Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  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 middleclass 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.30

  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.”31

  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 middleclass 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.”32 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

  my Eve looks into my eyes with brief bright glances, with long rapturous embraces,—when her sweet life beneath and her warm enfolding arms appease my hunger, and quiet my [illegible] and carry my body to the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love!

  These later letters even suggest that their sexual relationship included remarkable erotic fantasy and role playing. For example, Rose writes Evangeline:

  Ah, my Cleopatra is a very dangerous Queen, but I will look her straight in those wide open eyes that look so imperious and will crush those Antony-seeking lips, until her arms close over (alas, for my hair with all those armlets), and she becomes my prisoner because I am her Captain…. How much kissing can Cleopatra stand?

  The sexual relationship between the two women apparently cooled after a few years, and Evangeline, at the age of thirty-six, married the seventy-four year old Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. When the bishop died five years later, however, the correspondence between the two women began again. In 1910 they went off together to Bagni di Lucca, Italy, where they made their home until Rose died in 1918. Before Evangeline’s death in 1930 she directed her executors to bury her near Rose in Italy.33

  Their correspondence is not unique, although not many early extant letters between women go quite so far as to talk about carrying each others’ bodies “to the summit of joy.” But frequently they do refer to caresses that are unmistakably erotic. Among the papers of feminist leader Anna Dickinson there is a letter signed “Ida” that recalls, “This time last evening you were sitting on my knee, nestled close to my heart and I w
as the happiest of mortals.” The letter does not stop with such a maternal description. Ida goes on to remember Anna in bed, “tempting me to kiss her sweet mouth and to caress her until—well, poor little me, poor ‘booful princess.’ How can I leave thee, queen of my loving heart.”34

  Similarly, Emma Goldman kept for posterity several 1912 letters from Almeda Sperry, a woman who had been a prostitute and was so strongly affected by Goldman’s lecture on white slave traffic that she became an anarchist worker alongside Goldman. The two spent a vacation in the country together, but prior to their trip Almeda wrote Emma that just before she falls asleep she imagines that “I kiss your body with biting kisses—I inhale the sweet pungent odor of you and you plead with me for relief.” The letter obviously did not frighten Goldman into canceling their vacation plans. After their return Almeda wrote her again, recalling Emma taking her in her arms and “your beautiful throat that I kissed with reverent tenderness…. And your bosom—ah, your sweet bosom, unconfined.” Their erotic relationship was apparently culminated, as still another letter from Almeda suggests:

  Dearest. … If I had only had courage enuf to kill myself when you reached the climax then—then I would have known happiness, for at that moment I had complete possession of you. Now you see the yearning I am possessed with—the yearning to possess you at all times and it is impossible. What greater suffering can there be—what greater heaven—what greater hell? And how the will to live sticks in me when I wish to live after possessing you. Satisfied? Ah God, no! At this moment I am listening to the rhythm of the pulse coming thru your throat. I am surg[ing] along with your life blood, coursing thru the secret places of your body.

  I wish to escape from you but I am harried from place to place in my thots. I cannot escape from the rhythmic spurt of your love juice.35

  But women did not necessarily perceive themselves as lesbians simply because they lived such experiences and wrote and received such letters. Some even dismissed entirely the significance of those experiences in identifying their sexual orientation. Several years after Emma Goldman’s relationship with Almeda Sperry, in 1928, the same year the famous lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was published, Goldman wrote of her shock that a woman friend had run off with Djuna Barnes: “Really, the Lesbians are a crazy lot. Their antagonism to the male is almost a disease with them. I simply can’t bear such narrowness.” Although she had held another woman to her “unconfined bosom” and shared her “love juice” with her, Goldman did not hate men, so she felt she was not “one of them.”36

  As the century progressed, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss the new implications of such “slips.” Even romantic friendship came to signify lesbianism, once women’s close relationships began to appear especially threatening to the establishment of companionate marriage (see pp. 90–91). The start of a transition in views is suggested in Wanda Fraiken Neff’s 1928 novel about Vassar, We Sing Diana. In 1913 violent crushes between young women were considered “the great human experience” and it was so common for first-year students to smash on one particular professor that she was called “the Freshman disease.” But when the main character returns to teach at Vassar seven years later, all has changed: everything is attributed to sex, undergraduate speech is full of Freudianisms, and “Intimacy between two girls was watched with keen distrustful eyes. Among one’s classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions.” It is no wonder that M. Carey Thomas, having spent her whole life loving women, later felt compelled to express negative attitudes about homosexuality and to fear that public discussion of it would make life difficult for all women who lived together.37

