Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 6
June 28, 2025
Romantic Friendships and the "Sex Instinct"
As noted previously, the number of the entries is going to get a bit weird for a bit. But since I don't expect that much of anyone besides me pays attention to the numbering, this is no big deal. The most relevant part is that I've identified which article I want to slot into #500, so now I have to keep track of that as I fill in what comes before.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #471 Martin 1994 These Walls of Flesh About LHMP Full citation:Martin, Sylvia. 1994. “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 243-266
Martin uses the writings of early 20th c Australian poet Mary Fullerton, and in particular numerous poems related to her long-term relationship with Mabel Singleton, to explore the debate among historians around the question of romantic friendship and lesbian sexuality. [Note: Fullerton was born in 1868 and much of the discussion concerns solidly 19th century topics, so I consider the article in-scope for the Project.]
Much of the article reviews and discusses the evolving scholarship around the intersection of female friendship and lesbian history, which she refers to as the “romantic friendship versus lesbianism debate.” This debate has played out in works such as:
Smith-Rosenberg 1975 Rich 1908 Faderman 1981 Moore 1992 Newton 1984 Stanley, L. 1992. “Romantic Friendship? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography” in Women’s History Review, 1, 2: 193-216. (Not blogged yet)Much of the tension has derived from the competing programs of valorizing women’s social (but non-sexual) bonds in the face of patriarchal framings that view relationships between women of any type as being inherently less relevant than the relationships to men, and the work of historians of lesbian history who view the active “unsexualization” of romantic friendships as queer erasure deriving from a discomfort with the idea that sex might sully the “purity” of those friendships. Even concepts such as Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” can be seen as downplaying an essential difference between sexual and non-sexual relationships in a way that undermines the meaningfulness of the category “lesbian.”
On the one side, we have positions such as Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg who argue that romantic friendships must have been inherently non-sexual because women were socialized to consider themselves non-sexual beings, and besides which romantic friendships couldn’t have been social acceptable (as they were) if there were anything sexual about them, plus nobody was a lesbian until the sexologists invented the concept. On the other side, we have positions such as Stanley 1992 and Moore 1992 who document the policing of 18-19th century female friendships that were felt to stray into “dangerous” sexual territory, indicating that people of the time certainly acknowledged the possibility that female friendship could have a sexual component. Both poles have contributed to failures of the historical imagination: either ignoring sexual potential or over-emphasizing it.
At this point, Martin returns to her Australian poet and women with similar lives, discussing how their lives have been treated by biographers through one or the other framing, either overlooking potential support for a lesbian interpretation (or viewing incontrovertible evidence as a “problem” to be explained), or assuming sexual relations against a background of ambiguity. Martin asks the question “Why is the lesbian such a problem to theorizing friendship?” She attempts to answer that question in terms of the gendering of mind-body duality and how the “woman as body” is pushed toward an interpretation focused on motherhood and nurturing, as well as a phallocentric definition of sex that denies lesbians the ability to participate in it. Thus there is no space within these frameworks for an embodied sexuality between women that is not an imitation of some other dynamic.
Even within the field of lesbian history, there is a conflict between envisioning a “utopian” image of an era when f/f relationships could be free of the suspicion of sexuality, and a desire to define lesbianism as defined by sexual desire.
[Note: The article spends a lot of time on theorizing, which I have condensed greatly.]
Returning once more to Mary Fullerton’s life, the article looks at hear own words and finds various potential interpretations. Fullerton was a feminist and socialist activist, was proud of her unmarried state, and asserted that she lacked the “sex instinct,” while engaging in a close friendship with a woman with whom she co-habited for almost four decades. Such a self-description in such a context would seem to support interpretation of her life as a classic non-sexual romantic friendship (if somewhat behind the historic curve, as the relationship started in 1909). However further examination of her love poems complicates the question. Her expressions of passion are spiritual but also bodily. Physical interaction is the means for spiritual unity. Further, we find that her definition of “sex instinct” was tied up in procreation. For her the “sex instinct” was the animal urge that drove reproduction—a drive that was not as strong in more “evolved” individuals. [Note: We shall overlook potentially problematic interpretations of this position for the moment.] This leaves room for seeing her poetry as representing an erotic same-sex desire that she viewed as entirely separate from the “sex instinct” she denied having.
Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: AustraliaMisc tags: romantic friendshipEvent / person: Mary Fullerton View comments (0)
June 27, 2025
Charity and Sylvia: The End of the Story
This finishes up Cleves' book on Charity and Sylvia. As I noted in a previous blog, the entry numbers are going to be a bit jumbled for a while, both because I'd accidentally skipped a run of numbers and because I've already assigned a number to a book that's taking some time to write up, for logistical reasons. In the mean time, I have a bunch of short articles ready to go, which will take me through the end of Pride Month, after which I won't hold myself to the "post every day" schedule. It's been a fun challenge, but I have other projects that need to move forward as well!
One "fun" project has been an in-depth statistical study of what people have nominated over the years for the Best Related Work Hugo in all of its several forms. The results show some interesting dynamic interactions between categories as people try to find places to nominate works that don't quite fit, or as types of works shift from category to category as they are reorganized and expanded. Having done some initial work on the history of the category--as well as pulling the basic nomination data--I'm now slogging through the process of looking up each nominee and coding it for format (initially, always "book", but more recently rather variable), genre (e.g., biography, reference, criticism, humor), and specific topic. I've been pointed to some previous surveys of the category that tended to focus on the winners (or at most the finalists), but I think I'll be adding something new to the field.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491k Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 19 & Afterword About LHMP Full 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 19 & Afterword
Chapter 19: Sylvia Drake | W 1851
Sylvia Drake was 66 when Charity died and had not left her side for over 40 years. Family and neighbors commented on what a shock it would be for her to be on her own, with loneliness a common theme in their condolence letters. Some came close to recognizing that Sylvia was the equivalent of a widow, using that word, but she was denied the social recognition and status that widowhood normally conferred.
Sylvia lived for another 16 years, wearing mourning black. Initially, she remained in their shared home and continued their business, but after half a decade, she found herself unable to continue working at the same intensity and reduced her sewing to family only.
Eight years after Charity’s death, Sylvia moved in with her widowed brother, who needed medical care. At the age of 83, in 1868, Sylvia died. The family buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.
As with so many aspects of their life, Charity and Sylvia’s wills reflected a marriage-like status, while also reflecting a more egalitarian life than m/f marriage offered. Charity left all her share in their joint property to Sylvia, and Sylvia in turn distributed her legacy equally between both their families, but with a feminist twist: largely leaving it to female relatives who were either unmarried or were poorly supported by their husbands.
The rest of the chapter uses the Drake family finances to illustrate the gendered dynamics of property law and practices at the time.
Afterword
This chapter reviews the nature of the evidence for C&S’s lives and the means by which it was preserved and kept in public awareness. Even into the mid 20h century, local tradition preserved memories of the two as a positive example of female devotion. Eventually, the tacit veil of ambiguity began to be removed and local historians began celebrating them as lesbian foremothers , after struggling against the “we can’t really know” crowd. [Note: Which included Lillian Faderman, who included them under confident assertions that early 19th century women could not possibly have imagined participating in anything more than chaste kisses.]
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 26, 2025
What Could Women Do?
When constructing fictional narratives of the past, we often run into absolute statements along the lines of "women couldn't...," "women didn't...," "women always..." But when we look at the detailed truths of history, we usually find a lot of "women couldn't unless they..." and "women didn't typically..." and "women always...except when..." Once we get past the falsity of absolute statements, we need to get past a blythe assumption of exceptionalness, fighting our way to a nuanced particularity of the circumstances in which some women could, did, and didn't--with an understanding of the costs and tradeoffs and consequences.
Historical fiction usually centers around people who are atypical in some fashion--perhaps even extraordinary. And historical romance has conventions that often stretch the bounds of plausibility. (Young, handsome, unmarried dukes with no venereal discase anyone?) So when we're designing our historical sapphists, how obligated are we to make our characters more plausible than the standards straight characters are held to? That's a question that haunts me both as an author and as a reader, and in the end it's a question that each author grapples with on their own.
What are the historic structures that can be bent with little consequence for reader reception? Which are the ones that will start to throw readers out of the story? How many readers? To what degree? Where is the line between historical fiction and historic fantasy--not the historic fantasy of overt elements like magic and dragons, but the historic fantasy that has become unmoored from the details of ordinary existence that should have context and consequence?
Which readers will notice that unmooring, and how much will they care? Will they care if an early 19th century widow acts oblivious to the expectations for her state? Will they care if a woman engages in a profession that would have been hedged about with restrictions and handicaps because of her sex...but encounters none of those? Will they care if a woman carries a noble title that there was no legal way for her to hold in the stated time and place? Will they care if a character has an anachronistic worldview regarding sexuality? And which of these are essential to the story the author wants to tell as opposed to being dismissed as simply not being important enough to reflect?
Actual people in history often surprise us--as when Charity and Sylvia are able to become accepted and cherished by their community as a recognized couple. But it is the details of their path to that acceptance that make their story plausible. Charity's early missteps that showed her which hazards she needed to avoid. Sylvia's diplomatic negotiations to maintain family ties. The particularities of small-town New England life that allowed for possibilities of a specific shape and nature, but would not have allowed for others. (For example, it's unlikely that they would have received the same acceptance if Charity wore male clothing and took up a specifically male-coded profession. Either of those in isolation, perhaps, but probably not in the context of being part of a recognized female couple. For that, they would probably have needed to relocate to a community where she could pass entirely--as some such couples did.)
For myself as a reader, there are some historical infelicities that will move a book from "historical fiction" to "historic fantasy" in a way that the author may not have intended. And if my brain was set for the expectation of history, it may be the difference between whether I enjoy the reading experience. (There have been books where I could only enjoy the story by flipping that switch in my brain.) As an author, I enjoy the challenge of writing stories that both follow history and provide a desired HEA, within the constraints of the times. It's the same way that I enjoy the challenge of writing strict meter poetry--the point isn't simply slavishly following a particular scheme of rhyme and meter, but of doing that and creating a work of beauty and emotional catharsis. And, as always, the goal of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project isn't to say "you must write this specific type of story with this specific level of historic accuracy" but to provide tools to know that whatever choices you make are informed ones.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491j Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 17 & 18 About LHMP Full 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 17 & 18
Chapter 17: Diligent in Business 1835
The chapter opens with a detailed dramatized episode from a typical workday for C&S, cited to a diary entry, but not indicated as direct quotes and clearly elaborated from the author’s imagination. This is the sort of concern I’ve noted previously about the fictionalizing of details.
The emphasis of the chapter is on the exhausting balance between having a constant stream of sewing workload and the material comfort and stability it provided. In general, unmarried women lived lives of poverty or dependence or both. There were many examples around C&S of what happened to women who either had no skills or were too old or infirm to earn their own room and board. C&S recorded endless long working hours and the ill health it generated, including repetitive stress injuries and eyestrain.
While they never became rich, even by local standards, their standard of living and personal property were equivalent to the household of a more traditional married couple, even through multiple general financial crises of the early 19th century. In general, they avoided debt, and many of their customers paid in kind, helping to buffer the consequences of financial panics, even as some relatives were badly affected.
The stability of their business also meant they were able to employ a succession of young women as assistants and apprentices. They provided not only wages, but training that the women could then take with them to support themselves or even to set up their own shops with additional employees. Sewing itself was only part of the job—the more skilled aspect was patterning and the tailoring of male clothing.
Their particular path to economic independence would fade somewhat in mid-century with the invention of the sewing machine and commercial printed patterns.
Chapter 18: The Cure of Her I Love 1839
In 1839, Charity suffered what was likely a heart attack. This came after a lifetime of various acute and chronic ailments that were endemic in the 19th century. Both women experienced chronic headaches, including migraine symptoms, as well as the usual round of infectious diseases. Treatments of the time were largely bleeding and quack medicines, including regular treatments to “purge the system” (i.e., induce vomiting and diarrhea). One medical principle was that a medicine could be considered effective if it produced a violent effect, even if that effect was debilitating. There were also treatments using traditional herbal remedies that likely had a better cost-benefit ratio.
In general, this chapter discusses ailments mentioned in C&S’s correspondence and diaries, with the treatments either used or recommended, as well as discussing the general state of medical practice at the time.
