6

Mother-Hearts/Lesbian-Hearts

We can hardly think of Mary Grew at all without thinking of her friends Sarah Pugh and Margaret Burleigh, especially the latter, devoted to her with that affection passing the love of men which many of the anti-slavery women manifested toward each other; in the affection of Caroline Putnam for Sallie Holley finding one of its loveliest illustrations.

—John White Chadwick, 1899

 

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LEADERS such as Frances Willard and Anna Howard Shaw who hoped to wangle a place for women outside the home developed a compelling discourse in support of their position. Women’s distinctly feminine talents, they insisted, were vital to cure the ills of a troubled society. In a speech entitled “The Great Defect in Our Government,” for example, Shaw proclaimed that America desperately needed what men had been unable to achieve: to figure out “how shall we make our streets clean; how shall we banish contagious and preventable diseases . . . how shall little children’s lives be spared from avaricious business which contaminates food and drink.” The answers, she said, lay in women’s participation in government.

Women had the best ability to minister to public needs because, Shaw argued in another speech, the “mother-heart” was instinctive to them. The mother-heart had nothing to do with biological motherhood, she said, since all true women, whether spinsters or wives and mothers, possessed it. Because of her mother-heart, a woman “finding any wrong, any weakness, any pain, any sorrow, anywhere in the world, reaches out her hand to right the wrong, to heal the pain, to comfort the suffering.” That being so, Shaw handily concluded, government needed women to vote and to work where their mother-heart would benefit society.

In the nineteenth century, volunteer work in which women could supposedly express their mother-heart became for many the one guilt-free method of sell-development in which they could indulge. By the early twentieth century, such work actually gave a new generation of women paying jobs as social workers and public policy experts in the government agencies that were set up—in good part in response to their agitation—to address the problems of municipal housekeeping. In effect, a variety of new professions for women were established from the concept that women, because of their mother-hearts, were suited much more than men to “housekeeping on a large scale.”

Such housekeeping endeavors not only provided useful occupations for women; they were also instrumental in the development of America’s social conscience. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, they consisted, for example, of teaching former slaves to read and write, organizing working women to demand better conditions, and establishing settlements to tend to the various needs of the urban poor. These early efforts were often led and fueled by unmarried women, many of whom lived as lesbian couples. Although large numbers of heterosexual women also participated in such work, what was true of the suffrage battle was true here: a woman without conventional domestic responsibilities had more time and energy to devote to causes—and if she lived with another woman who shared her interests and inclinations (or who would take care of their shared home while she pursued social housekeeping), the time and energy available for such work were expanded.

 

Cleaning Up the Slavery Mess: Sallie Holley, Caroline Putnam, and Rebecca Primus

Abolition was one of the earliest nineteenth-century mother-heart pursuits in which female couples worked together, trying to right the wrong of slavery. Once slavery was abolished, large-scale social housekeeping was required in a new area: the freedmen and women had to learn to read and write (which they had often been forbidden to do under slavery) and claim their citizenship. Female couples often undertook such jobs together. Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam, who met as students at Oberlin College in 1848, first became an antislavery team, much like Mary Grew and Margaret Burleigh, and then, after the Civil War, turned their efforts to educating the former slaves.

There is no question that Holley and Putnam were sincerely committed to their work. As Holley wrote, their “conscience and heart would not be satisfied with doing nothing for the noble cause.” However, that work also provided them with an exciting, legitimate means of grasping the personal freedom that was otherwise denied women in their day. It allowed them to travel in each other’s company rather than settling down with a husband, and it provided an escape from the drudgery and confines of mere domesticity. Both Holley and Putnam had observed the limited lives their mothers and other female relatives led, and they had both decided they wanted no part of it. Holley claimed that when she was a young woman, she received a number of marriage proposals but turned them all down. Instead of having a conventional marriage, she and Caroline Putnam created a virtual marriage, managing also to forge careers as reformers at a time when there was almost no such thing as a career for a woman. As Katherine Herbig, their modern biographer, has observed, in the mid- and late nineteenth century they “fashioned a full, satisfying life for themselves as a working couple.”

Holley and Putnam usually traveled together on the abolitionist lecture circuit, often in company with other leading speakers, such as the former slave Sojourner Truth. But when work separated them, in their letters they lamented their agony over being away from each other. An 1861 note, for example, was weighted with Sallie Holley’s separation anxieties. “Oh, my heart yearns toward you this morning,” she wrote to Caroline Putnam, “and the heaviest disappointment of my life would fall if you should die. Again and again I thank you for all your love to me. . . . How I should love to put my arms around your neck and kiss you.” Sallies letters constantly declared that whether or not Caroline was with her, she felt sustained by their relationship. Caroline cheered her on during these separations, addressing her as “Dear Loving Heart” and “My Best Angel” and assuring her that she too longed for “the old delight of working, sleeping, and talking by your side.”

