Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  “Poets and Lovers Evermore”

  In a poem of the 1890s two Englishwomen, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, “romantic friends” who wrote twenty-five plays and eight books of poetry together under the pseudonym Michael Field, declared of themselves: “My love and I took hands and swore/ Against the world to be/ Poets and lovers evermore.”18 Many early professional women in America also clasped hands and swore, generally not to be poets together, but often to be doctors, professors, ministers, union organizers, social workers, or pacifist lecturers together—and “lovers evermore.”

  They were often barred from those careers that had long been male preserves. But fueled by the power they gave each other, they could establish their own professions in teaching and administration at women’s colleges, founding and serving in settlement houses, establishing and running institutions for social and political reform, and bringing reform concerns to existing institutions. In these ways thousands of them were able to serve their own needs to be financially independent and creatively employed, as well as their social and political interests in betterment such as had concerned women of their class since the fiery mid-nineteenth-century women abolitionists saw the necessity for female participation in reform work. Perhaps they were able to play roles of prominence as professional figures despite the prevalent opinion that woman’s place was in the home because what they did could often be seen as housekeeping on a large scale—teaching, nurturing, healing—domestic duties brought into the public sphere. They were eventually able to convince great portions of the country—particularly the East and Midwest—that the growing horrors perpetrated by industrialization and urbanization begged to be cured by their mass mothering skills.

  But in creating jobs for themselves through their skills they achieved the economic freedom (such as their middle class counterparts in the past never could) to live as what the later twentieth century would consider lesbians, though the early twentieth century was still reluctant to attribute sexuality to such proper-seeming maiden ladies and would have preferred to describe them, as historian Judith Schwarz has pointed out, as “close friends and devoted companions.” Whether or not their relationships were specifically sexual, had they lived today they would at least have been described as falling somewhere on what Adrienne Rich has called the “lesbian continuum.” Their numbers included Emily Blackwell, the pioneering physician and co-founder of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, and the woman she lived with for almost thirty years until her death in 1910, Elizabeth Cushier, an eminent gynecological surgeon; renowned biographer Katharine Anthony and progressive educator Elisabeth Irwin, who developed a teaching system for the New York schools and with whom Anthony raised several adopted children in the course of a thirty year relationship; pairs of women such as Mary Dreir and Lenora O’Reilly, and Helen Marot and Caroline Pratt, who lived most of their adult lives together and organized the Women’s Trade Union League, spearheading its battles to regulate women’s hours in factories, fighting clothing and cigar sweatshops, forcing the appointment of women factory inspectors; Vida Scudder, who was a professor at Wellesley but fled from Back Bay Boston privilege to identify herself with the tenement population, establishing the Rivington Street Settlement House and founding the College Settlements Association to bring libraries, summer schools, trade unions, and “culture” into poor communities, and whose “devoted companion” was Florence Converse, a professor and novelist; Frances Witherspoon, head of the New York Women’s Peace Party, co-founder of the New York Bureau of Legal Advice for conscientious objectors, and Tracy Mygatt, with whom she lived her entire adult life and with whom she built the War Resisters League into a large and strong pacifist organization. The list of female contributors to twentieth-century social progress and decency who constructed their personal lives around other women is endless.19

  Some of those women were cultural feminists, fueled by their belief that male values created the tragedies connected with industrialization, war, and mindless urbanization and that it was the responsibility of women, with their superior sensibilities, to straighten the world out again. Their love of women was at least in part the result of their moral chauvinism. Others were less convinced of women’s natural superiority, but they wanted to wrest from society the opportunities and training that would give women the advantages men had and thus permit them to be more whole as human beings. Their love of women was at least in part a search for allies to help wage the battle against women’s social impoverishment. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House Settlement, president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, founder of the Summer School for Women in Industry to serve urban working women, and first president of the National College Women’s Equal Suffrage League, represent these two different types. They are similar, however, in that they both managed to find kindred spirits, “devoted companions,” who would work with them to promote the success of their endeavors.