The 1839 attack, though frightening, was survived. Charity lived another 12 years after that to the age of 74. During that period, she would lose siblings and friends, one by one. Another heart attack took her life in 1851.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 25, 2025
Charity & Sylvia: Family and Community
One of the things I love about the level of detail in this biography is how it shows the day-to-day interactions among family and community. Yes, C&S were accepted and cherished by their community, but that doesn't mean everything was constant sunshine and roses. They had family squabbles. People may have accepted them as a couple but that doesn't mean there were never any qualms about the propriety of women living without a man in charge of the household. C&S had a comfortable and secure life at the cost of an unrelenting work schedule, but was it that different from the unrelenting schedule either would have had as a farmwife? When discussing their religious lives, I keep getting the feeling that Cleves sees them as considering their relationship in some way "sinful" but I would have like a better comparison with what other people in their circle considered "sinful" in their own lives. This was a religious community strongly focused on the sins of everyday life and everyone's need for religious redemption, so I question whether they were unique in this.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491i Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 15 & 16 About LHMP Full 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 15 & 16
Chapter 15: Dear Aunts 1823
C&S became “aunts” with no distinction between them to the many Drake children who lived in the same community. (Sylvia’s siblings all had large families.) Similarly, in visits to Massachusetts, Sylvia was “aunt” to the children of Charity’s siblings. This next generation had never known a time when C&S were not a couple. Theh two families were further entwined by naming practices, with the names “Charity” and “Bryant” being given to Drake children (alongside several “Sylvia”s). The two women had a special connection to their name sakes (though they had close relations with all the children), making presents of clothing and, in one case, paying for college fees and books. This college-bound nephew was functionally adopted by them, with the assent of his father who felt unable to provide for him financially.
Arrangements were in train to send one niece to Mount Holyoke shortly after it opened, but for unknown reasons the plan fell through. That niece (one of the Sylvias) may have had a special connection with the pair. She never married, and after Charity’s death she became a companion to her Aunt Sylvia.
In general, this chapter details the lifelong connections between C&S and the younger generations, with many specifics of the material support they provided. Their prosperous and stable tailoring business both enabled this support and provided a model of alternatives to the difficult life of a farmer.
Not all relations were entirely positive. Evidently Charity was generous with unrequested advice and wasn’t shy about pointing out when she felt the family was slighting them. And Charity’s relations with her father and stepmother were sour well beyond their deaths due to a very awkward inheritance.
C&S’s poetry was another legacy that connected them to family, not only in the gifts of poems they provided, but in helping inspire others to take up literary aspirations.
The chapter also discusses the many female apprentices the couple took in and trained, who became a part of their family and in some cases referred to them as “mothers.” Many children in the larger community called the two “aunt” without any family connection, and several girls with no direct family tie were named after them.
Chapter 16: Stand Fast in One Spirit 1828
C&S founded and contributed to a charitable organization, the Weybridge Female Benevolent Society, with many Drake women also signing on to the charter. The organization also had a religious character. This chapter includes a long discussion of religious movements of the early 19th century. It also discusses their religious associations and the positive relations they had with the ministers of their local church. Correspondence with the ministers shows them being treated as a couple, “in one spirit, with one mind.” These relations recognized their serious spirituality, as well as the material support they gave to the church, and their social leadership in the community.
Through all this, the two often express private thoughts about spiritual failure and the state of their souls. [Note: But as I’ve commented earlier, this should be compared to the general tenor of religious thought in their context. I feel like the author implies too strongly that they felt a uniquely heavy burden of sin from their relationship.]
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 24, 2025
Charity and Sylvia in the Context of Religion and Gender Roles
No extra commentary today. I've been bopping all over the place getting my bike tuned up and meeting up with friends in Sacramento and I'm exhausted.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491h Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 13 & 14 About LHMP Full 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 13 & 14
Chapter 13: Wild Affections 1811
C&S were not immune from the sense that their relationship was, to some degree, sinful—even beyond the general Protestant attitude that everyone was sinful. There are references to hoping that repentance and Christ’s forgiveness would see them through. Their local Congregational church required a confession and being “born again” to be admitted to taking communion, and this was something they both sought in connection with their “wild affections”—a term they used, taken from a phrase that referred to extramarital sex. To some extent, the struggles they recorded around feeling sinful provide some of the strongest arguments for the sexual nature of their relationship (and that they classified what they were engaging in as “sex”). [Note: At the same time, this struggle should not be interpreted as indicating that they felt uniquely sinful for their relationship. All people were sinful, after all. One could find writings from a similar era by people in heterosexual marriages who felt that some aspect of their sex lives was “sinful.”]
It appears that C&S spent their entire relationship suspended in a balance of considering their sexual relations to be sinful, repenting their transgressions, and continuing to enjoy the erotic aspect of their union. Such are the contradictions of life. [Note: The latter part of this chapter engages in a close textual analysis to find coded euphemisms in their writing that would indicate specific sexual techniques they might have engaged in.]
Chapter 14: Miss Bryant Was the Man 1820
In the 1820 census records, Charity is listed as the “head of household” with “another woman” (Sylvia) also living at the residence. This was repeated for the 1830 census. In 1840, there was the addition of an employee residing there. Only the head of household was recorded by name until 1850 when the census began including the names of dependents.
The chapter goes on to explore the extent to which C&S inhabited gendered roles within their relationship. Although certain aspects assigned Charity the “husband” role and Sylvia the “wife,” this was not a case of a “female husband.” Charity always dressed in conventionally feminine ways. But being older, taking the lead in business, and a certain boldness in social interactions led to the community labeling her “the man” of the couple. And the language Charity used in addressing and referring to Sylvia matched language typically used by a man for his wife.
Local tax and land records listed Charity’s name first in the household, but also included Sylvia’s name (where a wife’s name would not have been listed). Yet their property was recognized as belonging to them in common.
(There follows a discussion of the structure of economic transactions in the early 19th century, including a constant economy of gift exchanges of food, carefully recorded.)
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 23, 2025
As If Married To Each Other
After I finish up Charity and Sylvia, the numbering on the LHMP entries may get jumbled for a while. I realized that I'd skipped a run of numbers and need to go back and fill them in. (I also realized when doing some database housekeeping that I'd failed to assign a number to a work that I'd blogged in a non-standard fashion.) And the book that I've already assigned the next (catch-up) number to (Gay American History) may well take longer to process than the remainder of the current book, so if I want to carry through with blogging every day for Pride Month, I need to do 3 more quick items to stay on track.
Why is Gay American History taking so long to review when it's basically an anthology of excerpts from historic documents? Normally those just involve typing up a list of the relevant contents. Ah, but I've started on another side project: a database of key vocabulary in primary sources. So working on a publication that's rich in primary source material means spending a lot of time creating vocabulary records. At some point I also want to go back and pull vocabulary from the hundreds of publications I processed before I dreamed up this side project, but that's a task for future-me. The idea is to know how people talked (or at least wrote) about erotic activity between women, how they described women engaging in such activity, and to a lesser extent, how they described relevant aspects of gender transgression. (The original idea was just to focus on sexual vocabulary, but there's been a little scope-creep.)
I've written on parts of this topic before, as in the podcast episode "When Did We Become Lesbians?" and the discussion of historic usage of "lesbian" versus "Sapphic". But there's a lot more nuance than the usage of one or two specific words. Some of the language is overtly hostile, some is vaguely euphemistic, some is technical jargon, some is gutter slang. But all together it can provide a picture of how your historic characters might have described themselves and their activities, or how they might have heard others talking about them. And let me assure you, there was always some way to talk about women who loved women, even in contexts where that was not understood as a fixed category.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491g Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 11 & 12 About LHMP Full 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 11 & 12
Chapter 11: The Tie That Binds July 1807
In a later memoir, Charity described Sylvia’s agreement as becoming “my help-meet and…companion.” The language of this statement is the language of marriage, from “consent” to “help-meet.” (“Help-meet” was a gendered term, indicating a wife.) If they had been an opposite sex couple, a statement of this type could have constituted a legal common-law marriage contract at the time. Although their union had no legal status, it eventually acquired that social standing in their community. Neighbors described them “as if…married to each other.”
Initially, however, Charity was cautious about making the nature of their relationship clear, using the press of work as the reason for staying in Vermont when she had originally planned to return to Massachusetts, and omitting mention of Sylvia in her letters. Her poetry, however, celebrated the union. Gradually, Sylvia was introduced into her letters, and some made the correct conclusions.
That first year, Charity was anxious that something might happen to separate them, as had happened in previous relationships. To protect against this, when she finally made a visit back to relatives in Massachusetts, she brought Sylvia with her. There was a round of visits over the summer, starting with her most sympathetic sister, who immediately embraced Sylvia as Charity’s “constant companion” and supported her decision to return to Vermont after her travels.
The visits included a meeting with Lydia, which confirmed to the latter her fears that Charity had definitively moved on. After that, Lydia’s previously constant letters ceased for several months.