Though Holley was more famous as an abolitionist, in the years after the Civil War it was Putnam who took the reins. While Holley was still on the lecture circuit, trying to raise money in the North to help the freed people in the South, Putnam filled her carpetbag with dozens of used slates, primers, alphabet cards, and penmanship cards and headed to Lottsburg, Virginia, in order to teach the new citizens to read and write. Though the Freedmen’s Bureau had made some effort to help establish black schools in the South, it had begun disassociating itself from the work by the time Putnam arrived, and it pulled out entirely in 1871. Many of the schools were discontinued, but Putnam felt encouraged to hold fast when she succeeded in convincing Holley in 1869 to join her in her efforts to educate the former slaves. Their school—which Putnam insisted on calling the Holley School in honor of her life partner—flourished. It soon became not just a school but in effect the first settlement house in America.

Putnam and Holley built a compound near the school and settled in, ignoring recurrent threats from their white neighbors. Like Jane Addams, the founder of the most famous settlement house a generation later, they believed that they must try not only to give to the black community but to become a part of it. Thus they were present at births, baked cakes for weddings, mourned misfortunes, served as scribes, and acted as personal friends.

Though ladies of the middle class, they consistently belied a gentility that was more apparent than real by a daring that was indispensable to their successes. For example, though as women they could not vote, they were determined to protect the new voting rights of black men, which were being challenged by unreasonable literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation. Defying their white neighbors, Holley and Putnam organized the freedmen to exercise their franchise, accompanying them to the polls when necessary, acting as witnesses, and encouraging them to ignore the former masters’ warnings against voting for the hated Republican Party, which had been responsible for emancipation. While the Holley School’s impact may have remained local for the forty-nine years of its existence, its concept was much larger, anticipating the work of northern civil rights activists who went south in the 1960s.

Idealistic young women who had just been to college and unmarried middle-aged women who had spent years teaching in northern schools were attracted to Holley and Putnam’s work. They went to join them, to teach in the Holley School, and to learn what they could from the experience. As in most of the American settlement houses later in the century, the volunteers at the Holley School were primarily female. Their work at the school allowed them to explore a world beyond the limitations of private domesticity at a time when women were not supposed to have daring adventures on their own. Yet as bold as their adventures were, such work, because it could be seen as social housekeeping, was somehow within the realm of what was permissible for nineteenth-century women to undertake. Many who went to teach for a few months stayed for years, and they formed a women’s community with Caroline Putnam and Sallie Holley.

African-American women from the North also went south during the years after the Civil War to help the newly freed slaves. For instance, under the auspices of the Freedman’s Relief Association, Sojourner Truth counseled ex-slaves on how to maneuver in liberty. African-American women, like white women, were more likely to be able to undertake such work, which required them to uproot themselves from their homes, if they had no marital encumbrances. Rebecca Primus, for example, an African-American woman from Connecticut, went to Royal Oak, Maryland, right after the Civil War in order to establish a school for former slaves. She eventually married, but not until 1872, two years after the death of her female lover, Addie Brown.

Approximately 150 letters that Addie wrote to Rebecca between 1859 and 1868 have survived. Karen Hansen, who recently discovered the letters, characterizes the intimate contacts between the two women as “bosom sex,” a reference to a letter in which Addie, working as a cook in a boarding school, admitted that she slept in a bed with a white girl but assured Rebecca, “My night dress was butten up so she could not get to my bosom.” During their separations, each imagined that “I am near the[e], breathing the same air with your arm gently drawn around me, my head reclining on your noble breast in confidence and love.” In several letters Addie complained of their separation and expressed her longing: “How I did miss you last night. I did not have anyone to hug me up and to kiss. . . . I don’t want anyone to kiss me now. I turn Mr. Games [a suitor] away this morning. No kisses is like youres.” Though the relationship was clearly intense for both women, it did not prevent Primus from serving the former slaves, a task she could not have undertaken if she had had a conventional marriage and a family rather than a female lover.

 

Northern-Style Social Housekeeping: Helen Marot

The challenges in the North were very different from those in the South, as European immigrants and the rural poor began flocking to large American cities, where they became a cheap labor force for burgeoning American industries. Simultaneously, an emerging middle- and upper-class female population wished to lighten their load. Young women from affluent families, many of whom had just gone through the heady experience of pioneering in higher education, were distressed to find that they were expected to return home to perform a daughter’s duties, at least until suitable husbands manifested themselves. Of course, some female college graduates did not mind returning to the comforts of domestic life and eventually settling into a household of their own; they could adjust with grace to the contrast of the years that followed. But others had little or no interest in becoming wives and mothers. They were devastated to realize that they would never again have such exciting challenges as those they had experienced during their four years in college. Few professions were as yet open to them that would make use of the talents they had developed through higher education.

The great puzzle was what to do with their lives after college that would be absorbing, useful, and—a consideration for many—not so shocking a departure from women’s roles that they would have to face resistance from family and community. Volunteer work had been popular earlier in the century, when women had undertaken such tasks as the establishment of orphan asylums and the reform of prostitutes. It is not surprising that many educated young women now thought to turn their abundant energies to reform, helping thereby to set off the Progressive era in America.

These women volunteered their labor in a variety of settlement houses and organizations that were being formed to aid the needy. Paradoxically, it was often expensively educated women who established the most effective organizations to help the exploited working class. They were determined to break away from the romance of acquisition, which had been responsible for making their capitalist fathers (and therefore them) middle and upper class. They were set on developing not only their own social conscience but also that of their complacent families and their class.

Many of the organizations that they helped establish were concerned specifically with working-class women. These activist middle- and upper-class women saw their role as “big sisters” to laboring women, who were virtually friendless. The men’s unions, such as the American Federation of Labor—which should have been acting as “big brothers” to working women—feared that women would glut the labor market and thus endanger the men’s hard-won and still meager benefits. According to the AFL’s newspaper, American Federationist, organized labor had a duty to “keep women out of the trades, and if not, out of the unions.” By helping exploited female workers achieve economic justice, the college-educated and affluent women felt they were performing a very vital kind of social housekeeping on which male workers had turned their backs.

The problems of female workers were exacerbated by the large numbers of poor southern and eastern European immigrants who began coming into America in the 1880s. Since salaries for uneducated workers were a pittance—less than a pittance for women—if a family was to survive, most of its able-bodied members had to go out to work, resistance on the part of male unionists notwithstanding. In response to the terrible exploitation of female laborers, especially in the garment industry, the Women’s Trade Union League was organized in 1903. The league’s first goal was to help female wage-earners secure better conditions by forming trade unions. Though the WDUL was founded by a man, the radical William Walling, women quickly became its most active workers. By 1905, Walling had lost interest in the organization and gone off to Russia to learn about socialism. When he returned, in 1908, his energy was directed toward founding the NAACR But middle- and upper-class women, many of them lesbians, had already taken charge of the WTUL before Walling left.

The WTUL played a prominent role in the establishment of unions among garment workers, retail clerks, paper box makers, waitresses, laundresses, and many other female occupational groups. Its members helped lead strikes, such as the 1909 women shirtmakers’ “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” which eventually involved about 40,000 strikers and was the largest strike of female workers in history. The WTUL comprised feminist middle- and upper-class “allies” on the one hand and working-class laborers on the other. Several wealthy lesbians devoted their lives and fortunes to the Women’s Trade Union League, and they proselytized for the WTUL among their class, bringing its concerns to suffrage organizations, settlement houses, and other women of wealth.

Helen Marot, one of the most effective allies, served as executive secretary of the New York WTUL from 1906 to 1913. Marot, the daughter of a wealthy publisher, and her life partner, Caroline Pratt, both had long histories of social housekeeping before becoming involved in the WTUL. In the late nineteenth century the two women owned a radical socialist library and coffeehouse in Philadelphia. They compiled the Handbook of Labor Literature in 1899, and they investigated the working conditions of Philadelphia tailors for the U.S. Industrial Commission. They were especially concerned about the exploitation of women and children. When they moved to New York at the start of the 1900s, Marot investigated child labor problems. The attention her work received led to the establishment of the New York Child Labor Committee in 1902, and the following year to passage by the New York state legislature of the Compulsory Education Act, which protected children by keeping them in school and out of the labor force until the age of fourteen.

Helen Marot, who always dressed in what her contemporaries considered mannish clothing, lived with Caroline Pratt in what was already the bohemian and heavily lesbian world of Greenwich Village that Eleanor Roosevelt was to discover a few years later. Pratt became a progressive educator and later the founder of the New York City and Country School, the most famous and successful of the American progressive schools in the 1920s. Marot became a major mover and shaker in the WTUL. She was instrumental in organizing into unions female bookkeepers, stenographers, and accountants. Her greatest role was in directing the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, which helped garment workers go out on strike to protest their seventy-five-hour work week, for which they earned between four and five dollars.

