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
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.]
Chapter 1: A Child of Melancholy 1777
Charity’s mother died of consumption shortly after Charity’s birth in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War. She was the last of 10 children. Death haunted the family with three of Charity’s grandparents and her oldest brother also dying within the same 2-year period.
Charity felt the absence of her mother keenly (as documented in poems on the subject), despite never having known her. Charity was named for a “spinster” aunt, famed as a seamstress, who may have served as something of a role model. Both due to her mother’s illness during pregnancy and the lack of mother’s milk, Charity was a sickly infant and considered unlikely to survive. She was supported through it by a hired nurse who became a family friend, and by the care of a slightly older sister, Anne. Charity’s father remarried (the date of the marriage is not given here) but her stepmother evidently had little affection for her.
Chapter 2: Infantile Days 1784
Sylvia’s childhood was a contrast to Charity’s. She had a loving mother and family, neither war nor illness devastated the family, but the disruptions of the Revolution did leave them bankrupt and homeless. (In contrast, Charity’s family was well off.) Like Charity, Sylvia was the youngest of a large family.
[Note: The book often digs deeply into the historic context of the women’s lives, as with the post-war economic crisis in Massachusetts. There is also a lot of social history background to provide context for how people understood the women’s lives and affections. I’m not going to take notes on those aspects in detail, but simply stick to the outlines of the couple’s lives.]
The town Sylvia’s family lived in was poor and crime-ridden. When her grandfarther’s death meant selling off their property to settle debts, the family split up to live with or work for various relations. Because of Sylvia’s youth, she stayed with her mother and invented fantasies in her poetry of the comfortable togetherness that she had never actually known.
One of her brothers moved to Vermont for better opportunities and found trhem in plenty, marrying his employer’s daughter and becoming a land holder. This allowed him to invite the rest of the family to join him (except for the father, who died on the journey). Vermont was far less developed than Massachusetts, providing more opportunities for men, but fewer for women.
Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787
The Revolution had inspired something of a “generation gap” as younger people took seriously the ideals of liberty and independence and were less inclined to reflexively bow to parental and employer authority. Another legacy of the Revolution was the valorization of intimate same-sex friendships among both men and women. These friendships had the potential to displace the familial bonds that had previously been the essential basis for economic success. Such friendships had the same potential as m/f relationships for both joy and tragic break-ups. One of Charity’s brothers suffered greatly from the destruction of one such friendship, which may have affected some of her ambivalence about intimate relationships.
Another of her brothers also had an intimate friendship with that same man, and there was conflict between the brothers over contrasting loyalties. [Note: Although the author doesn’t make the connection at this point, these close same-sex friendships may have been a model for Charity’s own socializing later. Also note: I’m using “intimate friendship” in the sense of a highly particular, intensely emotional bond, without necessarily implying an erotic component.]
Resistance to parental attempts to dictate their lives led to most of Charity’s siblings eventually distancing themselves from their father and step-mother. Her sisters struggled harder to find a path other than marriage. One had poetic aspirations, but chose marriage at 20. Another married even younger. Both moved away from the family neighborhood at marriage. That left Charity as the only child at home at age 15. Charity clashed regularly with her stepmother, perhaps over her distaste for the endless housework, preferring literary activities. These gave her a common focus for close friendships with other young women in the community.
At age 20, after a conflict with her father, he threw Charity out of the house and she went to live with one of her married sisters. In the next decade, Charity moved between several communities, living with relatives, and formed a number of close friendships with women who were drawn by her intellect and bold spirit. But the admiration she attracted also sparked gossip and tension within those communities.
Chapter 4: Mistress of a School 1797
Charity worked as a school teacher, which fit well with her skills and interests, though she had a low opinion of many of her students. Like several of her siblings, she was a poet. At first, she boarded with her sister Anna. After some problems with gossip (more on which later), and a minor medical crisis, she moved back in with her parents until that became untenable. Then she went to live with a brother in western Massachusetts, where she resumed teaching. Then back to join Anna in a different locations. Despite these various moves and occasional breaks from teaching, the profession gave her freedom and economic independence, if not a very substantial income.
Post-revolutionary America encouraged general education, creating new employment opportunities for educated women (as they could be paid less than male teachers). Young female teachers often wrote about their “liberty” from parental oversight and restrictions (and the expectation of domestic labor if they remained at home).
Charity became a prolific letter writer, as well as a poet, often describing her life in dramatic and sentimental terms, as if narrating a novel.
