Funnily enough, my grandmother was from Boston
And I’m still terrible at doing her accent!
- [Boston accent] it’s wicked hard!
I’m so sorry.
If you follow me on TikTok (at jessicaoutofthecloset- it’s the
same as my instagram) you’ll know that I’m doing a series called ‘Queer History 101’:
bitesizes pieces of the rainbow history we weren’t taught in school!
And today we’re going to be talking about Boston Marriages!
(that’s not just when you get married in Boston)
In 1880, on the first anniversary of her marriage,
author Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in a poem: “do you remember, darling, a year ago today,
when we gave ourselves to each other? We will not take back the promises we made.”
But she WASN’T writing to her husband! She was writing to her WIFE.
She lived in a publicly accepted, committed, same-sex partnership with another woman for
over two decades, in what was known as a “Boston Marriage”. For several years near the end of the
19th century, same-sex marriage between women was relatively common and even socially acceptable.
Historically the term has been used to describe the cohabitation
of two wealthy women, who lived independent of financial support from a man.
Some of these relationships were romantic in nature and would now be considered ‘lesbian’
couplings, some were purely platonic and others… well, we just can’t tell. However, sharing kisses,
hugs and THE REST OF THEIR LIVES TOGETHER was considered normal.
- for slightly misogynistic reasons.
Relatively formalised life partnerships between women predates the term Boston
marriage and there is a long record of it in England and other European countries.
Homosexuality was certainly taboo but intense and romantic friendships among women were common.
At the time women were encouraged to exist separately from men and
not to mix with them socially, take part in the workforce or earn money.
[beat]
I am obviously talking about rich women here. History doesn’t care about poor ones.
History is an arsehole.
Since this ideology isolated women from the outside world,
it was expected that they would be together.
After all, women were docile, gentle and desexed.
Their kissing each other, holding hands, writing
love poetry to one another was just their way of expressing affection and was thus acceptable.
In the late 1700s, Anglo-Irish upper-class women Eleanor Butler
and Sarah Ponsonby were identified as a couple and nicknamed the Ladies of Llangollen.
- apologies Welsh speakers. I’m sure that was awful.
In her book on the wives, Elizabeth Mavor suggests that the institution
of romantic friendships between women reached a peak in eighteenth-century England.
- And of course we can’t not mention Gentlemen Jack! Potentially the first ‘lesbian wedding’.
Which you can find my video about by clicking in the top corner here.
WHAT IS A BOSTON MARRIAGE?
A group of New England women took this concept of ‘romantic friendship’ one step further by “getting
married.” Of course they couldn’t fully commit to one another legally but they combined households
and income and pledged to live together and support one another for the long term.
Some women did this because they felt they had a better connection to women than to men.
Some lived together out of financial necessity: these women were generally financially independent
due to family inheritance or even career earnings (such as from being a doctor,
scientist or professor)- however marrying a man meant forfeiting this independence
as anything she owned became his. Others wanted to be independent but didn’t have quite enough
money to run a household so paired up with another woman in a similar situation.
Educated women with careers who wanted to live with other women were allowed a
measure of social acceptance and freedom to arrange their own lives. They were certainly
pushing boundaries of what society deemed acceptable for women by attending university,
pursuing careers and living outside their parents’ home.
But… they weren’t getting involved with men and thus it was not ‘immoral’.
At this time ‘normal’ women were assumed not to have the physical desires of men.
It was all very safe and desexed!
- or that’s what outsiders thought anyway...
Regardless, society at the time was hostile to a woman who wanted to be independent
and ape-ing at least one part of expected behaviour- a marriage-
allowed a forward-thinking, feminist ‘new woman’ a certain degree of societal approval.
It wasn’t just the public face of Boston marriages that was helpful to women: these arrangements
offered support and equality at home to those who wanted to push outside of the domestic sphere.
Yes, not every couple referred to each other as ‘wife’,
shared a bed, kissed, hugged and wrote passionate love letters… but many did.
In 1885, novelist Henry James explored the phenomenon in his novel, The Bostonians.
The book pokes fun at independent women through a relationship between Verena Tarrant, an outspoken
feminist, and Olive Chancellor, a softer soul who becomes fascinated with the fiery Verena.
They agree to form a partnership and move in together but everything falls
apart when Verena decides to marry Olive’s cousin.
Henry James’ sister Alice, a well-known diarist, lived in such a relationship with Katherine
Peabody Loring, head of the history department at the Society to Encourage Studies at Home,
the first distance-learning school in the United States.
- excuse me whilst I rant about Alice.
Alice James was the youngest of five children and made to
live with her parents until their deaths when she was 34.
She suffered lifelong health problems that were generally dismissed as hysteria-
as most things relating to women were in that day.
She was born into a wealthy and intellectually active family but was crushed by being a
woman and thus unable to use her great intellect for anything of importance.
She also had a really weird relationship with one of her brothers that I’m pretty sure
fed into her psychological and physical problems but...
For three years, from 1873 to 1876,
she taught history for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, where she met
Katherine. Those three years were described as "among the most illness-free she had."
Which probably tells you something.
But her family ignored it. By 1882, she had suffered at least two
major breakdowns and would go on to experience several more.
In the Victorian era, hysteria was an extremely common diagnosis for women
as almost any disease a woman had could fit the symptoms because...
there WAS no set list of symptoms!
Also doctors didn’t really care to work out what was wrong with women because:
- women! So confusing!
She wrote in her diary that she was both suicidal and homicidal,
struggling with violent urges and desperately desiring release.
So her family sent her to New York to receive "therapeutic exercise" and “electrical massage".
They electrocuted her.
That’s what that means.
And not in the helpful way that can actually be used to treat medical conditions nowadays.
- fun fact, my neurological disability is confirmed by 1) a genetic test
and 2) running a painful electrical current through my body and reading
on a machine which bits of me don’t respond. Why do they need to do the
second thing when they can easily just take some blood and test it…? Uh… don’t know.
Hoping that a change of scenery would improve her health, she traveled to England with Katherine
and although she sought various treatments for her disorders
she didn’t find significant relief before dying from breast cancer at the age of 43.
Her brother Henry received her diary after death and found it full of witty, acerbic, insightful
comments on English life and manners- but also candid indiscretions about family and friends!
Thus it was not published for many years after her death.
Henry was certainly alarmed at some of the things Alice wrote but also developed a
great admiration for her from it as the diary, he said,
showed a “great energy and personality of intellectual and moral being."
He was saddened however, that it “puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her
lifetime -- that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made
the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' person—in the usual world—almost impossible
to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the
practical problems of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc."
Basically: She couldn’t be a man and be free so her body crippled her.
[blows air]
The diary has made Alice something of a feminist icon:
She was seen as struggling through her illnesses to find her own voice.
- but back to Lesbian Marriages…
WELLESLEY MARRIAGE
At newly founded women’s universities, like Wellesley College, a private women's liberal
arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, having a crush on another woman was an
expected part of women’s college experience.
Students gave one another bouquets of flowers, love poems and gifts, openly declaring their love.
In fact, so common were Boston Marriages at Wellesley College in the late 19th and early
20th centuries that the term ‘Wellesley Marriage’ became a common saying. Until the later part
of the 20th century, women who held academic posts were expected to resign upon marriage.
Thus any woman who wanted to keep her academic career
had to make housing arrangements other than a home with a husband
and children... such as sharing a home with another like-minded single female professor…
and if she happened to be sexually attracted to her
and they wanted to make sweet lady-love then all the better!
Lesbian love amongst academic women offered them independence,
support and the opportunity to create a life partnership that wouldn’t
end in a man taking all of your money and making you quit your job just so you
can be his domestic servant and do 100% of the child-rearing with 0% of the legal protections!
- don’t worry men, I know you’re not all like that. I’ve met some good ones.
There were so many of these female partnerships at Wellesley that in the late 19th century,
according to Lillian Faderman’s ‘To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America’:
of the 53 female faculty members, only
one was conventionally married to a man and most of the others lived with a female companion.
Until the 1920s, these arrangements were widely regarded as natural and respectable.
But then someone told society that ‘lesbians’ were a thing and
suddenly women in such relationships were suspected of being actually… SEXUAL!
- [fan] Scandal!
And thus it was ruined,
both for those single, straight women who were enjoying their independence
and for the lady-lovers who were genuinely pretty surprised no one had sussed them before that!
WERE THEY LESBIANS?
Well… it’s always difficult looking backwards to see whether someone might be a
lesbian in the contemporary sense of the word. We can’t peer directly into their bedrooms after all!
However it’s certain that many of the women in these Boston Marriages and ‘romantic friendships’
DID share sexual contact and to just say ‘oh we don’t know’ I feel invalidates our history.
We only KNOW when heterosexual couples have copulated because
they have a baby and we don’t invalidate heterosexual relationships by assuming
that those couples who don’t produce offspring AREN’T attracted to each other-
that would be ludicrous!
For some women, safe, desexed ‘Boston marriages’ were used as a front for relationships we
would definitely see as lesbian in the 21st century. They allowed women to partner together
for life without arousing suspicion that their relationship was anything more than
feminine attraction. ‘Romantic friendships’ could be used as a way to describe a very
close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality
did not necesarily exist as a social category and thus had no protections.
- not that categorising a relationship as ‘homosexual’ neccessarily gives it protections!
Ironically, the practice of Boston Marriages faded as people became aware of lesbianism.
The concept of “sexual inversion” made it possible to categorise relationships that
had once been considered socially acceptable as sexually deviant.
Also, I unfortunately learnt the term ‘womance’ in researching this video
and now I want to bleach my brain to get it out…
- fortunately I have memory problems so I will have forgotten about this by tomorrow!
A ‘womance’ is a close but non-sexual and non-romantic relationship between two or
more women. It’s a homosocial and exceptionally tight female bonding relationship that exceeds
that of usual friendship and is distinguished by a particularly high level of emotional intimacy.
Basically, it’s every teen book with a lesbian storyline I found as a teenager- two girls get
too close, our protagonist inevitably starts thinking it’s something more than it is.
She worries that she’s maybe a lesbian. But she’s a good little straight girl really
and it’s only intense friendship. It’s just that the other girl was hypersexualised…
Jesus! Who let me read books that crushed my little gay soul!?
Wait… was that all a plot to make me think that I was a good little straight girl too?
Lord alive, Gen Z, I hope someone is giving you better books.
Except for ‘Annie on My Mind’- that one I loved. Highly recommend. It’s very good
Does still fall into the ‘lesbians are desexed little girls we are just really,
really close friends’ trap but at least there isn’t a predatory lesbian in it and,
honestly, what more can we ask for? - a lot more! We can ask for a lot more!
My wife and I are in our early thirties, we own a house together, we want to start
a family soon… but we’ve come to terms with the fact that to acquaintances we’ll always be ‘the
girls’- even people younger than us call us that! And male gay couples get it to too: ‘the boys’.
As if our love is young and immature, as if we just one day accidentally crossed the boundary
of friendship and then… forgot to go back? Because it’s more comfortable for people to
desexualise our relationship. As if same-sex couples have to be sweet to be palatable.
Because the specter of our sexuality floats over everything. As if our sex life is so much scarier
than a straight sex life. - And, can I just say,
from the perspective of a lesbian who has never even been near a man:
your heterosexuality is kind of terrifying to me so fine, I get it.
Sometimes people are anxious not to introduce my wife and I as wives
as if they’re protecting some forbidden kink but… we literally stood in front of 100 people
and said we would be devoted to each other for life so, yes, please do introduce us as wives.
‘homosexuality’ is not a ‘sex’ thing, it’s just a people thing. It’s about who you are as a person.
You can be a lesbian but never have had sex with another woman. You can
be a lesbian but never WANT to have sex with another woman. You can be a lesbian
and want to have sex with all of the women! It’s just a way of categorising who YOU are
and how YOU feel. So YOU do YOU.
And I’ll see you in my next video [kiss]