Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (6 page)

Follow them only with their eyes,

And love them almost pityingly,

So I was blind and deaf those years

To all save one absorbing care,

And did not guess what now I know—

Delivering love was sitting there!
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Despite her absorption in Hull House, Jane Addams needed personal love, and to get it from a man was impossible, not only because that would have violated her inclinations but especially because it would have made her great work unfeasible. Mary Rozet Smith fulfilled Jane’s personal needs and contributed to her work through her wealth, her time and effort, and especially her supportive love.

Allen Davis tells of having spoken about the relationships between women at Hull House with Dr. Alice Hamilton, a ninety-year-old woman at the time of the interview in 1963, who had served there during the early years. As might be expected, Dr. Hamilton denied that there was any open lesbianism between Hull House residents but did agree that “the close relationship of the women involved an unconscious sexuality.” She hastened to interject that because it was unconscious it was “unimportant.” Davis reports: “Then she added with a smile that the very fact that I would bring the subject up was an indication of the separation between my generation and hers.”
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But more significant differences in views toward sexuality are revealed here as well. It would seem that Jane and Mary, who became “lovers” near the turn of the century, did not fear they had much to hide—they could even allow strange hotel keepers to know that they preferred to sleep in a double bed together. They understood (regardless of the sexual nature of their realtionship) that they could rely on the protective coloring of pearls and ladylike appearance and of romantic friendship, which was not yet dead in America since the works of the sexologists were not yet widely known. Dr. Hamilton’s response points up how lesbianism fared later in the century, once the public became more knowledgeable about the horrors of “perversion.” She implies that if love between women were expressed erotically by those who worked at Hull House that would have been unworthy of their noble undertaking, although she grants the existence of “unconscious” sexuality for which one cannot be held responsible, a Freudian concept of the 1920s that would have perplexed the 1890s. Finally, Davis’ blunt posing of the question to Dr. Hamilton in the 1960s, as compared to her veiled answer, indicates the greater freedom of more recent generations to discuss unconventional sexuality, yet Davis’ tone suggests his own felt need to rescue his “American Heroine,” as he calls Addams in his 1973 book, from “nasty imputation.” It is only in the last few years that we can acknowledge, without the fact diminishing her stature, that Jane Addams—whether or not she knew to use the term about herself—was what our day would consider lesbian. She devoted her entire emotional life to women, she considered herself married to a woman, and she believed that she was “delivered” by their shared love.

M. Carey Thomas was a very different kind of feminist. Unlike Jane Addams, a cultural feminist, Thomas’ philosophical thrust was not in demonstrating that women could redeem the world because they were different from and better than men, but rather in showing how they were like men, as good as men, and hence deserving of equal treatment. Under her leadership as president of Bryn Mawr, the school provided training for women that was a great departure from women’s education in female seminaries and other colleges that still claimed as a rationale for their existence “educate women and you educate the mothers of men.” Thomas was determined instead to show that “girls can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature, science and conjecture.”
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She wanted to produce hard-driving professional women in her own image to invade all the worthwhile pursuits that had been closed to women before. Thanks to Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr students, unlike those at other women’s colleges, were not even expected to care for their own rooms. All was done for them so that they could spend their time being scholars, just as male students could, and the curriculum was modeled on that of the best of the men’s colleges.

Carey Thomas was able to realize her childhood dreams as most women before her could not. She had written of having read Michelet’s misogynist work
La Femme
as a girl and being blinded by tears: “I was beside myself with terror lest it might prove true that I myself was so vile and pathological a thing.” She even begged God to kill her if she could never learn Greek and go to college. She declared early, with unshakable conviction: “I ain’t going to get married and I don’t want to teach school. I can’t imagine anything worse than living a regular young lady’s life. … I don’t care if everybody would cut me.” There must have been many young women in Victorian America who felt as she did, but it was she who was the pioneer who provided for other women a path to a real alternative to domesticity, just as she had managed to find that path herself.
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Even as an adolescent, Carey had written to her closest friend, Bessie King (they renamed themselves Rex and Rush because they saw that only men were permitted to do interesting things), of her dream that they would become scholars together and be together forever, surrounded by a library with “great big easy chairs where we could sit lost in books for days together,” a laboratory for scientific experiments, and “a great large table covered with papers.” Inextricably bound up with this vision was her fantasy of female love and mutual support, since she knew there was no way such dreams could be realized if she married a man:

There we would live loving each other and urging each other on to every high and noble deed or action, and all who passed should say “Their example arouses me, their books ennoble me, their ideas inspire me, and behold they are women!”
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Her early education in the 1860s and ’70s gave her no reason to believe that such an attachment that would foster both love and productivity was not possible. Her journals show that her years at a Quaker boarding school for girls and then at Cornell provided her with trial experiments on her ideas about female attachments. Nor did her society, still approving of romantic friendship, discourage her. The girls at the Quaker boarding school explained to her simply that she and a fellow student had “smashed on each other or ‘made love’. … I only know it was elegant,” she decided. At the age of twenty-three she complained to her mother, “If it were only possible for women to elect women as well as men for a life’s love! … It
is
possible but if families would only regard it in that light.” Both her Quaker mother and aunt responded to her admission of love for other females by writing her, “[We] guess thy feeling is quite natural. [We] used to have the same romantic love for our friends. It is a real pleasure.”
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But despite her understanding female relatives, Carey Thomas had to battle her father for the right to a college education. In fact, most of her upper-class Baltimore family believed that her desire was “as shocking a choice as a life of prostitution.” While middle-class girls were going to college in 1874, when Carey begged to, daughters of the wealthiest families were supposed to go on a grand tour of Europe instead, before they settled down in marriage.

After finally being allowed to attend Cornell (she spurned Vassar as an “advanced female seminary”), she attempted to get a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins but was denied entrance to the classrooms. In 1879, accompanied by Mamie Gwinn, her “devoted companion,” Carey went off to Europe to study and received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1882. Both then came to Bryn Mawr to teach, and Carey was soon appointed dean. Mamie lived with her at the deanery until 1904, when Mamie mysteriously altered her powerful animosity toward males, which had surpassed that of the most militant feminists, and ran off with a philosophy professor who was a married man.
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But long before that, Mary Garrett, a millionaire philanthropist, had fallen in love with Carey and promised the Bryn Mawr trustees she would donate a fortune to the college if they would promote Carey Thomas to president. They did so in 1894, when Carey was 37 years old. Upon Mamie’s departure Mary moved in with Carey on the Bryn Mawr campus, and the two shared a home until Mary Garrett’s death in 1915.

Together, with the help of Mary’s fortune, they promoted wildly controversial feminist causes such as endowing Johns Hopkins with a medical school under the stipulation that women be admitted on an equal footing with men. There can be no doubt that the relationship was what M. Carey Thomas had dreamed of as a girl: one between two women who loved each other and had great work to pursue. She acknowledged Mary as the source of her “greatest happiness” and the one who was responsible for her “ability to do work.” Nor was the fleshly aspect missing, as Carey wrote to her “lover”: “A word or a photo does all, and the pulses beat and heart longs in the same old way.”
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Despite their opposite visions of female aptitudes and uses, Jane Addams and M. Carey Thomas each exemplified what turn-of-the-century women who were devoted to other women, both personally and professionally, could accomplish in the best of circumstances. Of course they had remarkable advantages: they came from wealthy families; they formed relationships with even wealthier women who used their money to aid in the pursuits Addams and Thomas held dear; during their younger years romantic friendship was not yet scoffed at and people would have been incredulous had the term “lesbian” been applied to such fine ladies. They were not targets of homophobic prejudice, since it was only later in the twentieth century that relationships such as theirs became suspect. The significance of their vision is not diminished, however, by their advantages. They saw women as productive beings who could support themselves by professional labor, and as pathbreakers they found a way to make that labor possible, to permit women not only to contribute to society but to be self-supporting so that they might pursue whatever living arrangement they wished. Both during their lives and long after, turn-of-the-century institution builders such as Addams and Thomas affected hundreds of thousands of women, but especially middle-class lesbians who needed to be career women in order to support their lesbian lifestyles.

Lesbian Sex Between “Devoted Companions”

The psychologist Charlotte Wolff has observed: “It is not homosexuality but homoaffectionality which is at the centre and the very essence of women’s love for each other…. The sex act is always secondary with them.”
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Many lesbians probably violently disagreed with Wolff in the 1980s, the decade after she wrote those words, when they were furiously attempting to liberate their libidos. However, Wolff’s description may have been accurate enough for most lesbians of earlier eras, particularly those who were influenced by the Victorian insistence that women were not naturally sexual. But whether or not the women discussed in this chapter had sex with each other reflects less on the meaning and intensity of their involvement than on their relationship to their times. Those who did not share genital expression may have found ways more consonant with their early training to communicate the depth of their feeling—perhaps more verbal expressions of their affections, more displays of mutual nurturing, more holding.

Conditioning probably made it extremely difficult for most of these “proper” women to define themselves in terms that they learned were indecent, even if they did have sexual relationships. Since to them love for other women could still conceivably be seen as romantic friendship, any “slips” might be considered anomalous departures, not central to their relationships. Despite sexual contacts, some may have continued to see themselves as latter-day romantic friends rather than inverts or lesbians. However, it is clear that those “slips” were not entirely unusual.

Kinsey’s statistics show that 12 percent of the women of his sample who were born in the nineteenth century had lesbian contacts to orgasm. While many turn-of-the-century women may have been stopped by the strictures of their times from exploring sexuality, there were a few who knew they were sexual beings regardless of the strictures and did not let themselves be affected by them. Extant letters sometimes reveal an unmistakable sexual relationship between pairs of women. One remarkable set of such letters is that of Rose Elizabeth Cleveland and Evangeline Marrs Simpson Whipple. Rose was the sister of Pres. Grover Cleveland, who was unmarried during his first two years in office. Rose lived with him in the White House at that time and took over the hostess duties of the First Lady. She later became the principal of the Collegiate Institute of Lafayette, Indiana, a writer and lecturer, and the editor of the Chicago-based magazine
Literary Life.
When she was forty-four she met a wealthy thirty-year-old widow, Evangeline Simpson. Their passionate correspondence began in 1890. For example:

Oh, darling, come to me this night—my Clevy, my Viking, my Everything—Come!

—Evangeline to Rose

Ah, Eve, Eve, surely you cannot realize what you are to me—What you must be. Yes, I dare it now—I will no longer fear to claim you—you are mine by everything in earth and heaven—by every sign in soul and spirit and body…. Give me every joy and all hope. This is yours to do.

—Rose to Evangeline

The letters became more specifically erotic as the relationship progressed. In one, Rose remembers with delight the times when