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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 - 17:00
I'm blogging a new book starting today, which will probably run for about ten days worth of posts. The early 19th century romance of Charity and Sylvia is "unique" only in how well documented it was, due to both being prolific correspondents, both being poets (a context for recording their emotional lives in more detail than might otherwise have happened), and due to their families being supportive enough of their "marriage" to have turned their papers over to a local historian rather than destroying them (though much of their correspondence had been destroyed at various crucial points in their lives). Like many other iconic f/f couples, studying their lives is important not simply for the particularity, but also for what it says about the possibilities for women generally. (And--as with Anne Lister--for the incidental documentation of a wider informal network of women whose romantic interests were for other women.)
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Full citation:
Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Preface
The book opens with a description of a pair of cut silhouettes, framed with a lock of hair and labeled with the names of the two women. There follows an overview of their lives (which are then covered in much more detail in the chapters). Both women had determined not to marry. Both came from large families, though of different character. They met in 1807 and set up a household together where the continued as an acknowledged couple for 44 years. All their neighbors and relatives knew they were a couple and used the language of marriage for them, though the law treated them as two single women, e.g., for tax purposes. They lived gender-coded roles, with Charity taking on the husband-coded activities and Sylvia the wife-coded ones. After death, their relatives buried them together with a single headstone.
The author asserts that their sexuality must have been an “open secret” as “marriage was considered an inherently sexual institution.” In small communities, social harmony relied on people quietly overlooking facts that would disrupt society. And it may be noteworthy that female couples of that era usually dreamed of rural retreats rather than longing for urban anonymity. Charity and Sylvia’s lives were deeply intertwined with their families and community. They were accepted even when not entirely approved of. They were active with church and charities, supported their relations in sickness and hardship, and supported the local economy in the structure of their tailoring business. They were considered pillars of the community. Their remarkable union was even documented in a newspaper during their lifetimes, though without giving their names.
Charity (the elder) had numerous romantic relationships with women before meeting Sylvia, and her earlier life was the subject of gossip and rumor. Perhaps for that reason, she arranged for most of her writings, memoirs, and letters written to intimate friends to be destroyed. Sylvia, who survived her, had no such attitude and preserved all their documents after Charity’s death, though some items may have been weeded out. After Sylvia’s death, their papers were given to a local historian.
Stories like this one emphasize how spotty the historic record is for f/f couples, as so many women did destroy their papers (or their surviving relatives destroyed them out of a concern for the family’s reputation).
This introductory chapter concludes with a review of the available documentation.
[Note: A couple of observations that apply to the entire book. The chapters are numerous but very short, which is why I’ll be clustering them for the blog. Cleves often assigns thoughts, feelings, reactions, and actions to her subjects that are note cited to specific documentation, but neither are they explicitly framed as rooted in the author’s imagination. It is sometimes difficult to tell when she is speculating and when she may be summarizing actual data that isn’t supported by quoted material. She brings in contextual material about female same-sex relationships that are more explicit regarding sexuality, such as details from the lives of Anne Lister and from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then speculates that Charity and her various intimate friends may have engaged in similar practices. These approaches make for better storytelling and provide a richer picture of what their lives may have been, but at the expense of historical clarity. The undiscerning reader can easily come away with the impression that these various interpolations are factual rather than imaginative.]
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Monday, June 16, 2025 - 07:00
Sometimes I envision a broad-scope historical understanding of the dynamics of gender and sexuality as being like a collage of scraps of colored paper. Each individual book or article has a specific take on the question, and they don't always align with each other, but as each is pasted in place, a larger picture develops that is independent of the precise nature of each piece of paper. And--of course--I must never lose sight of the fact that the person pasting them in place (that is, me) has a vision for the overall work that affects how the collage is put together. History is never simple and coherent. We must move back and forth between standing at a distance to see that composed picture and zooming in to read the writing on the individual scraps.
With this post, I'm caught up on the rather large set of articles I'd managed to write up in advance. I've been working on a fascinating book, which I'll post in smaller pieces (though probably not one chapter at a time, as the chapters are very short). Then I have three more books on US topics lined up. One thing I'm finding is that even in books specifically focusing on American queer history, there's a lot of reliance on British material and examples. It makes me curious about the overall similarities and differences between the British and American lesbian experiences have been (during the centuries when both existed to compare). I don't feel like I'm there quite yet, but it's a note to jot down in my outline for the book project.
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LaFleur, Greta. “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America.” Early American Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2014, pp. 469–99.
This article challenges the strict version of “social construction” of sexuality by reviewing the evidence that 18th century Americans had an extensive vocabulary for identifiable and categorizable variations in sexual behavior and gender presentation. At the same time, the author does not claim a multi-century continuity of certain gender/sexuality concepts, rather than certain concepts have recurred at different times. [Note: compare Valerie Traub’s “cycles of salience.”]
One question she examines is whether “gender” (as a concept of performative presentation distinct from anatomy) existed as a concept in 18th century America. A relevant context is that scientific advances at that time had developed an elaborate vocabulary for describing sexual and gender differences among plants and animals, that could be available for applying to humans. (Note: the gender theories of Joan Scott, Judith Butler, and Denise Riley are credited as background for the discussion.) This article is not a study of specific texts, but rather a higher-level consideration of 18th century gender concepts as a whole.
Changes to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality occurring in the 1790s shook up social attitudes, but this was part of a larger shakeup that considered class inequities, colonial dynamics, religious attitudes especially concerning Christianity vs. Islam, and differing governmental structures. Many issues were being re-examined and gendered norms and expectations were shifting drastically. (As background, the author notes the work of Laqueur and Trumbach.)
An example is given from an English conduct manual republished in America in 1791 that inveighs against behaviors framed as crossing gender lines, such as make-up on men and male-coded dress styles on women (such as tailored riding habits). Also relevant is the popularity of cross-dressing narratives involving women such as Hannah Snell (British) and Deborah Sampson (American) who demonstrated a cultural category that was understood to have certain characteristics and scripts. When race intersected gender, popular opinion distinguished degrees of “womanliness” that were not available to racialized women, essentially creating alternate gender categories.
The “legibility” of gender was a concern—that is, the ability to identify what gender category someone belonged to based on consistent and universal cues. Ways in which women were labeled as being “masculine” were evaluated in inconsistent ways, with arguments for women’s education and political participating praising “manliness” in women, while in other behavioral fields even feminists decried male-coded activities such as sport and hunting. Satire and caricature used masculinity to attack women in certain fields, such as writing. Individuals who failed to fit neatly into binary gender categories (most notably the Chevalier d’Eon) became celebrities, indicating a fascination with a pluralistic understanding of gender.
Conduct literature pushed the idea that men and women should stick to their “natural state” but there was no clear consensus as to exactly what those states were. Feminists such as Wollstonecraft argued that a woman’s state could hardly be “natural” if society had to work so hard to keep her in it.
The existence of an elaborate vocabulary for gender/sexuality argued for the existence of conceptual categories matching that vocabulary, for women, such as: sapphists, tribades, amazons, female husbands, viragos, tommies, and “unsexed females.”
The article’s conclusion returns to Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance, noting that the development of gender theorizing in the later 20th century has misled historians to dismiss the possibility that similar concepts could have existed earlier. Instead, LaFleur argues that cycles of “gender trouble” have recurred, with societies experiencing parallel periods of gender disruption without the existence of a continuous through-line connecting those periods.
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Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 10:00
How much do general social anxieties around demographics and sexuality interact with each other? I've seen a number of historians connect early 19th century concerns about falling birthrates with increasingly controlling attitudes towards non-procreative sex. But is there cause and effect? We could look around today's America and ask "is the nativist anxiety about white birthrates tied in any way to surges of hostility against marginalized genders and sexualities? To be sure, I've occasionally seen anti-trans comments to the effect of "they're destroying their reproductive protential." And it definitely feels like there's a connection between anxieties around white birthrates and anti-abortion forces. But the current picture is far more complex than that. The dynamics were likely to have been similarly complex in the 19th century. The cyclical recurrence of "sex/gender panics" and the ways in which they manifest would be worth studying as a topic on its own, just as the cyclicity of feminist progress and repression is worth studying. Once you see it, the whole illusion of unidirctional social progress evaporates. We may start each cycle from a different status quo, but we never seem to solve the underlying issues and anxieties that generate the next cycle.
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Freedman, Estelle B. 1982. “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics” in Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects: 196-215
This article mostly concerns attitudes toward m/f sex, so my summary is going to focus fairly narrowly on the high-level basic premise and the specifically f/f parts.
Freedman examines three parallel but separate topics in sexual history: ideology (prescriptive opinions), behavior (evidence for what people were actually doing), and “politics” (by which she means activities intended to change sexual practice or attitudes, as distinct from simple statements about what was considered correct behavior). These three topics interact, but historians have often assigned causation between them in ways not supported by the evidence. For example, looking at declining fertility rates in certain populations and ascribing it to conduct literature that prescribes control of sexuality, rather than looking for changes in sexual practice that avoided pregnancy. Another example involves conduct literature that asserted 19th century women’s disinterest in sex, while ignoring both rational reasons women might be less than enthusiastic (such as fear of pregnancy and lack of sexual satisfaction) and evidence from surveys that contradicted the claim that women had low sexual desire.
A decline in fertility in the later 19th century was paralleled by an increase in public concerns about female masturbation and lesbianism. (Male anti-masturbation literature had become prevalent a century previous.) There was a rising suspicion toward girls’ same-sex crushes at school, while a survey (taken in the 1920s among adult women about their younger experiences) reported that of women born after 1850, a majority had masturbated to orgasm and 20% of college-educated women had been involved in lesbian relationships. Did an increase in non-procreative sex cause a decline in birthrates that then created anxiety about the causes? Or did the decline in birthrate leave authorities casting about for a correctable cause, who then pointed the finger at pre-existing that had made no difference?
Women’s intimate same-sex relationships had long been considered acceptable and not considered “lesbian” (regardless of whether individual relationships had an erotic component) until sexologists began pathologizing them. [Note: I’m grateful to Freedman for challenging Faderman’s assumption that 19th century women were incapable of experiencing sexual desire and that therefore Boston Marriages were never erotic.]
Although the preceding discussion is included in the introductory part of the article, the remainder is entirely focused on m/f sex.
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Saturday, June 14, 2025 - 20:30
Psychoanalyzing the fiction of earlier ages has been a popular, if often misguided sport. In particular, when characters' intimate friendships are analyzed from contemporary angles, while ignoring the context when the work was written, we find out more about the literary critic's mind than the minds of the author or the characters. The "social constructionist" approach needs to cut both ways: if a character cannot properly be labeled "lesbian" because orientation categories hadn't been invented yet, then neither can that character be dismissed as "perverted" if the social constructions of their own day would not frame them as such. These are the debates playing out in analysis of the novel Ormond.
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Comment, Kristin M. 2005. “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic” in Early American Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 57–78.
The novel Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) maybe the earliest American literary depiction of a passionate romantic relationship between women. Criticism of the work has tended to reflect the attitudes toward women’s same-sex relationships prevalent in the critic’s own era, rather than considering it within its own context.
This literary analysis situates it within the cultural debates and anxieties prevalent in the Anglophone world around 1800, including the “sex panic” in the wake of the French revolution that led to something of a backlash in England (and to a lesser extent in America) around women’s sexuality in general, but in turn led to some interesting explorations in fiction of the nature and limits of women’s intimate relations with each other.
Ormond focuses around several prominent female characters, in particular the intimate friendship between Constantia and Sophia, but also including the “male-identified” Martinette (who is held up as something of a bad example, due to a somewhat bloodthirsty enthusiasm for revolution) and others. The generally positive and supportive relationships between the female characters are contrasted with more destructive dynamics between the male characters.
American reactions to the French revolution differed in certain aspects from English reactions, with Americans initially celebrating the French cause and American women leveraging debates over women’s rights. However with the turn of the century, enthusiasm for the excesses of the revolution waned, and some of the momentum for women’s rights with it.
Despite American and English differences, the two strands of literature both saw women’s virtue as reflecting the strength and morality of the state, manifesting as a debate around controlling women’s bodies. This is the context in which Ormond depicts the specter of the most extreme version of female autonomy: women so closely bonded to each other that male interests are excluded entirely.
The 18th century had seen something of an explosion of literature (English and French) depicting lesbian interactions, generally with a sense of titillation but in some cases for satiric purposes. But the absence of similar literature in America cannot be taken as an absence of interest, either literary or real. The article quotes French travel writer Moreau de St. Méry discussing in the 1790s how Philadelphian women might be averse to hearing sexual language, but “are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex.”