She often wrote poems as gifts to friends, and was considered talented. She and her correspondents sometimes had pet names for each other used in their letters.
In her writing, Charity praised the virtues of modesty and sincerity, though she didn’t always recognize her own failings in those areas. Others viewed her pride and self-confidence as deviating from feminine ideals.
Chapter 5: So Many Friends 1799
Teaching brought Charity into contact with many like-minded young women. “Like-minded” included some women who were specifically attracted to teaching because they had little interest in marriage and whose primary romantic interests were with other women. In addition to their intellectual connections, it was normal for women friends to shar a bed and to openly record their enjoyment of embraces and kisses. Such women also recorded dreams of setting up housekeeping with an intimate friend. More rarely, private writings survive that describe genital sex and orgasm. Intimate friendships had a wide range of expressions and cannot be generalized.
Passionate friendships between single female teachers were unremarkable. Charity’s sister used the potential for one such relationship with a friend of hers to encourage Charity to join her household. Surviving documents trace a series of attachments for Charity. Their correspondence and poems express a strong physicality—wishes to embrace, to share a bed, expressions of longing and physical excitement. The peripatetic lives of teachers also meant these relationships were disrupted by separations and jealousies, again expressed in letters.
Social concerns about such relationships were not typically associated with their sexual potential, as sex and romance were not automatically considered to be linked. But if intimate same-sex friendships appeared to interfere with marriage prospects, it could be a source of concern.
In Charity’s case, concern seemed to revolve around a certain behavioral masculinity in her interactions with other women, combined with a stated disinterest in marriage. But the particulars of what generated gossip about her are difficult to identify due to the vague language used to describe the situation. Charity recorded suffering from malicious gossip, but did not give specifics. Talk was sufficient in some cases to induce Charity to move to a different community.
In some cases, initial friendships were ruptured when Charity initiated something more like courtship when the degree of feeling was not reciprocated. Eventually, only one of her previous intimates remained in correspondence with her.
Chapter 6: Discontent and Indifferent 1800
Sylvia pursued education past what was typical for a woman—or even a man—in her economic situation. Her location in rural Vermont meant reduced opportunities for advanced schooling, though she followed with interest news of academies for girls opening elsewhere. Despite some recovery in finances when the family moved to Vermont, there was no money to send Sylvia away to school.
Sylvia’s family approved of her ambitions, despite not always understanding them and not being able to do more to support them. Schooling provided a reason for Sylvia’s indifference to marriage, which her family commented on. She sought out female friends, but the pickings among unmarried women were few and not sustainable. Her family sometimes warned her against the dangers of “unsuitable” friendships. This may have come, in part, from her sister Polly, who was acquainted with Charity back in Massachusetts and may have had her in mind as a cautionary tale.
By 1804, when Sylvia was 20, comments in correspondence suggested that the family was accepting that Sylvia’s single state might be permanent, and she was urged to look forward to being a companion to her aging mother. Unlike Charity, Sylvia’s disinterest in marriage didn’t extend to refusing to learn domestic skills.
Chapter 7: Never to Marry 1800
In 1800, Charity—finding her welcome wearing out in her sister’s household, which was beset with illness—returned to her brother’s household, which she had previously left due to gossip about her intimate friendships. Yet in the letter announcing her intent, she explicitly laid out her plan never to marry, stating that it was a matter of principle and that marriage would not be “productive of happiness.” (The rest of the chapter spends a lot of time exploring the possibility that Charity’s position could be due to a failed/impossible m/f romance, only to dismiss the theory.)
Chapter 8: Charity and Mercy 1805
The concern that Charity and her girlfriends had about the nature of their relationships shows up in letters talking about the need for keeping those letters secret, or the advisability of destroying them, despite their sentimental value.
[Note: This also sheds light on why documentation of women’s intimate relationships can seem so rare, if women understood there was a boundary of acceptability beyond which the details must be kept secret. If that self-awareness meant that documentary evidence of relationships “beyond the pale” was selectively more likely to be destroyed, it creates the illusion that more passionate relationships didn’t exist. Later in the book, we’ll see the efforts Charity went through to try to manage her legacy by retrieving and destroying letters.]
Not all Charity’s intimate friends were from the educated circle of teachers. Mercy Ford lived with a controlling mother and hired out to do domestic service, leaving her little free time for her romance with Charity. (Earlier, Charity’s friendship with Nancy Warner had formed over a shared interest in religious philosophy, but Nancy’s religious sensibilities were part of why she distanced herself when Charity began courting her.)
Mercy and Charity did destroy most of their correspondence, due to concerns over the content becoming public. Some that do survive make clear they had a dual letter stream: one for public consumption, and one containing material “so particular…it will do by no means for the world.”
Other surviving letters express passionate feelings and language that may be coded terms for sex, but certainly express a desire to share a bed alone together. Their continued devotion and disinterest in marriage (along with previous gossip about Charity) eventually resulted in Charity’s parents forbidding Mercy to visit, and Mercy’s mother to make her life such a misery that Charity decided she must move elsewhere. This was when she left home the second time to go live with a brother.
[Note: The timeline in the book keeps looping back and jumping ahead, which is hard to keep track of.] At this point, Charity was 28 years old.
Chapter 9: Charity and Lydia 1806
Lydia Richards was another schoolteacher who prized the opportunity the work gave her for freedom and avoiding marriage. When she came into Charity’s orbit, she expressed a desire “to be your constant companion.” They had first met half a dozen years earlier and felt an immediate bond that was disrupted when gossip forced Charity back to her parents’ home. The two kept up a correspondence through the Mercy years, though Lydia more faithfully than Charity. She repeatedly longed for “mutual love” “clasped in each other’s arms.” When Charity once again moved to the town where Lydia lived, this wish was fulfilled by an initial two-week visit to Lydia’s family.
After that initial visit, Charity and Lydia spent as much time as possible in each other’s company and wrote copious letters to fill the absences, including complaints of what could not be set down on paper. They exchanged gifts typical of those given by courting couples. Friction between Charity and her brother’s in-laws was making her living situation untenable, and Lydia began floating the idea that Charity move in with her family. Charity did so for two months, but during a visit the two made to another friend in a nearby town, word came from Lydia’s parents that she was to return alone.
There are suggestions that Lydia’s parents had found some sort of evidence of the true nature of the couple’s relationship. Despite Lydia’s pleas, Charity determined to accept an invitation from friends in Vermont, promising to continue loving Lydia forever.
Lydia’s continued letters reflect increasing longing for Charity’s love and return, but half a year later, Charity was still in Vermont and the letters became increasingly pleading and lonely. By the time a year had elapsed, Lydia heard from a third party that Charity had set up housekeeping with a younger woman in Vermont.
Only after an eventual visit from Charity, with Sylvia in tow, did Lydia acknowledge the end of her hopes, in a letter filled with bitter literary allusions. But after that, they realigned their relationship as a friendship that lasted until death. Lydia never did marry.
Chapter 10: Charity and Sylvia February 1807
The couple who invited Charity to join them in Vermont were distantly related—not uncommon in the small-town culture of New England. The husband was related to Charity’s mother, and the wife was the sister of Sylvia Drake. The family connections—however distant—may have helped people justify the bond that sprung up between them. Sylvia was initially anxious about the introduction of another single woman into their circle—one who had had the educational opportunities she lacked. Despite their differences in background, a romantic relationship began quickly.
Charity began work as a tailor and Sylvia apprenticed to her to keep up with the work. Two poems, written during the period when they were first getting acquainted and attributable to Sylvia, celebrate Spring as a time of budding romance and love, though adding further seasonal imagery of the eventual coming of winter. Initially, Charity had planned to stay for three months, and the anticipated end of the visit may have prompted Sylvia’s concern for the turning of the seasons.
Charity was beset by a steady stream of Lydia’s letters and omitted all mention of her new friend in response. Charity extended her visit, then extended it again. In mid-summer, Sylvia moved on to stay with a different family member—a typical arrangement for an unmarried woman being maintained by her family. The two promised to write, but this promise was unnecessary. A month later, Sylvia returned and they would never again be parted in the succeeding 44 years.
This time, Charity made some practical plans. Never again would a relationship be at the mercy of a host family’s scrutiny and disapproval. The amount of sewing work shew as receiving was enough to establish an independent household. She rented a room, while retaining the community good will of being part of a familial network. Charity wrote Sylvia asking her to join her. The sewing work was the cover to make their arrangement acceptable to the community. Charity would “hire” Sylvia as her assistant, thus bypassing questions of why Sylvia was no longer living with family members.
Chapter 11: The Tie That Binds July 1807
In a later memoir, Charity described Sylvia’s agreement as becoming “my help-meet and…companion.” The language of this statement is the language of marriage, from “consent” to “help-meet.” (“Help-meet” was a gendered term, indicating a wife.) If they had been an opposite sex couple, a statement of this type could have constituted a legal common-law marriage contract at the time. Although their union had no legal status, it eventually acquired that social standing in their community. Neighbors described them “as if…married to each other.”
