Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (4 page)

A young woman who was not chaste came to [college] through some misrepresentations, but was speedily dismissed. Not knowing her degraded status I was speaking to her when a schoolmate whispered a few words of explanation that crimsoned my face suddenly: and grasping my dress lest its hem should touch the garments of one so morally polluted, I fled the room.

In fantastic contrast to the situation that prevailed on American campuses in the middle of the twentieth century, in the nineteenth century it was far better socially for a woman to have been a lover of women.
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As pioneering females with ambition, these women understood well that marriage would most likely interfere with their self-realization. Marriage was seldom feasible for them, not only because the demands of running a home and bearing children at that time made any other pursuit all but impossible, but also because there were few husbands who could be expected to sacrifice their historically entrenched male prerogatives to revolutionary female notions. Those pioneering women who did marry generally selected very atypical men. Perhaps something of an extreme, Carrie Chapman Catt, who even married a second time after she was widowed at the age of 27, was specific about what she needed to make a heterosexual relationship palatable to her. Her second marriage lasted for fifteen years, until George Catt’s death, but during their marriage they seldom lived together, since she was busy pursuing voting rights for women. She claimed that her husband, who left her a sizable income to continue her pursuits even after his death, had said to her, “I am as earnest a reformer as you are, but we must live. Therefore, I will earn the living for two and you will do reform work for both.” She added, “The result was that I was able to give 365 days work each year for 50 years without a salary.”

It is interesting to note that regardless of what her arrangement with her husband really was, Carrie Chapman Catt still turned to romantic friendships with women for sustenance. Her correspondence with Mary Peck, another active suffragist, suggests the intensity and sensual playfulness of their affectional relationship. For example, Mary Peck would write to her: “Goodnight, darling, beautiful, glorious, priceless, peerless, unutterably precious Pandora. … I love you ardently.” Carrie would respond to her extravagances: “You wrote another letter concerning the charm of my lower lip! I took a day off and went cavorting from mirror to mirror and grinning like a Cheshire cat in hope of catching that ‘haunting smile.”’ Carrie lived with another woman, Molly Hay, for twenty years after George Catt died. It is with Molly rather than with either of her husbands that she declared she wished to be buried. One tombstone covers them both.
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But for the most part, these pioneering women did not marry. The observation of Harriet Hosmer, the nineteenth-century sculptor, applied not just to artists but to any women with dreams of a career:

Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot.

Hosmer was not, however, unwilling to tie a consolidating knot with another female, and many other professional women, into the twentieth century, shared her perspective.
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There were few role models to show them that it was possible to combine marriage and career. It must have seemed to many of those pioneering women that a renunciation of marriage was demanded of them no less than it was of a nun. Yet such a renunciation did not preclude a relationship with another woman.

Of course many of those early professional women did not necessarily feel they were making a sacrifice in relinquishing marriage. Their choice to follow a profession may even have served as an excuse to remain heterosexually celibate. Since society generally agreed that marriage and career were incompatible for a woman, those who found marriage distasteful and preferred to live with another female realized that they would be granted social license to arrange their lives as they pleased if they pursued an education and a profession. Many of them would have well understood M. Carey Thomas (the pioneering president of Bryn Mawr) when she wrote of a male suitor: “I should, I think, have committed suicide if I had to live with him. But my choice was made easy by the fact that in my generation marriage and academic career was impossible.”
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But even those who did not realize before they elected their revolutionary paths that they preferred to make their lives with other females often found that a “Boston marriage” had great advantages. It was not only that heterosexual marriage would have closed off possibilities for a professional life and heterosexual affairs would have been socially unacceptable. These career women’s relationships with other females were not simply
faute de mieux.
At their best, same-sex “marriages” offered a communion of kindred spirits such as romantic friends of other eras had longed for. They could be not only nurturing relationships but also relationships of equals in terms of finances, responsibilities, decision-making—all areas in which the husband claimed precedence and advantage in heterosexual marriage. They potentially fostered rather than interfered with the heady and exciting new ambitions of the early generations of professional women. Coming from a tradition of romantic friendship between women that was widespread in America since the country’s beginnings, being generally unaware that same-sex relationships were already being called “abnormal” and “unhealthy” among sexologists, knowing that for practical reasons they must not marry if they wanted careers, it was probably neither morally nor emotionally difficult for these women to attach themselves to each other.

The Metamorphosis of Romantic Friendship

While romantic friendship had had a long history in Western civilization, it took on particular significance in nineteenth-century America, where men’s spheres and women’s spheres became so divided through the task of nation building. Men saw themselves as needing the assistance of other men to realize their great material passions, and they fostered “muscle values” and “rational values,” to the exclusion of women. Women, left to themselves outside of their household duties, found kindred spirits primarily in each other. They banded together and fostered “heart values.” When nineteenth-century women began to engage in reform and betterment work, they were confirmed in their belief that females were morally superior to men and that their sensibilities were more refined.
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Nevertheless, as long as the facts of economic and social life pushed them to move directly from their father’s house to a husband’s house, the bonds they formed with each other ultimately had to be secondary to familial concerns. But for many of them college changed that path.