The romantic relationship between Constantia and Sophia in Ormond is described and acted out in line with the ideals of romantic friendship, but it includes a physicality that is less common. And the central conflict of the novel is the competition between Sophia and Ormond for Constantia’s affection. Ormond’s reaction is hostile and jealous, establishing for the reader that there is a potential reason for jealousy in the strength of the women’s bond. The novel’s author uses various motifs to contradict the sapphic potential, again, recognizing that potential.
The potential for female same-sex erotics was certainly in the public awareness in the 18th century. The lesbian rumors/slanders about Marie Antoinette were rife. Military cross-dressing narratives and female husband stories felt the need to deny any sexual element when a female-bodied person living as a man flirted with women or married, as when a news account of Continental Army soldier Deborah Sampson’s romantic interactions with women commented that they were inspired by “sentiment, taste, [and] purity” and that “animal love, on [Sampson’s] part was out of the question.” Clearly it wasn’t entirely out of the question if there was a need to deny it.
Thus, readers of Ormond would have been well aware of the potential for such an intense and intimate love between two women to take an erotic turn. If such a possibility had been unthinkable, there would have been no need for the author to deny it.
The character of Martinette in Ormond helps to situate non-normative sexuality as a “foreign” element—a common theme in the early modern period—both by her birth and by her association with France. This was another way of acknowledging sapphic possibilities while insulating the “virtuous” characters from any taint.
Despite repeated attempts to heterosexualize the female characters in Ormond, the male characters play a very marginal role and a repeatedly shown to be inessential to the women’s emotional and economic lives, highlighting the potential for full female self-sufficiency within a truly “companionate” relationship of the type beginning to be idealized for (but rarely achieved in) heterosexual marriage. The titular character fails to win Constantia by wooing her and resorts to attempting violence, viewing her as a prize or possession, not a love object.
The author concludes that literary representations of romantic friendship must be understood not simply in the context of the idealized image of that type of relationship, but also in the context of the anxieties and power struggles around female autonomy and lesbian possibility. Literature was one of the tools for recognizing and trying to contain these potentials as a means of social control.
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Friday, June 13, 2025 - 19:00
I'm not completely allergic to "lit crit" articles (by which I make a fine-grained distinction from "literary criticism" but perhaps one that is idiosyncratic), but I confess I find them far less useful for the Project than articles written from a historian's angle. I guess it's because lit crit feels like it's more about the reception of the topic in question by a modern audience than it is about the historic context of the topic itself. Perhaps that means I'm wronging this journal article in classifying it as "lit crit" because it's very much about the historic context of Fuller's life and writings. It just...feels very slippery and squishy.
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Wood, Mary E. 1993. “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” in American Literature 65: 3-4.
Given the prominence of the word “lesbianism” in the title of this article, I found it less interesting than I hoped. Margaret Fuller was a prominent American writer and feminist in the first half of the 19th century. The theme of this article is how her writings and opinions around various romantic connections she had with women illustrate the tensions around the dividing line between acceptable and praiseworthy Romantic Friendship and the types of relationships between women that were felt to go beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
In general, this article leans more toward literary criticism than social history. There is a review of literature on Romantic Friendship and the history of sexuality in the 19th century, examining how relationships that were described with strongly romantic and sensual language could be seen as not transgressing social norms. (See, for example, Smith-Rosenberg 1975 and Lillian Faderman 1981.) Two strains of thought on this topic are: 1) that 19th century female friendships were never “lesbian” and that was why they were acceptable; or 2) that all such female friendships can be considered to be within a broad “lesbian continuum” regardless of whether they were erotic, thus reducing the meaningfulness of the term “lesbian.” Wood looks at a middle path where 19th century society was constantly, if silently, negotiating how far female friendships could go without crossing the line.
Wood identifies places in Margaret Fuller’s writings where she appears to be self-aware of reaching or crossing those lines, such as when she wrote to one intimate friend, “I build on our friendship now with trust, for I think it is redeemed from ‘the search after Eros’.” In passages like this, Fuller recognizes the potential for eros (thus negating framing #1) and deliberately steps back from it (thus negating framing #2).
Fuller was hardly the only writer who recognized that this boundary existed, well before intimate friendships were pathologized by medical sexologists. Advice literature aimed at women and girls cautions them to view their same-sex friendships as “not the real thing…but rather a foreshadowing of love” that must be put in second place after marriage. Close same-sex bonds were essential to the homosocial divisions of society, but there was a constant policing of those bonds to ensure they didn’t exclude men and marriage entirely.
In her feminist writings, Fuller finds an uneasy balance between attacking the notion of women’s inherent difference from men, and accepting the idea that certain types of opinions, interests, and literature were inherently gendered.
Overall, far less interesting than I hoped, and the examples from Fuller’s writing that are supposed to illustrate a “lesbian” sensibility are rather weak.
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Thursday, June 12, 2025 - 15:00
Yes, once again I'm blogging an article that largely duplicates material that was covered more extensively in a different publication. Sigh. The work of a historian is not always exciting.
But what is exciting is that I'm coming up on publication #500. I'm currently searching the set of all publications that I haven't yet blogged that I have in-house to see if I can find something Significant And Meaningful for the occasion. Feel free to suggest your favorite publication relevant to lesbian history. (Though you might want to search the site to see if I've done it already.)
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Oaks, Robert F. 1978. “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England” in Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, No. 2: 268-281
As with several other articles I’ve blogged in this run of American-themed publications, this one covers material that I’ve already discussed in more detail in a previous entry. (Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “"The Cry of Sodom": Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in <em>The William and Mary Quarterly</em>, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286)
As the title notes, the general subject is the legal and social treatment of sodomy (generally defined as same-sex relations) and buggery (most often applied to bestiality) in 17th century New England. Oaks notes that court records are the most important data source for this topic, but that this can skew our understanding as it only tells us about cases where offenses were identified and prosecuted. Even so, the legal records is valuable at the very least to correct myths, such as that sodomy usually received the death penalty.
The article notes that sodomy laws only applied to men, except for one New Haven code briefly for ten years starting in 1655 when female same-sex relations were included. Despite the theoretical harshness of the laws, the actual case outcomes show that sodomy was not punished more severely than other types of sex crimes, and that the death penalty was applied very rarely (and never to women). This leniency increased toward the end of the 17th century.
In relating the most commonly cited f/f case, that of Mary Hammon and Sara Norman for “leude behavior each with other upon a bed,” the article adds that Norman was also accused of “divers Lasivious speeches,” which may explain why her sentence required a public confession while Hammon was “cleared with admonision” which I read as telling her not to do it again. If the lascivious speeches were specifically in connection with this incident, then we may imagine that they may have specifically concerned f/f sex, though a later note indicates that Norman was also brought before the law for m/f sexual offenses in at least one case.
The latter part of the article is focused in great detail on accusations of bestiality.
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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 - 07:00
Once again, I have an article on a topic covered much more extensively in a publication I already blogged. Though in this case, by a different author. Thomas/ine Hall reminds us of the ways in which historic fixation on binary gender complicate the question of categorizing interactions as "same-sex" or "opposite-sex". There are several topics that I'll be discussing in the book version of the Project where it's inaccurate to characterize the topic as "lesbian" but that shed useful light on how historic societies would have viewed lesbian activity. Probable intersex people are one of those categories in the same way that transgender people are.
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Vaughan, Alden. 1978. “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86: 146-48.
I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)
The article opens with a discussion of how Colonial courts seemed to be fond of inscribing penalties for crimes (especially moral crimes) onto a person’s visible presentation, noting that the “scarlet A” that is central to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was only one of a variety of alphabetic penalties in Massachusetts law. He connects this practice with the unique penalty applied to Thomas(ine) Hall in Virginia in 1629. Hall’s offense was not one of commission but of existence: being intersex and failing to choose one binary gender presentation and sticking with it. (Please see Brown 1995 for the details. Vaughan’s discussion is more scanty and less analytic.) Hall’s sentence was to wear clothing that combined male and female garments, as a visible sign of their transgression. Note that although Hall presented variously at times as male and female, when they had a sexual relationship with a woman, it was when presenting as male.
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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 - 07:00
This is largely a "teaser article" for Jen Manion's book on female husbands. Since it largely duplicates material I've already blogged, I've just linked that write-up. But it does quote a medical journal article written by Joe Lobdell's psychiatrist, which includes some interesting points of language.