Initially, however, Charity was cautious about making the nature of their relationship clear, using the press of work as the reason for staying in Vermont when she had originally planned to return to Massachusetts, and omitting mention of Sylvia in her letters. Her poetry, however, celebrated the union. Gradually, Sylvia was introduced into her letters, and some made the correct conclusions.
That first year, Charity was anxious that something might happen to separate them, as had happened in previous relationships. To protect against this, when she finally made a visit back to relatives in Massachusetts, she brought Sylvia with her. There was a round of visits over the summer, starting with her most sympathetic sister, who immediately embraced Sylvia as Charity’s “constant companion” and supported her decision to return to Vermont after her travels.
The visits included a meeting with Lydia, which confirmed to the latter her fears that Charity had definitively moved on. After that, Lydia’s previously constant letters ceased for several months.
Another fraught visit was to Charity’s parents, who had begged for “one last visit” feeling their impending mortality. The reunion was far from joyous, but left relations open for future visits from the couple. A visit to the brother who had previously banished Charity was similarly cool but satisfactory in tacitly accepting Sylvia as a member of the family.
A second meeting with Lydia cemented the conversion from rejected lover to friend, with Lydia resuming correspondence and always sending her love to Sylvia.
The final errand of their travels before returning to Vermont was Charity asking her brother to buy a ring on her behalf on his next trip to Boston.
Chapter 12: Their Own Dwelling 1809
1809 started off with C&S (which I’m going to shorthand from here on out) moving into a house, built specifically for them, and combining living quarters and a tailor’s shop. Economic and social conditions made it difficult for women to own property, but they benefitted from a work-around where a neighbor woman had inherited land in trust for her sons (to protect the inheritance from her husband’s control) and she gave C&S a lifetime lease on a parcel of it where they could build. This arrangement also protected them from the gossip that having a male landlord might have provoked.
They were not entirely protected against a general social anxiety about unmarried women living alone or in couples. The book notes two Philadelphia women arrested in 1792 for “co-habiting”—a term more typically applied to an unmarried m/f couple sharing living quarters. Bed-sharing by relatives or friends of the same sex had long been considered unremarkable, especially under circumstances where rooms and furniture were at a premium. By the mid 19th century, however, advice manuals were beginning to suggest that bed-sharing might lead to “mutual masturbation”—a typical way that same-sex erotics were characterized. [Note: This is one of those places where it isn’t clear whether literature of this type would be in circulation in rural New England. Also we aren’t anywhere near the mid century yet. So I don’t know that it’s reasonable to suggest that this concern would be in people’s minds. No positive evidence for this concern in their case is offered.]
As comparatives, the text notes Hannah Catherall and Rebecca Jones, who cohabited in Philadelphia in the 1760-1780s (this appears to be a different couple than mentioned previously) who were referred to in the Quaker community as “yoke-fellows” (a term that could refer to spouses) with no indication of disapproval. The text also notes Ponsonby & Butler and Lister & Walker, but I have doubts that either of those couples are a useful comparison for attitudes or awareness in rural New England.
Another unexpected hazard was the admiration of other unmarried women, who not only saw in C&S a model for their own personal ambitions, but sometimes tried to insert themselves into the middle of the relationship, as with one Mary Harvey whose initial gushing admiration for their arrangement shifted to romantic advances on Charity alone, which resulted in Charity solidly rebuffing her.
The house became a symbol for C&S’s relatives of the solidity of their commitments, and its upkeep (largely falling to Sylvia as the wife-analog) was a metric of their respectability. Despite some gendering of their roles, they always emphasized co-ownership of the house and of their resources.
It wasn’t long before they were financially able to expand the original 2-room structure to create a greater separation of public and private, and to allow for hosting the visits of relatives and friends. By 1821, they had the space and resources to hold a family Christmas dinner with perhaps a dozen guests. The tailor’s shop had expanded to include female apprentices, who were treated like daughters.
The surface acceptance did not entirely conceal underlying uneasiness and tensions. Sylvia’s mother came for an extended visit, but both were relieved when it concluded. Sylvia’s local brother, who had been the means for the couple to meet initially, rarely visited and Sylvia evidently called him out about it, then wrote remorsefully about her reaction.
On the other hand, when the couple were in the midst of expanding and renovating their house, community support was enthusiastic, and letters indicate they were on excellent terms with their landlady’s sons, who would eventually own the property.
[Note: Some of the relatives may have been influenced by the underlying expectations of homosociality. Two of Sylvia’s brothers noted that they stayed away because “there was no man to visit.” It could be possible to interpret this as feeling socially awkward about gender issues rather than sexuality issues.]
Eventually, the tensions eased and family loyalty proved stronger than disapproval.
Chapter 13: Wild Affections 1811
C&S were not immune from the sense that their relationship was, to some degree, sinful—even beyond the general Protestant attitude that everyone was sinful. There are references to hoping that repentance and Christ’s forgiveness would see them through. Their local Congregational church required a confession and being “born again” to be admitted to taking communion, and this was something they both sought in connection with their “wild affections”—a term they used, taken from a phrase that referred to extramarital sex. To some extent, the struggles they recorded around feeling sinful provide some of the strongest arguments for the sexual nature of their relationship (and that they classified what they were engaging in as “sex”). [Note: At the same time, this struggle should not be interpreted as indicating that they felt uniquely sinful for their relationship. All people were sinful, after all. One could find writings from a similar era by people in heterosexual marriages who felt that some aspect of their sex lives was “sinful.”]
It appears that C&S spent their entire relationship suspended in a balance of considering their sexual relations to be sinful, repenting their transgressions, and continuing to enjoy the erotic aspect of their union. Such are the contradictions of life. [Note: The latter part of this chapter engages in a close textual analysis to find coded euphemisms in their writing that would indicate specific sexual techniques they might have engaged in.]
Chapter 14: Miss Bryant Was the Man 1820
In the 1820 census records, Charity is listed as the “head of household” with “another woman” (Sylvia) also living at the residence. This was repeated for the 1830 census. In 1840, there was the addition of an employee residing there. Only the head of household was recorded by name until 1850 when the census began including the names of dependents.
The chapter goes on to explore the extent to which C&S inhabited gendered roles within their relationship. Although certain aspects assigned Charity the “husband” role and Sylvia the “wife,” this was not a case of a “female husband.” Charity always dressed in conventionally feminine ways. But being older, taking the lead in business, and a certain boldness in social interactions led to the community labeling her “the man” of the couple. And the language Charity used in addressing and referring to Sylvia matched language typically used by a man for his wife.
Local tax and land records listed Charity’s name first in the household, but also included Sylvia’s name (where a wife’s name would not have been listed). Yet their property was recognized as belonging to them in common.
(There follows a discussion of the structure of economic transactions in the early 19th century, including a constant economy of gift exchanges of food, carefully recorded.)
Chapter 15: Dear Aunts 1823
C&S became “aunts” with no distinction between them to the many Drake children who lived in the same community. (Sylvia’s siblings all had large families.) Similarly, in visits to Massachusetts, Sylvia was “aunt” to the children of Charity’s siblings. This next generation had never known a time when C&S were not a couple. Theh two families were further entwined by naming practices, with the names “Charity” and “Bryant” being given to Drake children (alongside several “Sylvia”s). The two women had a special connection to their name sakes (though they had close relations with all the children), making presents of clothing and, in one case, paying for college fees and books. This college-bound nephew was functionally adopted by them, with the assent of his father who felt unable to provide for him financially.
Arrangements were in train to send one niece to Mount Holyoke shortly after it opened, but for unknown reasons the plan fell through. That niece (one of the Sylvias) may have had a special connection with the pair. She never married, and after Charity’s death she became a companion to her Aunt Sylvia.
In general, this chapter details the lifelong connections between C&S and the younger generations, with many specifics of the material support they provided. Their prosperous and stable tailoring business both enabled this support and provided a model of alternatives to the difficult life of a farmer.
Not all relations were entirely positive. Evidently Charity was generous with unrequested advice and wasn’t shy about pointing out when she felt the family was slighting them. And Charity’s relations with her father and stepmother were sour well beyond their deaths due to a very awkward inheritance.
C&S’s poetry was another legacy that connected them to family, not only in the gifts of poems they provided, but in helping inspire others to take up literary aspirations.
The chapter also discusses the many female apprentices the couple took in and trained, who became a part of their family and in some cases referred to them as “mothers.” Many children in the larger community called the two “aunt” without any family connection, and several girls with no direct family tie were named after them.
Chapter 16: Stand Fast in One Spirit 1828
C&S founded and contributed to a charitable organization, the Weybridge Female Benevolent Society, with many Drake women also signing on to the charter. The organization also had a religious character. This chapter includes a long discussion of religious movements of the early 19th century. It also discusses their religious associations and the positive relations they had with the ministers of their local church. Correspondence with the ministers shows them being treated as a couple, “in one spirit, with one mind.” These relations recognized their serious spirituality, as well as the material support they gave to the church, and their social leadership in the community.
Through all this, the two often express private thoughts about spiritual failure and the state of their souls. [Note: But as I’ve commented earlier, this should be compared to the general tenor of religious thought in their context. I feel like the author implies too strongly that they felt a uniquely heavy burden of sin from their relationship.]
Chapter 17: Diligent in Business 1835
The chapter opens with a detailed dramatized episode from a typical workday for C&S, cited to a diary entry, but not indicated as direct quotes and clearly elaborated from the author’s imagination. This is the sort of concern I’ve noted previously about the fictionalizing of details.
The emphasis of the chapter is on the exhausting balance between having a constant stream of sewing workload and the material comfort and stability it provided. In general, unmarried women lived lives of poverty or dependence or both. There were many examples around C&S of what happened to women who either had no skills or were too old or infirm to earn their own room and board. C&S recorded endless long working hours and the ill health it generated, including repetitive stress injuries and eyestrain.
While they never became rich, even by local standards, their standard of living and personal property were equivalent to the household of a more traditional married couple, even through multiple general financial crises of the early 19th century. In general, they avoided debt, and many of their customers paid in kind, helping to buffer the consequences of financial panics, even as some relatives were badly affected.
The stability of their business also meant they were able to employ a succession of young women as assistants and apprentices. They provided not only wages, but training that the women could then take with them to support themselves or even to set up their own shops with additional employees. Sewing itself was only part of the job—the more skilled aspect was patterning and the tailoring of male clothing.
Their particular path to economic independence would fade somewhat in mid-century with the invention of the sewing machine and commercial printed patterns.
Chapter 18: The Cure of Her I Love 1839
In 1839, Charity suffered what was likely a heart attack. This came after a lifetime of various acute and chronic ailments that were endemic in the 19th century. Both women experienced chronic headaches, including migraine symptoms, as well as the usual round of infectious diseases. Treatments of the time were largely bleeding and quack medicines, including regular treatments to “purge the system” (i.e., induce vomiting and diarrhea). One medical principle was that a medicine could be considered effective if it produced a violent effect, even if that effect was debilitating. There were also treatments using traditional herbal remedies that likely had a better cost-benefit ratio.
In general, this chapter discusses ailments mentioned in C&S’s correspondence and diaries, with the treatments either used or recommended, as well as discussing the general state of medical practice at the time.
The 1839 attack, though frightening, was survived. Charity lived another 12 years after that to the age of 74. During that period, she would lose siblings and friends, one by one. Another heart attack took her life in 1851.
Chapter 19: Sylvia Drake | W 1851
Sylvia Drake was 66 when Charity died and had not left her side for over 40 years. Family and neighbors commented on what a shock it would be for her to be on her own, with loneliness a common theme in their condolence letters. Some came close to recognizing that Sylvia was the equivalent of a widow, using that word, but she was denied the social recognition and status that widowhood normally conferred.
Sylvia lived for another 16 years, wearing mourning black. Initially, she remained in their shared home and continued their business, but after half a decade, she found herself unable to continue working at the same intensity and reduced her sewing to family only.
Eight years after Charity’s death, Sylvia moved in with her widowed brother, who needed medical care. At the age of 83, in 1868, Sylvia died. The family buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.
As with so many aspects of their life, Charity and Sylvia’s wills reflected a marriage-like status, while also reflecting a more egalitarian life than m/f marriage offered. Charity left all her share in their joint property to Sylvia, and Sylvia in turn distributed her legacy equally between both their families, but with a feminist twist: largely leaving it to female relatives who were either unmarried or were poorly supported by their husbands.
The rest of the chapter uses the Drake family finances to illustrate the gendered dynamics of property law and practices at the time.
Afterword
This chapter reviews the nature of the evidence for C&S’s lives and the means by which it was preserved and kept in public awareness. Even into the mid 20h century, local tradition preserved memories of the two as a positive example of female devotion. Eventually, the tacit veil of ambiguity began to be removed and local historians began celebrating them as lesbian foremothers , after struggling against the “we can’t really know” crowd. [Note: Which included Lillian Faderman, who included them under confident assertions that early 19th century women could not possibly have imagined participating in anything more than chaste kisses.]