Another fraught visit was to Charity’s parents, who had begged for “one last visit” feeling their impending mortality. The reunion was far from joyous, but left relations open for future visits from the couple. A visit to the brother who had previously banished Charity was similarly cool but satisfactory in tacitly accepting Sylvia as a member of the family.
A second meeting with Lydia cemented the conversion from rejected lover to friend, with Lydia resuming correspondence and always sending her love to Sylvia.
The final errand of their travels before returning to Vermont was Charity asking her brother to buy a ring on her behalf on his next trip to Boston.
Chapter 12: Their Own Dwelling 1809
1809 started off with C&S (which I’m going to shorthand from here on out) moving into a house, built specifically for them, and combining living quarters and a tailor’s shop. Economic and social conditions made it difficult for women to own property, but they benefitted from a work-around where a neighbor woman had inherited land in trust for her sons (to protect the inheritance from her husband’s control) and she gave C&S a lifetime lease on a parcel of it where they could build. This arrangement also protected them from the gossip that having a male landlord might have provoked.
They were not entirely protected against a general social anxiety about unmarried women living alone or in couples. The book notes two Philadelphia women arrested in 1792 for “co-habiting”—a term more typically applied to an unmarried m/f couple sharing living quarters. Bed-sharing by relatives or friends of the same sex had long been considered unremarkable, especially under circumstances where rooms and furniture were at a premium. By the mid 19th century, however, advice manuals were beginning to suggest that bed-sharing might lead to “mutual masturbation”—a typical way that same-sex erotics were characterized. [Note: This is one of those places where it isn’t clear whether literature of this type would be in circulation in rural New England. Also we aren’t anywhere near the mid century yet. So I don’t know that it’s reasonable to suggest that this concern would be in people’s minds. No positive evidence for this concern in their case is offered.]
As comparatives, the text notes Hannah Catherall and Rebecca Jones, who cohabited in Philadelphia in the 1760-1780s (this appears to be a different couple than mentioned previously) who were referred to in the Quaker community as “yoke-fellows” (a term that could refer to spouses) with no indication of disapproval. The text also notes Ponsonby & Butler and Lister & Walker, but I have doubts that either of those couples are a useful comparison for attitudes or awareness in rural New England.
Another unexpected hazard was the admiration of other unmarried women, who not only saw in C&S a model for their own personal ambitions, but sometimes tried to insert themselves into the middle of the relationship, as with one Mary Harvey whose initial gushing admiration for their arrangement shifted to romantic advances on Charity alone, which resulted in Charity solidly rebuffing her.
The house became a symbol for C&S’s relatives of the solidity of their commitments, and its upkeep (largely falling to Sylvia as the wife-analog) was a metric of their respectability. Despite some gendering of their roles, they always emphasized co-ownership of the house and of their resources.
It wasn’t long before they were financially able to expand the original 2-room structure to create a greater separation of public and private, and to allow for hosting the visits of relatives and friends. By 1821, they had the space and resources to hold a family Christmas dinner with perhaps a dozen guests. The tailor’s shop had expanded to include female apprentices, who were treated like daughters.
The surface acceptance did not entirely conceal underlying uneasiness and tensions. Sylvia’s mother came for an extended visit, but both were relieved when it concluded. Sylvia’s local brother, who had been the means for the couple to meet initially, rarely visited and Sylvia evidently called him out about it, then wrote remorsefully about her reaction.
On the other hand, when the couple were in the midst of expanding and renovating their house, community support was enthusiastic, and letters indicate they were on excellent terms with their landlady’s sons, who would eventually own the property.
[Note: Some of the relatives may have been influenced by the underlying expectations of homosociality. Two of Sylvia’s brothers noted that they stayed away because “there was no man to visit.” It could be possible to interpret this as feeling socially awkward about gender issues rather than sexuality issues.]
Eventually, the tensions eased and family loyalty proved stronger than disapproval.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 22, 2025
Charity's Girlfriends
I hope that some of the listeners to the podcast have been intrigued enough by the quick synopsis it gave of Charity and Sylvia's lives to follow up with the more extensive summary presented here in the blog--or even to track down a copy of the book for the full story. I don't often coordinate the blog and podcast quite this closely, but it's often the case that I'll do a run of articles on a theme in preparation for working up a podcast. The blog and podcast are intended to work in tandem, with the blog working on the academic side and the podcast working more on the general public side (even if it doesn't always feel like it). I know that about 200 people follow the podcast (or at least, we average around 200 downloads, though some of those may be bots). It's much harder to know how many people read the blog, without doing a lot of tedious digging through website stats. It's much easier to know how many people talk to me directly about how much they appreciate the blog: relatively few, but greatly appreciated!