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Manion, Jen. “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Legacies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 6–11.
Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
The current article starts with a discussion of Charles Hamilton/Mary Hamilton’s career as an itinerant doctor in the Colonies, supplemented with their background in England which was fictionalized in Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband. The details provided are essentially identical to what is in Female Husbands, so I won’t repeat them here.
The second example presented in this article is Joseph Lobdell/Lucy Ann Slater who spent various stints toward the end of their life in Pennsylvania (though the majority in other locations—so the tie-in for this periodical is somewhat tenuous). I’m going to cheat a little, since Lobdell’s life history is provided in much greater detail in chapter 5 of Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. So I’m not going to re-iterate it here.
The major addition that the current article provides is an extensive excerpt from the medical case study published about Lobell, based on their sessions with a doctor at the Willard Asylum for the Insane. (Wise, P.M. 1883. “Case of Sexual Perversion,” in Alienist and Neurologist: A Quarterly Journal of Scientific, Clinical and Forensic Psychiatry and Neurology, vol 4, no 1: 87-91.) The doctor uniformly genders Lobdell as female, but has an overall sympathetic tone, within the context that Lobdell clearly had mental health issues. Although the doctor describes Lobdell’s gender-crossing as a “form of insanity” he does appear to distinguish between the psychological issues that landed Lobdell in the asylum (depression and mania) and their gender identity.
Also of interest is the language the doctor uses.
“During the few years following her [i.e., Lobdell’s] return from the West, she met with many reverses, and in ill health she received shelter and care in the alms-house. There she became attached to a young woman of good education, who had been left by her husband in a destitute condition and was receiving charitable aid. The attachment appeared to be mutual and, strange as it may seem, led to their leaving their temporary home to commence life in the woods in the relation of husband and wife. The unsexed woman assumed the name of Joseph Lobdell and the pair lived in this relation for the subsequent decade; ‘Joe,’ as she was familiarly known, following her masculine vocation of hunting and trapping and thus supplying themselves with the necessaries of life. An incident occurred in 1876 to interrupt the quiet monotony of this Lesbian love. …”
I want to call attention to the three bolded items. The doctor recognizes the marital nature of their relationship, though he clearly distances it from “real” marriage. Although describing Lobdell’s presentation and activities elsewhere as “masculine” he calls Lobdell “unsexed.” This is a characterization that appears regularly from the later 18th century on to describe women who move away from or reject stereotypically feminine things. Sometimes it is neutral or positive, in a sense of “stepping free from the restrictions of gender roles” but more often it has a negative tone. But the third item is quite fascinating as it gives us an 1883 citation for the phrase “Lesbian love” in an unambiguous sense of “a romantic and erotic relationship between two women.” Of course, one of the things I regularly harp on is that this sense of “lesbian” is much older than the myth of “invented by sexologists,” but solid citations are always useful.
Wise’s case history is also interesting in that it concludes with a discussion of the theories of Krafft-Ebing about same-sex desire which perhaps provides a basis for the doctor’s more clinical approach to Lobdell’s life history. He writes of Krafft-Ebing’s work that he “suggests they should be excepted from legal enactments for the punishment of unnatural lewdness; thus allowing them to follow their inclinations, so far as they are harmless, to an extent not reaching public and flagrant offense.” A somewhat mild endorsement since Wise continues with a discussion of Lobdell’s condition as insanity. (Note that neither Krafft-Ebing nor Wise are clearly distinguishing cross-gender presentation from same-sex desire in their discussions.) Wise concludes with, “The subject possesses little forensic interest, especially in this country, and the case herewith reported is offered as a clinical curiosity in psychiatric medicine.”
Of course, as the century turned over and the sexological view of homosexuality became more widespread in the public consciousness, the idea of considering it a “curiosity” gave way to greater persecution.
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Monday, June 9, 2025 - 07:00
This is a very useful and detailed article comparing references to same-sex activity in Colonial-era religious opinions, legal codes, and popular opinion, all of which could be quite different in degree.
