Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (3 page)

Before women could live as lesbians the society in which they lived had to evolve to accommodate, however grudgingly, the possibility of lesbianism—the conception needed to be formulated; urbanization and its relative anonymity and population abundance were important; it was necessary that institutions be established where they could meet women with similar interests; it was helpful that the country enjoyed sufficient population growth so that pressure to procreate was not overwhelming; it was also helpful that the issues of sexuality and sexual freedom became increasingly open; and it was most crucial that women have the opportunity for economic self-sufficiency that would free them from the constant surveillance of family. The possibility of a life as a lesbian had to be socially constructed in order for women to be able to choose such a life. Thus it was not until our century that such a choice became viable for significant numbers of women. This book traces the ways that happened.

“The Loves of Women for Each Other”:
“Romantic Friends” in the
Twentieth Century

The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so little should be said about them surprises me, for they are everywhere…. In these days, when any capable and careful women can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of “two hearts in counsel,” both of which are feminine.

—
Frances E. Willard,
Glimpses of Fifty Years,
1889

Ah, how I love you, it paralyzes me
—
It makes me heavy with emotion…. I tremble at the thought of you
—
all my whole being leans out to you…. I dare not think of your arms.

—
Rose Elizabeth Cleveland to
Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890

Early twentieth-century women, particluarly those of the middle class, had grown up in a society where love between young females was considered the norm, “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life,” where women’s love for one another was thought to “constitute the richness, consolation, and joy of their lives.”
¹
They could still envision their relationships as romantic friendship, and if sex entered into it they may have considered it somewhat irregular, but they did not feel compelled to spend too many daytime hours analyzing its implications.

Romantic friendship in Western society can be traced back hundreds of years, at least to the Renaissance. But it was just as sexologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century were grasping their pens to suggest that women who loved other women were abnormal that romantic friendship, especially in America, truly burgeoned. Its growth was stimulated by the increasing militancy of nineteenth-century feminists who were agitating together not only for suffrage but for more opportunities in education and the professions. Its development was fostered by their shared successes. By the end of the century, ambitious women of the middle class who loved other females no longer needed to resign themselves to marriage in order to survive. They could go to college, educate themselves for a profession, earn a living in a rewarding career, and spend their lives with the women they loved. Perhaps for the first time in history they could proclaim, as Enid does to her would-be male suitor in Florence Converse’s 1897 novel,
Diana Victrix:

I am not domestic the way some women are. I shouldn’t like to keep house and sew … It would bore me. I should hate it! Sylvia and I share the responsibility here, and the maid works faithfully. There are only a few rooms. We have time for our real work but a wife wouldn’t have…. Please go away! I have chosen my life and I love it!
²

Thousands of women such as Enid and Sylvia now banded together in colleges and in various professions, and they created a society of what the nineteenth century and earlier had seen as romantic friends. But there were significant differences between the relationships of these women and those of their predecessors: since they could support themselves, they were no longer economically constrained to give up their female loves in favor of matrimony, and they now had plausible excuses to resist social pressure toward marriage—they could not be adequate wives because they were engaged in pioneering in education and the professions. For the first time in American history, large numbers of women could make their lives with another woman.

Those females who enjoyed such privileges were, for the most part, of middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Among the rich higher education and professional pursuits were still considered entirely inappropriate for women, and among the poor there were no such options for many decades to come. Women from wealthy families who loved other women generally remained constrained to behave much as they would have in past centuries—they still suffered under tremendous and often inescapable pressure to marry “appropriately” at a proper age. And women from poor families who loved other women also continued to be limited. It was not easy for two working-class women to set up a home together on the wages they could earn through menial labor. Economically, long-term relationships continued to be most feasible between working-class women if one of them could pass as a male and get a man’s wages for a man’s work, as some had managed to do in earlier eras. But for women of the middle class, these new times made a whole new lifestyle possible.

The Educated “Spinster”

More than any other phenomenon, education may be said to have been responsible for the spread among middle-class women of what eventually came to be called lesbianism. Not only did it bring them together in large numbers within the women’s colleges, but it also permitted them literally to invent new careers such as settlement house work and various kinds of betterment professions in which they could be gainfully and productively employed and to create all-female societies around those professions. Although these ramifications were undreamt of when the first real college for women, Mount Holyoke, was established in 1837, those who believed in the sacred-ness of stringent sex role behavior or were intent on keeping females chained to domesticity were quick to sniff danger even then. As one writer observed in
The Religious Magazine
that year, the new education for women meant that all that was “most attractive in female manners” would be replaced by characteristics “expressly formed for acting a
manly
part upon the theatre of life…. Under such influence the female character is fast becoming masculine.” Despite warnings like that, women’s colleges continued to proliferate. Vassar was founded in 1865, Smith in 1872, Wellesley in 1875, Bryn Mawr in 1886. In the 1870s several universities such as Cornell and the University of Michigan also began to open their doors to females. By 1880, forty thousand women, over a third of the higher education student population in America, were enrolled in colleges and universities and there were 153 American colleges that they could attend.
³