Before the advent of women’s colleges, there had been female seminaries in America, but their emphasis was on equipping young middle-class females only with what they needed to become admirable adornments in the home. The new women’s colleges generally aimed to give them an education that went beyond domestic refinements and that challenged their minds in ways not unlike education for men. That education opened up an entirely new world, permitting some women to set their sights much higher than their predecessors could have conceived. Many women before them must have dreamed about ways to defy the usual lot of the female, yet short of passing as a man (see pp. 42–45), which could have little appeal for well-brought-up middle-class young ladies, there seemed no escape from stagnating nineteenth-century domesticity. College women found an escape.

But it was not the facts of their education alone that permitted those who wanted an alternative to domesticity to create one. Rather, it was that the young women’s relationships with one another while away at college helped to make them new people. With or without the administration’s or their families’ blessings, college allowed them to form a peer culture unfettered by parental dictates, to create their own hierarchy of values, and to become their own heroes and leaders, since there were no male measuring sticks around to distract, define, or detract. In those ways the early women’s colleges created a healthy and productive separatism such as radical lesbian-feminists of the 1970s might have envied. But unlike the 1970s radicals, the earlier women managed to fashion that separatism from institutions that were handed to them by the parent culture. They manipulated those institutions to their own needs and ends.

Perhaps the most important element in encouraging young college women in their escape from domesticity was a new form of what had been termed romantic friendship, which came to be called in college life “smashes,” “crushes,” and “spoons.” These passions were even described in an 1873 Yale student newspaper, obviously without any awareness that relationships of that nature might have sexual undertones, or that elements of them were already being seen as “inversion” by some European sexologists (see pp. 39–40): “When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another,” the Yalie observed, “she straightway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridley’s Mixed Candies,’ locks of hair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her attentions is captured, the two women become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as—
smashed.”
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Such mores and passions in women’s colleges did not die with the end of the century. Romantic all-women dances were held in the early twentieth century by colleges such as Vassar and Smith, as described by the
Cosmopolitan Magazine
in a 1901 article entitled “A Girl’s College Life,” where the writer observed that the older student generally played “the cavalier” for the younger student:

She sends her flowers, calls for her, fills her order of dance, … takes her to supper, sees her partner home…. And if the freshman has made the desired hit, there are dates for future meetings and jollifications and a good night over the balusters, as lingering and cordial as any the freshman has left behind.

The young women took these dances very seriously, as a veteran of such socials, Josephine Dodge Daskam, suggested in her early twentieth-century collection
Smith College Stories.
She decribes one student having delightful “visions of the pretty little freshman” whose name would fill out her dance program and another student who in disappointment over her date “cried herself to sleep for she had dreamed for nights of going with Suzanne, whom she admired to stupefaction.” The writers were not disposed to speculate on the fact, but such courting often led to “lovemaking,” both in the sense of the nineteenth-century sentimental usage of that term and the way we use that term today.
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Although romantic friendships were not yet uncommon outside of women’s colleges, such passions were encouraged even more strongly in an academic setting, since females could meet each other there in large numbers and the colleges afforded them the leisure necessary to cultivate those relationships. With men living in a distant universe outside of their female world and the values of that distant universe suspended in favor of new values that emerged from their new settings, young women fell in love with each other. They became academic, athletic, and social heroes to one another; they shared a vast excitement and sense of mission about their mutual roles in creating new possibilities for women; they banded together against a world that was still largely unsympathetic to the opening of education and the professions to women. How could such excitements not lead to passionate loves at a time when there was not yet widespread stigma against intense female same-sex relationships?

Young college women also soon had role models for romantic friendships in their female professors, since the colleges often required faculty to reside on campus. Many chose to live in pairs and remained in pairs their entire lives. They pointed the direction to a new path, too, because they were self-supporting. Unlike the women in the students’ previous environment, they did not have to marry in order to survive economically. Once the young women left college, however, they often felt adrift in a world that was not yet prepared to receive them. Sex solidarity became to them necessary armor against a hostile environment. They formed networks with one another, served as mentors for one another, and encouraged and applauded one another’s successes, knowing that they could not trust to males (who were still jealous of what they perceived as their own territory) to be thrilled about women’s achievements. But even more important than those networks, they formed intense and lifelong love relationships—“marriages”—with each other.
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They needed all the armor they could get, since when they entered the professions they had been trained for they frequently encountered a huge battle because of their sex. The more they succeeded the more difficulty they had. Dr. Sarah Josephine Baker, for example, a health commissioner for the city of New York in the early twentieth century (who lived in two successive Boston marriages), was told to print her name on stationery as “Dr. S. J. Baker” so the Health Department could “disguise the presence of a woman in a responsible executive post.” These early professional women often felt themselves forced into dress and behavior that was also characterized as “masculine.” Dr. Baker wore “man-tailored suits,” shirtwaists, stiff collars and four-in-hand ties to work, not necessarily because that was her preference but rather because, as she described it: “I badly needed protective coloring … [so that] when a masculine colleague of mine looked around the office in a rather critical state of mind, no feminine furbelows would catch his eye and give him an excuse to become irritated by the presence of a woman where, according to him, a woman had no right to be. … I wore a costume—almost a uniform—because the last thing I wanted was to be conspicuously feminine when working with men.”
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“Butch drag,” professional-woman style, served as armor to deflect the arrows of sexism for those early generations of career women.