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491f Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 9 & 10 About LHMP Full 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 9 & 10
Chapter 9: Charity and Lydia 1806
Lydia Richards was another schoolteacher who prized the opportunity the work gave her for freedom and avoiding marriage. When she came into Charity’s orbit, she expressed a desire “to be your constant companion.” They had first met half a dozen years earlier and felt an immediate bond that was disrupted when gossip forced Charity back to her parents’ home. The two kept up a correspondence through the Mercy years, though Lydia more faithfully than Charity. She repeatedly longed for “mutual love” “clasped in each other’s arms.” When Charity once again moved to the town where Lydia lived, this wish was fulfilled by an initial two-week visit to Lydia’s family.
After that initial visit, Charity and Lydia spent as much time as possible in each other’s company and wrote copious letters to fill the absences, including complaints of what could not be set down on paper. They exchanged gifts typical of those given by courting couples. Friction between Charity and her brother’s in-laws was making her living situation untenable, and Lydia began floating the idea that Charity move in with her family. Charity did so for two months, but during a visit the two made to another friend in a nearby town, word came from Lydia’s parents that she was to return alone.
There are suggestions that Lydia’s parents had found some sort of evidence of the true nature of the couple’s relationship. Despite Lydia’s pleas, Charity determined to accept an invitation from friends in Vermont, promising to continue loving Lydia forever.
Lydia’s continued letters reflect increasing longing for Charity’s love and return, but half a year later, Charity was still in Vermont and the letters became increasingly pleading and lonely. By the time a year had elapsed, Lydia heard from a third party that Charity had set up housekeeping with a younger woman in Vermont.
Only after an eventual visit from Charity, with Sylvia in tow, did Lydia acknowledge the end of her hopes, in a letter filled with bitter literary allusions. But after that, they realigned their relationship as a friendship that lasted until death. Lydia never did marry.
Chapter 10: Charity and Sylvia February 1807
The couple who invited Charity to join them in Vermont were distantly related—not uncommon in the small-town culture of New England. The husband was related to Charity’s mother, and the wife was the sister of Sylvia Drake. The family connections—however distant—may have helped people justify the bond that sprung up between them. Sylvia was initially anxious about the introduction of another single woman into their circle—one who had had the educational opportunities she lacked. Despite their differences in background, a romantic relationship began quickly.
Charity began work as a tailor and Sylvia apprenticed to her to keep up with the work. Two poems, written during the period when they were first getting acquainted and attributable to Sylvia, celebrate Spring as a time of budding romance and love, though adding further seasonal imagery of the eventual coming of winter. Initially, Charity had planned to stay for three months, and the anticipated end of the visit may have prompted Sylvia’s concern for the turning of the seasons.
Charity was beset by a steady stream of Lydia’s letters and omitted all mention of her new friend in response. Charity extended her visit, then extended it again. In mid-summer, Sylvia moved on to stay with a different family member—a typical arrangement for an unmarried woman being maintained by her family. The two promised to write, but this promise was unnecessary. A month later, Sylvia returned and they would never again be parted in the succeeding 44 years.
This time, Charity made some practical plans. Never again would a relationship be at the mercy of a host family’s scrutiny and disapproval. The amount of sewing work shew as receiving was enough to establish an independent household. She rented a room, while retaining the community good will of being part of a familial network. Charity wrote Sylvia asking her to join her. The sewing work was the cover to make their arrangement acceptable to the community. Charity would “hire” Sylvia as her assistant, thus bypassing questions of why Sylvia was no longer living with family members.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)
June 21, 2025
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia
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 NotesIn 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 Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8 This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Charity Bryant & Sylvia DrakeLinks 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 PatreonLinks to Heather Online
Website: http://alpennia.com Email: Heather Rose Jones Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop Bluesky: @heatherrosejones Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcastEphemeral Correspondence
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.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491e Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 7 & 8 About LHMP Full 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.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)June 20, 2025
Marriage Resistance is the First Clue
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.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491d Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 5 & 6 About LHMP Full 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.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAMisc tags: female co-habitationemotional /romantic bonds between womenlove poetrymarriage resistanceromantic friendshipEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)