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Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286
While this article is (necessarily) focused primarily on m/m history, it does have useful details of the early legal history of female same-sex relations in America. I’ll be focusing on those details and so this summary won’t cover the article as a whole. The general approach is to compare the “official” (church and state) position on same-sex erotics with the evidence for how specific individuals were viewed within their communities, including some startlingly lax responses to men notorious for their sexual interest in other men.
Official discourse did not consider the issues of desire or specific orientation, being concerned only with the specifics of the acts and whether they were approved or forbidden. In Puritan-influenced areas of the colonies, sex outside of marriage of any sort was in the “forbidden” category, but to some extent equated with other moral concerns such as drunkenness.
In contrast, non-official records indicate a recognition that certain individuals had a specific inclination toward same-sex behavior. Without applying an anachronistic concept of sexual orientation, this does lean more towards a perception of “identity” rather than a focus only on “acts.” Furthermore, communities had a variety of attitudes towards sodomy accusations and were often unwilling to apply the (theoretical) official penalties, as long as essential social harmony was not badly disrupted. Sodomy was not approved, but might be considered less significant than other aspects of a person’s contributions to the community.
Clerical and legal references to f/f sex as a parallel with m/m sex were inconsistent. John Cotton (1641) referred to “unnatural filthiness…of man with man, or woman with woman.” This phrasing including “woman with woman” was also used by Thomas Shepard (1664), Charles Chauncy (1642), and Samuel Whiting (1666). In general, New England opinions on the definition of sodomy focused on the same-sex aspect rather than a definition of anal sex, which could be enacted between a m/f couple.
Legal codes, in contrast with clerical opinions, focused almost exclusively on m/m sex. Codes from Plymouth (1671), Massachusetts (1641), Connecticut 1642), and New Hampshire (1680) only penalize m/m sex. A draft Massachusetts law by John Cotton in 1636 included women, but this was not adopted. Only New Haven (1655) identified f/f sex as a capital crime. (All of these law codes specifically cited biblical language as the justification for considering these crimes.) The New Haven law was, in general, much broader in the sexual crimes it covered, including m/f anal sex, sex with prepubescent girls, and public masturbation as well as any non-procreative acts.
The article notes only two instances of women being charged in courts for sexual activity with each other. Elizabeth Johnson received a whipping and fine in 1642 in Essex County for “unseemly practices betwixt her and another maid.” [Note: “maid” here presumably means two unmarried women rather than a reference to employment?] Another case, commonly cited in the literature, was in 1649 in Plymouth Colony, against Sara Norman and Mary Hammon for “leude behaviour each with other upon a bed.” In neither case was the activity labeled as “sodomy” in the record. [Note: I believe from other sources that they received a warning only, but I’m not finding a clear citation.]
Only two men (and specifically men) are known to have been executed for sodomy in the colonial era, and in both cases this seems to have been motivated not only by the number of occasions they transgressed, but because they non-consensually targeted boys. In contrast, several cases are discussed where a man’s habitual sexual interest in other men was known to and tolerated by the community, even over a significant period of time, if the community felt that the situation was being adequately addressed by social pressure and a whisper network. (This topic gets a lot of discussion and details, but is not relevant to the Project.)
The article notes that during this same era, London was developing a subculture catering to men who had sex with men, including the distinctive culture of the “molly houses” that included cross-dressing and role-playing, creating a popular connection between sodomy and effeminacy. But this culture was relatively restricted to London and has not been identified either outside that metropolis in England, or in any of the developing cities in the colonies. Nor is there any evidence that the colonies associated cross-dressing with sodomy. Even so, there is at least some evidence for an understanding in the colonies of something resembling an orientation toward m/m sex. (There is insufficient data on f/f relations to conclude anything.)
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Sunday, June 8, 2025 - 18:00
By what appears to be random coincidence, I have a handful of articles coming up that are preliminary versions of material I've already covered, or in one case, material more thoroughly covered by another article I'm about to blog. So there's a certain amount of "for completeness' sake" happening on the blog in the next week or so.
But hey! I've finished the substantial revisions to the Skinsinger stories. Only a couple of technical editing passes to go plus figuring out book formatting. How hard could it be?