  It was to a large extent the work of the sexologists, which was disseminated slowly to the layman but finally became part of popular wisdom after World War I, that accounts for the altered views of women’s intimacy with each other. It may be said that the sexologists changed the course of same-sex relationships not only because they cast suspicion on romantic friendships, but also because they helped to make possible the establishment of lesbian communities through their theories, which separated off the lesbian from the rest of womankind and presented new concepts to describe certain feelings and preferences that had before been within the spectrum of “normal” female experiences. Many early twentieth-century women who loved other women rejected those new concepts as being irrelevant to them because they could still see their feelings as “romantic friendship.” But by the end of World War I the tolerance for any manifestations of what would earlier have been considered “romantic friendship” had virtually disappeared, as women were urged to forget their pioneering experiments in education and the professions and to find happiness in the new companionate marriage. Subsequent generations of women who loved other women soon came to have no choice but to consider themselves lesbians or to make herculean efforts of rationalization in order to explain to themselves how they were different from real lesbians.

  Because the label “lesbian” implies sexual identification, historians have denied that those pioneering women for whom same-sex intimacies were so crucial had much in common with contemporary lesbians since, to the historians’ relief, there is little concrete evidence of the sexuality of “romantic friends.”38 But those early career women who spent their lives with devoted companions share with their class counterparts today the most crucial perceptions, values, antipathies, and loves that shaped their existence. Professional women who are lesbians at the end of the twentieth century are the descendants of those pioneering women of a century ago.

  A Worm in the Bud: The Early

  Sexologists and Love Between Women

  Avoid girls who are too affectionate and demonstrative in their manner of talking and acting with you…. When sleeping in the same bed with another girl, old or young, avoid ‘snuggling up’ close together…. and, after going to bed, if you are sleeping alone or with others, just bear in mind that beds are sleeping places. When you go to bed, go to sleep just as quickly as you can.

  —Irving D. Steinhardt,

  Ten Sex Talks With Girls, 1914

  Because nineteenth-century women of the working class were largely illiterate and thus have left little in the way of letters, journals, or autobiographies, it is difficult to know to what extent some form of romantic friendship may have been prevalent among them. Historians such as Marion Goldman have suggested a picture of relationships between nineteenth-century American prostitutes that appears to have commonalities with nineteenth-century middleclass romantic friends. They spent all their free time together, traveled together, protected each other, loved each other. Goldman talks about two who were so devoted that they even tried to die together. The deviance of prostitutes’ roles, which set them apart and circumscribed their activities, encouraged them in a “female solidarity and bonding” that were not unlike romantic friendship. However, because their sexuality was so much more available to them than to the typical nineteenth-century middleclass woman, love between women who were prostitutes was much more likely to have manifested itself in genital relations.1

  Women in penal institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seem also to have engaged in some form of romantic friendships. The early twentieth-century psychologist Margaret Otis described such passionate but apparently largely nonsexual relationships between black and white women in reform schools. Otis claimed that those relationships occurred only along cross-racial lines, “the difference in color … tak[ing] the place of difference in sex” and the black woman generally playing the “man’s role.” But since the black and white women were physically segregated in the institutions Otis observed, the relationships usually could have no consummation outside of romantic notes passed surreptitiously between the women and quick utterances of endearment and high sentiments—which would have rendered those affections as emotionally intense and ungenital as most romantic friendships probably were. Had the women not b
een segregated, however, the nature of the relationships might have been quite different.2

  But in the era when romantic friendships between middleclass women in America were an important social institution, during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, they appear not to have been common for working-class women, perhaps because the intimacy necessary for the development of such relationships required leisure and some degree of social privacy. Working-class women, who were generally employed in a domestic setting, had little of either. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, their situation began to change. American working-class women made a move into the public sphere parallel with their middleclass counterparts, taking the new jobs that were opening up with the rapid growth of American corporations and industry. There was now employment for them outside of homes, not only in factories but also in service occupations such as sales and clerical work, and the number of women in unskilled and semi-skilled occupations grew rapidly. The low-paid female wage worker figured heavily in the tripling of the female labor force between 1870 and 1900 (from 1.8 million to 5.3 million, twice the increase in the number of women in the general population).3

  Many young working-class women left parents’ or domestic employers’ homes and moved to big cities where they were on their own—away from perpetual supervision and scrutiny for the first time. Such a move accounts for their changing heterosexual practices—which seem to have constituted a (hetero)sexual revolution that preceded the revolution of the 1920s by at least a couple of decades. But such a move also drew young working-class women together in ways that would have been impractical or impossible earlier. Because they lived and worked away from a domestic setting and often made less than subsistence wages, they frequently shared rooms, sometimes on a long-term basis. One historian gives several examples of women who not only lived together but moved together from city to city to find work, and she suggests that such long-term partnerships indicated “close personal bonds that existed among some lower-paid working women similar to the bonds of love and friendship [among] nineteenth century American middleclass women.”4