint.
Despite repeated attempts to heterosexualize the female characters in Ormond, the male characters play a very marginal role and a repeatedly shown to be inessential to the women’s emotional and economic lives, highlighting the potential for full female self-sufficiency within a truly “companionate” relationship of the type beginning to be idealized for (but rarely achieved in) heterosexual marriage. The titular character fails to win Constantia by wooing her and resorts to attempting violence, viewing her as a prize or possession, not a love object.
The author concludes that literary representations of romantic friendship must be understood not simply in the context of the idealized image of that type of relationship, but also in the context of the anxieties and power struggles around female autonomy and lesbian possibility. Literature was one of the tools for recognizing and trying to contain these potentials as a means of social control.
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Friday, June 13, 2025 - 19:00
I'm not completely allergic to "lit crit" articles (by which I make a fine-grained distinction from "literary criticism" but perhaps one that is idiosyncratic), but I confess I find them far less useful for the Project than articles written from a historian's angle. I guess it's because lit crit feels like it's more about the reception of the topic in question by a modern audience than it is about the historic context of the topic itself. Perhaps that means I'm wronging this journal article in classifying it as "lit crit" because it's very much about the historic context of Fuller's life and writings. It just...feels very slippery and squishy.
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Wood, Mary E. 1993. “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” in American Literature 65: 3-4.
Given the prominence of the word “lesbianism” in the title of this article, I found it less interesting than I hoped. Margaret Fuller was a prominent American writer and feminist in the first half of the 19th century. The theme of this article is how her writings and opinions around various romantic connections she had with women illustrate the tensions around the dividing line between acceptable and praiseworthy Romantic Friendship and the types of relationships between women that were felt to go beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
In general, this article leans more toward literary criticism than social history. There is a review of literature on Romantic Friendship and the history of sexuality in the 19th century, examining how relationships that were described with strongly romantic and sensual language could be seen as not transgressing social norms. (See, for example, Smith-Rosenberg 1975 and Lillian Faderman 1981.) Two strains of thought on this topic are: 1) that 19th century female friendships were never “lesbian” and that was why they were acceptable; or 2) that all such female friendships can be considered to be within a broad “lesbian continuum” regardless of whether they were erotic, thus reducing the meaningfulness of the term “lesbian.” Wood looks at a middle path where 19th century society was constantly, if silently, negotiating how far female friendships could go without crossing the line.
Wood identifies places in Margaret Fuller’s writings where she appears to be self-aware of reaching or crossing those lines, such as when she wrote to one intimate friend, “I build on our friendship now with trust, for I think it is redeemed from ‘the search after Eros’.” In passages like this, Fuller recognizes the potential for eros (thus negating framing #1) and deliberately steps back from it (thus negating framing #2).
Fuller was hardly the only writer who recognized that this boundary existed, well before intimate friendships were pathologized by medical sexologists. Advice literature aimed at women and girls cautions them to view their same-sex friendships as “not the real thing…but rather a foreshadowing of love” that must be put in second place after marriage. Close same-sex bonds were essential to the homosocial divisions of society, but there was a constant policing of those bonds to ensure they didn’t exclude men and marriage entirely.
In her feminist writings, Fuller finds an uneasy balance between attacking the notion of women’s inherent difference from men, and accepting the idea that certain types of opinions, interests, and literature were inherently gendered.
Overall, far less interesting than I hoped, and the examples from Fuller’s writing that are supposed to illustrate a “lesbian” sensibility are rather weak.
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