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LHMPFull citation:
Faderman, Lillian. 1978. “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3: 309-332
[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]
Faderman considers the portrayal of women’s same-sex love in three mid-to-late 19th century novels by well-known (male) American novelists: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Holmes’s A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and James’s The Bostonians (1885). The main thesis of this analysis is the inappropriateness of applying post-Freudian sexual theories to the characters in these works, and rather considering them in the context of normalized women’s same-sex intimate relationships in the 19th century, as explored for example by Smith-Rosenberg (1975) (https://alpennia.com/lhmp/lhmp-292-smith-rosenberg-1975-female-world-lov...).
She sets out four reasons for 19th century American tolerance for these relationships.
- Women’s lack of economic independence which meant that their same-sex relationships would not interfere with marriage. [Note: While this may be an accurate high-level generalization, increasing economic opportunities for middle-class American women in the later 19th century created the context for phenomena like “Boston Marriages” which clearly overlapped the era when such relationships were considered acceptable.]
- People did not seriously consider the possibility of f/f sex, and assumed women “merely tolerated sex” and only for procreation. [Note: This dodges two inconvenient considerations: that the myth of the sexless woman has many heterosexual exceptions, and that f/f erotic activity was not always considered to be “sex.”]
- Medical professionals did not recognize female homosexuality until the end of the 19th century. [Note: I think this only holds if you restrict it to “homosexuality by that name” because there are certainly earlier cases that were considered to be medical conditions.]
- In the 19th century it was assumed (once recognized at all) that female homosexuality was limited to those with a masculine physical attributes. [Note: I would quibble again, but I’m getting repetitive.]
The underlying consideration regarding women’s relationships was “does this threaten society” and the answer to that question changed around the turn of the century and became very different in the period after WWI.
There’s a brief historical review of laws and attitudes toward f/f sexuality, including colonial era laws against sodomy, only one of which included women. In contrast, you have individuals like Deborah Gannett who fought in the Revolutionary War as a man, had romantic relations with at least three women during that time, was honorably discharged on discovery, and even was granted a Congressional pension for her heirs after her death. Similarly two women both serving in male dress in the Civil War had an “intimacy” but this aspect was not disparaged when their gender was discovered.
The article also cites an 1863 publication referencing four cross-dressing women serving in the Civil War including one who was married to another woman for 34 years, however the description of the case is that of James How, who lived in 18th century England, not 19th century US, so I’m skeptical of the accuracy of this particular citation. (And a bit disappointed that Faderman didn’t spot the error.)
Lucy Ann Lobdell is cited as the first case of such a woman being classified as “sexual perversion” (in the 1880s), supporting the position that earlier cases were not so classified. Faderman quotes a 1896 article from the American Journal of Insanity that states that until recently (i.e., the 1890s) insinuating that there was anything improper about women’s intimate relations would have been considered an outrage. The article goes on to note that the author was aware of a case somewhat earlier but had not recognized it as a type of perversion.
Faderman cites Smith-Rosenberg’s argument that whether or not 19th century women had genital relations is asking the wrong question, because that was not a dividing line between categories of relationships at the time. But Faderman continues with the assumption that grated on me when reading her book , that “it would probably be safe to assume that most of these relationships seldom involved genital contact—simply because the middle-class Victorian woman seldom engaged in genital contact outside of marriage.” I have always thought that Faderman bought in too deeply to the myth of the sexless Victorian woman.
But she notes that the concept of “being in love” was focused on intense emotional responses, rather than sexual desire. So there was no stigma attached to being “in love” with someone of the same sex and, indeed, given homosocial forces, the type of emotional intimacy associated with being “in love” was far more available with someone of the same sex than the opposite one.
[Note: we then get the old error of taking the OED at face value in asserting that the word “lesbian” in the sexual sense didn’t exist until the 20th century. Take my rant on this as given.]
Anyway, now we move on to analysis of the novels themselves, which illustrate the principles discussed above. Each of them depict a female couple who are clearly in love with each other, and where that relationship was socially acceptable or even praiseworthy. The apparent exception in The Bostonians, where the male character clearly views his target’s same-sex relationship as problematic becomes less clear when—as Faderman points out—the male character is rather clearly depicted as a controlling anti-hero whose victor over his rival will result in his future wife’s misery, not a happily ever after.
Literary critics of the 20th century, she asserts, who find Freudian character flaws in these three novels are bringing in anachronistic interpretations and assumptions that distort the stories that are actually on the page. (I have condensed down a great deal of detailed analysis here into only the conclusions.)
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