  Twentieth-century biographers have had a hard time trying to pin heterosexual interests to them. Jane Addams found her family’s efforts to launch her as a debutante and marry her to her stepbrother extremely distasteful. Those attempts, Addams recalled in her autobiography, led to “the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment,” from which she was extricated by Ellen Starr, whom she met in college. Ellen appears to have been Jane’s first serious attachment. For years they celebrated September 11—even when they were apart—as the anniversary of their first meeting. During their separations Jane stationed Ellen’s picture, as she wrote her, “where I can see you almost every minute.” It was Ellen who prodded Jane to leave her family, come to Chicago, and open Hull House together with her. On accepting the plan Jane wrote Ellen: “Let’s love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation.” It was Ellen’s devotion and emotional support that permitted Jane to cast off the self-doubts that had been plaguing her as a female who wanted to be both socially useful and independent during unsympathetic times and to commit herself to action: to create a settlement house in the midst of poverty where young, comfortably brought-up women who had spent years in study might now “learn of life from life itself,” as Addams later wrote. Under the guidance initially of both Addams and Starr these females of the leisure class investigated sweatshops and the dangerous trades and agitated for social reforms, helped newly arrived immigrants learn to make America their home, taught skills, and promoted cultural activities. They changed the lives of the poor and were themselves changed by their confrontation with realities from which they had always been sheltered.20

  While providing such opportunities for these young women Jane Addams also lived a personal life that most biographers have attempted to gloss over, since the facts have made them uncomfortable. For example, although it is known that Jane and wealthy philanthropist Mary Rozet Smith, who later became her “devoted companion” (as biographers must acknowledge), always slept in the same room and the same bed, and when they traveled Jane even wired ahead to be sure they would get a hotel room with a double bed, nevertheless most historians have preferred to present Addams as asexual. William O’Neill says of her:

  She gave her time, money and talents to the interests of the poor … and remained largely untouched by the passionate currents that swirled around her. The crowning irony of Jane Addams’ life, therefore, was that she compromised her intellect for the sake of human experiences which her nature prevented her from having. Life, as she meant the term, eluded her forever.

  Perhaps “Life,” as O’Neill and other historians have meant the term (i.e., heterosexuality, marriage, family), eluded Addams, but love and passion did not. Similarly, Allen Davis has tried to explain away what he benightedly calls appearances of “perversion” in Jane Addams’ same-sex intimacies as being instead typical of nineteenth-century “innocent” sentimental friendship. As Blanche Cook points out, Addams was a “conventional lady with pearls
,” and erotic passion between women has been considered perversion: the two concepts cannot be reconciled easily. But looking at the available facts, there can be no doubt that Addams was passionately involved with at least two women.21

  Although Ellen Starr continued to work alongside Jane and to live at Hull House for many years, the early intensity of their relationship dwindled, and Mary Rozet Smith replaced Ellen in Jane’s affections. Jane’s relationship with Mary lasted forty years. Mary first came to Hull House in 1890 as another wealthy young lady anxious to make herself useful. In the initial correspondence between Jane and Mary, Jane always brought in Ellen, using the first person plural, writing, for example, “We will miss you.” But soon Ellen dropped out of the letters, and by 1893 Mary became a traveling companion on Jane’s lecture tours. Two years later Ellen went off to England alone to study bookbinding so that she could learn to construct a bookbindery at Hull House according to the plans of English socialist-aesthete William Morris and to provide artistic work for the community. The intimate side of her relationship with Jane was by then clearly over.22

  Mary Smith and Jane Addams seem to have confided about their feelings for each other to confederates such as Florence Kelley, who wrote Mary at one separation in 1899: “The Lady [Jane] misses you more than the uninitiated would think she had time for.” Letters to each other when they were separated because of Jane’s busy schedule speak for themselves. Mary wrote Jane: “You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you now.” Jane addressed her “My Ever Dear” and wrote: “I miss you dreadfully and am yours ’til death.” They thought of themselves as wedded. In a 1902 letter, written during a three-week separation, Jane remarked: “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together.” In 1904 they purchased a home together near Bar Harbor, Maine. “Our house—it quite gives me a thrill to write the word,” Jane told Mary. “It was our house wasn’t it in a really truly ownership,” and she talked about their “healing domesticity.”23

  The fact of their intimacy is confirmed no more by the knowledge that they always shared a double bed together than it is by a poem that Jane wrote Mary at the end of the century recalling their first meeting:

  One day I came into Hull House,

  (No spirit whispered who was there)

  And in the kindergarten room

  There sat upon a childish chair

  A girl, both tall and fair to see,

  (To look at her gives one a thrill).

  But all I thought was, would she be

  Best fitted to lead club, or drill?

  You see, I had forgotten Love,

  And only thought of Hull House then.

  That is the way with women folks

  When they attempt the things of men;

  They grow intense, and love the thing

  Which they so tenderly do rear,

  And think that nothing lies beyond

  Which claims from them a smile or tear.

  Like mothers who work long and late

  To rear their children fittingly,

  Follow them only with their eyes,

  And love them almost pityingly,

  So I was blind and deaf those years

  To all save one absorbing care,

  And did not guess what now I know—

  Delivering love was sitting there!4

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

  Allen Davis tells of having spoken about the relationships between women at Hull House with Dr. Alice Hamilton, a ninety-year-old woman at the time of the interview in 1963, who had served there during the early years. As might be expected, Dr. Hamilton denied that there was any open lesbianism between Hull House residents but did agree that “the close relationship of the women involved an unconscious sexuality.” She hastened to interject that because it was unconscious it was “unimportant.” Davis reports: “Then she added with a smile that the very fact that I would bring the subject up was an indication of the separation between my generation and hers.”25

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

  M. Carey Thomas was a very different kind of feminist. Unlike Jane Addams, a cultural feminist, Thomas’ philosophical thrust was not in demonstrating that women could redeem the world because they were different from and better than men, but rather in showing how they were like men, as good as men, and hence deserving of equal treatment. Under her leadership as president of Bryn Mawr, the school provided training for women that was a great departure from women’s education in female seminaries and other colleges that still claimed as a rationale for their existence “educate women and you educate the mothers of men.” Thomas was determined instead to show that “girls can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature, science and conjecture.”26 She wanted to produce hard-driving professional women in her own image to invade all the worthwhile pursuits that had been closed to women before. Thanks to Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr students, unlike those at other women’s colleges, were not even expected to care for their own rooms. All was done for them so that they could spend their time being scholars, just as male students could, and the curriculum was modeled on that of the best of the men’s colleges.

  Carey Thomas was able to realize her childhood dreams as most women before her could not. She had written of having read Michelet’s misogynist work La Femme as a girl and being blinded by tears: “I was beside myself with terror lest it might prove true that I myself was so vile and pathological a thing.” She even begged God to kill her if she could never learn Greek and go to college. She declared early, with unshakable conviction: “I ain’t going to get married and I don’t want to teach school. I can’t imagine anything worse than living a regular young lady’s life. … I don’t care if everybody would cut me.” There must have been many young women in Victorian America who felt as she did, but it was she who was the pioneer who provided for other women a path to a real alternative to domesticity, just as she had managed to find that path herself.27

  E
ven as an adolescent, Carey had written to her closest friend, Bessie King (they renamed themselves Rex and Rush because they saw that only men were permitted to do interesting things), of her dream that they would become scholars together and be together forever, surrounded by a library with “great big easy chairs where we could sit lost in books for days together,” a laboratory for scientific experiments, and “a great large table covered with papers.” Inextricably bound up with this vision was her fantasy of female love and mutual support, since she knew there was no way such dreams could be realized if she married a man:

  There we would live loving each other and urging each other on to every high and noble deed or action, and all who passed should say “Their example arouses me, their books ennoble me, their ideas inspire me, and behold they are women!”28

  Her early education in the 1860s and ’70s gave her no reason to believe that such an attachment that would foster both love and productivity was not possible. Her journals show that her years at a Quaker boarding school for girls and then at Cornell provided her with trial experiments on her ideas about female attachments. Nor did her society, still approving of romantic friendship, discourage her. The girls at the Quaker boarding school explained to her simply that she and a fellow student had “smashed on each other or ‘made love’. … I only know it was elegant,” she decided. At the age of twenty-three she complained to her mother, “If it were only possible for women to elect women as well as men for a life’s love! … It is possible but if families would only regard it in that light.” Both her Quaker mother and aunt responded to her admission of love for other females by writing her, “[We] guess thy feeling is quite natural. [We] used to have the same romantic love for our friends. It is a real pleasure.”29