US and British suffrage movements existed at roughly the same time, but different approaches created a context for sharing tactics and experiences. This chapter looks at how US suffragists learned techniques and created alliances with their British counterparts in the early 20th century. These alliances also included transatlantic romantic relationships.
female comrades/friends
There is sometimes a fuzzy overlap between the depiction of bonds of friendship and bonds with romantic overtones. This tag identifies topics where the friendship interpretation is stronger but where the recognition of the importance of female friendship allows space for stronger feelings. This tag is distinguised from the “friendship” tag by the presence of a couple-like relationship but without romantic elements.
LHMP entry
This chapter expands on the previous. While chapter 2 focused on individual romantic/domestic relationships, this one looks at larger non-traditional households that might include couples (or not) as well as un-coupled women. The focus is on mutually supportive arrangements, not simply people sharing an address. These chosen families (to use a modern term) provided emotional, financial, and medical support for each other, as well as mentorship for younger suffragists. They might include biological or adopted children of the members.
This chapter looks at the personal lives of some prominent suffragists. It was not uncommon for such women to have been married to men at some point, and they might leverage their status as a widow to deflect concern about domestic partnerships with women. These arrangements disrupted heterosexual norms regardless of whether the women involved considered them to represent a specific “identity.”
Part of the overarching theme of this study is the tension between “respectability politics” and the essential reliance the suffrage movement had on women willing to disrupt social norms, specifically including norms of sexuality and gender presentation. The resonances with the “lavender menace” confrontations of the 1970s are inevitable (and noted specifically in the conclusion).
Introduction
In the later 18th century, there is a conflict in the English imagination between the foreign, dangerous, “female friends,” personified by the image of sapphic Marie-Antoinette, and the positive image of such celebrated English female couples such as Ponsonby and Butler, Seward and Sneyd. Hester Thrale personified this conflict, expressing deeply negative views of sexualized female relationships, but praising and even engaging in intimate (but not overtly sexual) relationships between women, such as Frances Barney.
This article is a conference proceeding rather than written for publication, therefore it has a somewhat more informal flavor than usual. It takes a methodological approach to questions of how to interpret images of two women in classical Greek art that would be interpreted as involving courtship motifs if the figures were two men or a man and a woman.
This paper considers the difficulty of tracing female alliances, due to gender differences in the types of records created and preserved. Women’s bonds are less commonly traceable in formal documents than men’s. Women’s letters provide one source for connections, even though many are written to men. The letter under consideration was written by lady Ralegh after her husband’s conviction for treason.
Tvordi’s article digs into the importance of female alliances for characters in early modern drama, and how those alliances represent a whole range of relationships including family, friendship, service, marriage resistance, and even desire. [Note: the topic of f/f desire in early modern drama is even more deeply examined by Walen 2005 https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4373] But given the imperatives of the “marriage plot,” these alliances are often broken or left behind in the play’s resolution.
This article looks at depictions of women and work in two scenes of the medieval Chester Mystery Play cycle. The plays were revised over their lifespan and these scenes were added fairly late—possibly the latter part of the 16th centuy--drawing on medieval legend rather than Biblical sources. The first of the scenes occurs in the Noah play and focuses on Noah’s wife, often played as a comic character as she first refuses to enter the Ark and then wants to divorce Noah to stay with her friends who are singing a drinking song as the waters rise.
While other papers in this volume look at relations between upper class waiting women and their aristocratic mistresses (whether in life or fiction), this study concerns itself with in-group relations among ordinary housemaids and women in service. One common life path for young women from rural households (whether of the gentry or lower) was to be placed in service with a large urban household with the expectation that this would not only provide income in the immediate future but would lead to wider opportunities for marriage.
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