But conservatives continued to be unhappy about the revolution in educational opportunities for females. Most of the attacks on women’s higher education centered on the ways in which it would render them unfit for the traditional roles that the writers believed vital to the proper functioning of society. Dr. Edward Clarke, for example, whose 1873 book
Sex in Education: or, A Fair Chance for Girls
continued to be printed for the next two decades, warned that study would interfere with women’s fertility, cursing them with uterine disease, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, and prolapsed uteri. Even into the twentieth century such writers, often imbued with racist and classist theories of eugenics, feared what they called “race suicide” and prophesied that since “the best [female] blood of American stock” went off to college and probably would not marry, the mothers of America would eventually all be “from the lower orders of society” and the country would be ruined.
⁴

Even worse, some writers eventually came to fear (not without cause) a problem they hardly dared to express: that higher education for females, especially in all-women colleges, not only “masculinized” women but also made men dispensable to them and rendered women more attractive to one another. One author of the 1870s, alarmed perhaps by decadent French novels such as
Mademoiselle de Maupin
(about an adventuress who has affairs with men and women indiscriminately) that were being translated into English and by the writings of the sexologists that were just beginning to emerge, hinted in the pages of
Scribner’s Monthly
at the sexual possibilities that might arise if large numbers of women had unlimited access to one another. However, he obviously did not feel free to be specific in his allegations:

It is not necessary to go into particulars … [but] such a system is fearfully unsafe. The facts which substantiate [this] opinion would fill the public mind with horror if they were publicly known. Men may “pooh! pooh!” these facts if they choose, but they exist. Diseases of body, diseases of imagination, vices of body and imagination—everything we would save our children from—are bred in these great institutions where life and associations are circumscribed, as weeds are forced in hot beds.
⁵

Perhaps understanding the potency of romantic friendship in nineteenth-century America, such writers could imagine where that sentiment might lead in the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances. They were not far from the mark, but for many young women these effects were fortunate rather than tragic.

Statistics corroborate that those who were interested in maintaining women in the narrow prison of heterosexuality as it was experienced by females in the nineteenth century were quite right in fearing the spread of higher education. Females who attended college were far less likely to marry than their uneducated counterparts. While only 10 percent of American women in general remained single between 1880 and 1900, about 50 percent of American college women at that time remained single. Fifty-seven percent of the Smith graduating class of 1884, at the height of women’s excitement over their new-found opportunities in education and the professions, never married. Marriage statistics for Vassar and Mount Holyoke were similar. Many of the most successful alumnae of that era were “spinsters.”
⁶

Undoubtedly some of them never married because most men in that era feared educated females and would not dare take them as wives. But others never married because they preferred to continue what they discovered in their women’s colleges—relationships with “kindred spirits,” other women who were interested in following the same dreams, with whom they thought it was far more possible to have a loving connection of equals than it was with a man. Many of those women paired with other female college graduates to establish same-sex households—“Boston marriages,” as they were sometimes called in the East where they were so common. Whether or not those relationships were usually sexual cannot be definitively known, but they were often clearly love relationships. The nineteenth century, observing them from the outside, would have called them romantic friendships. Eventually the twentieth century would come to call such relationships lesbian. But to most of those women themselves, who were on the historical cusp in this regard, the former term would have been anachronistic and the latter unacceptable.

Such same-sex relationships were far more preferable and even practical for many women than any form of heterosexuality would have been. As middle-class women who were born into the Victorian era, they could not with ease have indulged in affairs with men outside of wedlock. While some scholars have suggested that Victorian women’s “sexual restraint” existed more in ideology than fact, the evidence seems to support that position primarily with regard to sex within marriage.
⁷

Outside of marriage, women were still constrained by the double standard, which denigrated females who “slipped” sexually and made them pay. Wisdom had it that women could not trust men, since the “weaker sex” would always be at a disadvantage in the battle of the sexes. The
Ladies Home Journal
advised unmarried women in 1892: “Young men soon lose respect for a girl exactly in proportion as she allows them familiarity.” Such observations were not the purview of prescriptive literature alone. For example, in her book
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America,
Ellen Rothman quotes a letter from a woman of the period complaining that females are in danger if they dare even to expose their feelings to the opposite sex: “Woman should never confess her love lest the object of it … take advantage of [her].” And if an unmarried woman did let herself be “taken advantage of,” she was lost as a social being. Frances Willard, whose encomium to love between women opens this chapter, was undoubtedly typical in her response to a college classmate who was rumored to have had male lovers: