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Introduction

Not-men, not-women, answerable to no function of either sex, whose careers were carried on, and how successfully, in whatever field they chose: They were educators, writers, editors, politicians, artists, world travellers, and international hostesses, who lived in public and by the public and played out their self-assumed roles in such masterly freedom as only a few medieval queens had equalled. Freedom to them meant precisely freedom from men and their stuffy rules for women.

—Katherine Anne Porter, on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “lesbians”

 

THIS IS A BOOK about how millions of American women became what they now are: full citizens, educated, and capable of earning a decent living for themselves. It is also a book about how Americans developed a social conscience and adapted the goals of various reform movements into laws. But it departs from other such histories because it focuses on how certain late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women whose lives can be described as lesbian were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today.

For a variety of reasons, many of the women at the center of this book would not have used the noun “lesbian” to describe their identity, or even have been familiar with the word. However, using materials such as their letters and journals as evidence, I argue that that term used as an adjective accurately describes their committed domestic, sexual, and/or affectional experiences. I also argue that in their eras, lesbian arrangements freed these pioneering women to pursue education, professions, and civil and social rights for themselves and others far more effectively than they could have if they had lived in traditional heterosexual arrangements.

 

Lesbians Before “Lesbian Identity”

The emotional and sexual lives of many of the women discussed in this book were often complex. Most of them lived before the days when sexual identity was defined by clear-cut labels, and the noun “lesbian” would not in any case have been entirely adequate to identify all of them. Mary Dreier, for example, shared her life with another woman in a relationship that was almost certainly sexual, but she was also in love with a man she could not marry, and she probably did not consummate her attraction to him. Mildred Olmsted was married for most of her life and had a child with her husband, yet she was sexually uninterested in him, and throughout her marriage she continued a relationship with a woman that was emotionally and erotically intense. Still others loved and lived with women only. They may or may not have had sexual relationships with those women, but regardless, they saw them as their domestic spouses, partners, or lifelong loves. The binary paradigm of homosexual/heterosexual would probably have been baffling to many of them even if they had known those terms. However, what all these people had in common was that beloved women were centrally implicated in their emotional lives, and to a greater or lesser extent, their intimate relationships with other women helped enable their achievements.

To Believe in Women will perhaps be seen as being in opposition to postmodernism, which does not recognize the possibility of reclaiming women of the past as lesbians. Academic postmodernists might point to the precarious status of identity—the instability, indecipherability, and unnameability of sexualities—and conclude that lesbianism cannot really be discussed, particularly in regard to history. With their epistemological doubts, they would be suspicious of any attempt to construct a coherent pattern out of complex human lives in order to create a “grand narrative” of history. Grand narratives—indeed, any such theoretical speculations, they would argue—must ultimately expose themselves as “passionate fictions.”

I believe that such arguments have merit and serve as an important corrective to a simplistic temptation to name the “lesbians” in history. As the postmodernists claim, it is impossible—especially when dealing with historical figures—to make safe statements about identities, which are so slippery in their subjectivity and mutability. However, if enough material that reveals what people do and say is available, we can surely make apt observations about their behavior. That is what I have attempted to do in this book. I use the term “lesbian” as an adjective that describes intense woman-to-woman relating and commitment. Thus, I will admit at the outset that my subtitle is somewhat misleading. If there had been more space on the title page, and if the phrase had not been so aesthetically dismal, I might have subtitled this book, with greater accuracy, “What Women of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Whose Chief Sexual and/or Affectional and Domestic Behaviors Would Have Been Called ‘Lesbian’ If They Had Been Observed in the Years after 1920, Have Done for America.” When I slip into the shorthand of referring to these women as “lesbians,” readers might keep my alternate subtitle in mind.

While most of these women appear not to have had what we in the later twentieth century have called a “lesbian identity,” they somehow recognized each other. On what basis? Perhaps it was because they fought together to expand women’s possibilities, they were usually not living with a husband, and, most important, they were ostensibly engaged in a romantic and committed relationship with another woman. They often knew each other well. Anna Howard Shaw, the suffrage leader, was close not only to other suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and the woman Anthony called her “lover,” Emily Gross, but also to women such as M. Carey Thomas, the college president, and her partner, Mary Garrett. Thomas was also friends with Jane Addams, the social reformer, who, along with her partner, Mary Rozet Smith, was friends with the suffragist and politician Anne Martin and her partner, Dr. Margaret Long. When Addams and Smith visited Boston, they often dined or stayed with the writer Sarah Orne Jewett and her partner, Annie Fields.

These women seldom wrote to each other without also sending regards to the partner of the correspondent; “Love from both of us to both of you” was an oft-repeated phrase in their letters. When female couples traveled with other female couples, it was taken for granted that each woman would be sharing a room with her partner and not with another friend. Sleeping arrangements were understood to be as inviolate as they would be with husband and wife. Those qualities and lifestyles these women shared and recognized in each other apparently constituted an “identity” of sorts, though there is little evidence that they gave a name to it.

In the context of their day, the general absence of a name for their loves and lives is not surprising. I have found no articulated concepts of lesbianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with which they would have been entirely comfortable. “Inverts” were seen by most sexologists as pathological, and since these women believed their discontent was not pathological but rationally based on the unjust treatment of females, they would not have dubbed themselves “sexual inverts,” no matter how much sexologists’ definitions of the invert fit them. The term “homosexual” too would probably have felt foreign to most of them, since regardless of whether their relationships were specifically sexual, they were also much more than sexual. Nor would other nineteenth-century views of lesbianism, such as the images of the lesbienne in French decadent fiction and poetry, have seemed acceptable to most of them.

However, though most of the women discussed here may not have articulated, even to themselves, that their choice of a female mate instead of a husband was “lesbian,” sexologists writing at the end of the nineteenth century made the point emphatically, characterizing the leaders of the women’s movement as “sexual inverts.” In his 1897 work, Havelock Ellis even laid the blame for what he said was an increase in female homosexuality on the “modern movement of emancipation,” which encouraged women’s “intimacy with their own sex” and taught them “disdain” for women’s conventional roles.

Ellis’s supposition ran counter to a theory proposed several decades earlier and generally accepted by him that homosexuality was congenital. The true homosexual, sexologists insisted, suffered from a hereditary neurosis. But Ellis explained an apparent contradiction by asserting that the homosexuality of women who came to that “aberration” through the emancipation movement was only “a spurious imitation.” However, he continued his argument, the true homosexual often assumed leadership in women’s rights movements, where she made other women “spuriously” homosexual. She could intellectually seduce other females because her “congenital anomaly” of homosexuality “occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others.” Despite the charm of this supposition, I will not argue as Ellis does that the leadership for women’s rights and re-form came from lesbians because of the “high intelligence” associated with their “anomaly.” Rather, it seems that women of this time who formed domestic partnerships with other women were much more likely to be effective as social pioneers than women who lived with husbands.

 

The Virtues of Lesbian Domesticity

Almost all of the women discussed in the pages that follow had a primary relationship with another woman that lasted for twenty years or more. However, there was no one model of domestic and affectional arrangements among them. In some cases, such as that of Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony, one member of the couple mostly kept the home fires burning while the other traveled the continent to procure women’s rights. Lucy Anthony, who would surely have been called a “femme” if she had lived in the mid-twentieth century, had no interest in a public role for herself, yet she believed ardently in the women’s movement and felt that by taking care of the charismatic and politically effective Shaw, she was contributing to the cause.

In contrast, other women worked together with their partners to advance women’s position. Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier were both pioneering doctors in the New York infirmary that Emily founded. Frances Willard and Anna Gordon both led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay were both suffrage leaders on a national level. Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon both worked on issues of peace and civil rights.

In other cases, one woman made her considerable fortune available to the reform work in which her partner was engaged, thereby empowering the beloved partner while promoting a cause in which she too believed. Jane Addams was able to put Hull House on the map in part because of the many excellent projects that the generosity of her wealthy partner, Mary Rozet Smith, permitted her to pursue. M. Carey Thomas became one of the first female college presidents in 1894 because Mary Garrett, with whom Thomas lived until Garrett’s death, in 1915, told the trustees that she would give Bryn Mawr a large yearly endowment if, and only if, Thomas headed the college. Miriam Van Waters became a powerful women’s prison reformer with the help of the purse and political clout of Geraldine Thompson, with whom she had a long-term committed relationship.

In Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, I traced how the successes of the women’s rights movement by the late nineteenth century meant that so-called romantic friendships of earlier eras could become “Boston marriages”: committed relationships between two women who, having gone to college and then found decent-paying jobs, could set up a household together rather than marry men out of economic need. In To Believe in Women, I will show how many of those women also shared the excitement of pioneering. They went where no women had gone before—not only into colleges and universities, but also into the polls, the operating rooms, the pulpits, the legislatures, the law courts. It was often their same-sex partnerships and commitments that made those exciting explorations possible.

Why were women who lived in committed relationships with other women so apt to be the most effective early leaders in the movement to advance women and in many other reform movements? At the end of the long, strong first wave of the women’s rights movement, in 1920, Crystal Eastman, who had had two husbands and numerous male lovers, characterized what she believed to be crucial differences between heterosexual relationships and female-female relationships. Heterosexual marriage, in her summation, posed a danger to certain women:

 

Two business women can “make a home” together without either one being over-burdened or over-bored. It is because they both know how and both feel responsible. But it is the rare man who can marry one of them and continue the home-making partnership. Yet if there are not children, there is nothing essentially different in the combination. Two self-supporting adults decide to make a home together: If both are women, it is a pleasant partnership more often than work; if one is a man, it is almost never a partnership—the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job. Unless she is very strong, it is too much for her, she gets tired and bitter over it, and finally perhaps gives up her outside work and condemns herself to the tiresome half-jobs of housekeeping for two.

 

In our post—second-wave-of-feminism era, when egalitarian heterosexual relationships are not as rare as they were several generations ago, the fears of women such as Eastman may seem overwrought; but they clearly mirrored those of many of her cohorts and predecessors. For example, in a 1906 essay for Harper’s Bazaar, “The Passing of Matrimony,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed great relief that women no longer had to strive desperately to find a husband and that more and more women were in fact choosing to remain single. As Gilman phrased it, they were “refusing to be yoked in marriage,” which demanded that they “give up the dream of self-realization.” While there were marriages that were exceptions to these complaints, even with cooperative and well-meaning husbands, women often felt conflicts over attempting to balance professional and domestic life.

Because many women’s rights leaders believed that an unmarried woman could be more committed to the cause than one with a husband and children, they not infrequently hoped to encourage young women not to marry. As Susan B. Anthony phrased it on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday party, at which an army of movement women demonstrated how greatly they revered her, “I am so glad of it all because it will help teach the young girls that to be true to principle—to live to an idea—though an unpopular one—that is to live single—without any man’s name—may be honorable.” But did the loneliness of single life not appear formidable to many pioneering women? If a woman chose not to be “yoked in marriage,” was she not condemned to solitude? The women who are the subjects of this book believed that through their intimate relationships with other women they found escape from loneliness while maintaining their “dreams of self-realization.”

With regard to many of these women, it is impossible to determine which came first, the realization that it was important to remain single if they wanted to achieve or the desire to achieve because they knew they must since they did not want to marry. Did they fight for women’s rights because they did not have the opportunity to marry? Or was their opportunity to marry foreclosed by their fight for women’s rights? Or did they realize that they must fight for women’s rights because they preferred not to marry? Whatever the case, their same-sex living arrangements permitted them far more time for social causes and other pursuits than was available to those who were busy running a multiperson household before the days of modern conveniences and with raising a family before effective birth control could limit the number of pregnancies. It is not surprising that in Frances Willard and Mary Livermore’s biographical dictionary, A Woman of the Century, more than half of the 1470 biographies of women of achievement were of those who had never married or who were widowed young and never remarried. In the same vein, in her study of the twenty-six leading suffragists from 1890 to 1920, Aileen Kraditor talks about a number of women leaders who married “and then withdrew from activity because of family responsibility.” It was not easy to be a wife and mother while one led a revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Moreover, women in relationships that we would describe today as lesbian truly had a unique interest in the advancement of women and a psychological advantage in effecting that advancement: they were fighting for their lives, or at least for the quality of their lives. If no man was going to represent them at the polls or in politics, they needed the vote and they needed power to effect social changes. If no man was going to support them, they needed education and good jobs. They had the luxury as well as the necessity of greater female chauvinism than the woman whose “significant other” was a man. The 1970s lesbian feminist term “woman-identified woman” was cumbersome and unlovely, but it expressed something of the feeling not only of lesbian feminists of the second half of the twentieth century but also of many of the leading women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century. Regardless of whether a woman became a pioneer by volition or necessity, if she had a relationship with another woman, not only could she escape the inevitable loneliness of the single life, but also such a relationship might have made her feel double the plight of females in her era; it might have enhanced her desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with other women in order to lessen that plight.

Women who knew they were not going to marry also had less fear of offending men than a woman whose burning ambition was to be a wife. They could afford to be more militant and more devoted to pioneering pursuits in the cause of women, since they did not have to care what men thought. Through their commitments to each other and their freedom from heterosexual dependence, they were in the best position to wage the necessary grueling and often brutal battles on behalf of women.

 

Gender Trouble

The individuals who are the subject of this book might all be said to have had “gender trouble,” in the sense that they could not accept the restrictions inherent in the notion of gender: they were dissatisfied with the way the category “woman” was constructed, and they were frustrated by the limitations placed on them as forced members of that category. They desired the privileges that were associated with men. Such desires demanded that they break into the “masculine” public sphere, claim it for their own, and thereby neuter the notion of gender-appropriate spheres. However, many leaders who were particularly effective in the nineteenth century strategically disguised the fact that gender was a concept with which they wished to dispense. If, as Judith Butler has argued, all gender is performance, most of the heroes of this book can be said to have performed the role of “woman” while conducting their battles to invade the public spaces belonging to men.

These women also recognized that the category of gender was artificial and “as changeable as dress,” as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg phrased it with regard to modernist women. But they were quite the reverse of certain female inverts of the working class in their day, who claimed men’s privileges by literally changing their dress and traversing the world in men’s drag. By donning women’s drag (both literally and figuratively), many of the pioneers concealed their intent to claim male privileges. They believed that they must perform “woman” publicly in order to change what “woman” meant. Yet in private, traditional gender notions had little meaning for them.

It was in fact these women’s secret understanding of the sham of gender roles that fueled the movements that eventually gave women the vote, the right to a higher education and a profession, and the power of influence over public policy. But because most of them believed—with justification—that their society was not ready for unalloyed radical approaches, they often argued that changes in woman’s sphere were necessary not because women were just like men and gender was an absurd notion, but precisely because women were different from men. With essentialist arguments—which their own lives patently contradicted—their strategy was to proclaim that women’s special gifts were desperately needed in the muddle of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. For example, they claimed a place for females in politics by insisting that women should have more say in public policy because they were “morally superior” to men. Though few of these leaders were biological mothers, they insisted that if the influence of the “mother-heart,” which (they publicly declared) was intrinsic to all women, were expanded to spheres outside the home, everyone would profit.

They did not call attention to what they certainly understood: that once “woman” succeeded in moving into the public sphere, the constructed category of “woman”—as a domestic being—would be altered beyond recognition. The rights and privileges they were demanding in the name of “woman” and her “moral superiority” had the potential to revolutionize (and eventually did revolutionize) the way “woman” was conceptualized.

These women’s refusal to characterize their discontent as gender trouble gave them one more reason not to identify with the sexologists’ depiction of women like them as inverts. Nevertheless, case histories of female sexual inverts often described these pioneering women quite precisely, their public masquerade notwithstanding. As Krafft-Ebing depicted the female sexual invert, even in childhood she preferred “male” occupations, “the rocking horse, playing at soldiers, etc., to dolls and other girlish occupations. The toilet is neglected and tough boyish manners are affected.” The sexologists could not move beyond their fixed notion of appropriate gender behavior and its inevitability, even in childhood, in those they deemed normal.

Thus they would surely have considered a woman such as Susan B. Anthony to be abnormal—“inverted”—since she envied male freedoms and resented the limitations foisted on women. Anthony bitterly complained that beginning in girlhood, the female was “sacrificed to clean clothes, glossy curls and fair complexions.” She characterized this fictive yet autobiographical girl as wishing she could be “a boy like my brother, so I would wear long boots and thick pantaloons, romp on the lawn, play ball, climb trees.” The sexologists made precisely such sentiments central to their definition of female sexual inversion. If they had seen Anthony’s letters concerning her women “lovers,” they would have had no doubt whatsoever that she was a textbook specimen of an invert.

Almost all of the women discussed in this book experienced “inverted feelings” (as the sexologists would have dubbed them) such as Anthony’s. If “sexual inversion” signified discontent with women’s roles, envy of the broader possibilities that men had claimed for themselves, and love of other females who would succor them and help them fight their battles, these women were indeed sexual inverts. Yet they did not want to be men, as the sexologists claimed, as much as they wanted the rights and privileges their society had accorded to men alone.

Obviously, my valorization of these women’s leadership is not meant to imply that there were no heterosexual women leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, heterosexuality is almost always a tacit assumption we make about those whose actions have been socially useful or heroic. By emphasizing what I call the “lesbian presence” in movements that have bettered America, I aim to bring to the forefront what has been unfairly neglected and for too long unspoken.