Marot got the WTUL allies not only to give the workers financial support but also to join them in picketing the noncooperating shops. She also raised sympathy for the strikers in women’s groups such as the Colony Club, to which “only women of the highest social eminence were eligible” for membership. Her own family fortune and American roots, which went back to 1730, certainly made her eligible for membership, and she succeeded in convincing the Colony Club to pledge both money and influence on behalf of the strikers. Marot was supported in this endeavor by several other lesbian Colony Club members who were affluent descendants of American colonists, including the theatrical entrepreneur Elisabeth Marbury and the woman who was her lover from 1884 to 1914, the actress Elsie DeWolfe, as well as the woman with whom Frances Perkins later lived, the social welfare leader Mary Harrison Rumsey.

Perhaps most important, the WTUL allies whom Marot organized in support of the uprising could serve the striking workers as witnesses, because their money and social position allowed them to be blasé toward the bosses, the police, and the law courts, which intimidated the mostly immigrant workers. Though the Shirtwaist Employers Association called the WTUL and the Colony Club strike supporters “uptown scum,” they nevertheless bent quickly to the pressure these well-born women exerted: after two months of the strike, four hundred of the five hundred shirtwaist factory owners had agreed to reduce the maximum work week to fifty-two hours.

Under Marot’s guidance, the WTUL enrolled many of the striking workers in what became the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In cooperation with the National Consumers’ League, she also spearheaded a campaign to “whitelist” manufacturers who accepted the strikers’ terms, which meant that strike sympathizers would do business only with those companies. As the WTUL ally Rheta Dorr observed in a 1910 book, What Eight Million Women Want, the possibility that working women’s “progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was unthinkable”—but that was precisely what happened through the efforts of women such as Helen Marot.

Marot resigned from her position as secretary of the WTUL to protest the fact that too many of the officeholders in the organization were allies instead of workers. After leaving the WTUL, she became an editor of the radical journal The Masses and then of The Dial and a writer on left-wing issues, especially as they affected working women. Like a number of women of their class who chose to make their lives with other women, Helen Marot and Caroline Pratt used their inherited wealth for social causes and spent their days promoting the reforms in which they believed. Perhaps their mother-heart pursuits helped justify their decisions not to marry and to choose each other instead. They detested the notion of housekeeping for the nuclear family, but they happily devoted their lives to (in Anna Shaw’s words) righting wrongs, healing pain, and comforting the suffering. They encouraged each other in pursuits they regarded as much more meaningful than the leisured, trivial lives to which economic privilege such as theirs directed more traditional women.

 

An Interclass “Marriage” in the WTUL: Pauline Newman and Frieda Miller

The allies of the WTUL, like many radical feminists of the 1970s (who were also often middle- and upper-class lesbians), desperately wanted to reach across class lines and forge an egalitarian alliance with working women. But they were disappointed to find that working women were frequently hard to organize because they did not see their jobs as a permanent factor in their lives. Regardless of how fair and pleasant their working conditions might become through the efforts of the WTUL, their occupations would, after all, never be anything other than menial and dull. To the allies’ frequent chagrin, most working women seemed to dream that they would not have to work for more than a few years and that they would be rescued from the shop by a man who would marry them. The workers could not understand the allies’ admonishment that marriage would not liberate them from drudgery but merely substitute one form of exploitation for another. It was difficult for an ally to sympathize with the heterosexual aspirations of the workers if she had no interest in heterosexual marriage herself because of her fulfilling relationship with another woman, and the concept of a long-term domestic relationship with another woman, which many of the WTUL allies enjoyed, was unimaginable to most female workers. They would not have seen such a “marriage” as something likely to relieve them from toil in the shop, as they believed a heterosexual marriage would.

Yet while most intimate relationships among WTUL members were between allies, there were several instances of both romantic friendships and lesbian partnerships between a WTUL ally and a worker. These relationships had the potential of transcending the tremendous differences fostered by privilege and poverty, and even promoted the women’s work for the cause. The lifelong partnership between Pauline Newman and Frieda Miller, for example, had its start in the WTUL. Newman, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, had risen in the labor movement through her innate talent as a speaker and organizer. She had come to America at the age of eleven, lived in a Lower East Side tenement, and worked in sweatshops, including the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which she left just months before a fire killed 146 young women. As a result of the miserable living and working conditions that she experienced firsthand, Newman joined the New York Women’s Trade Union League at the age of fifteen and soon became prominent as a “fiery soapbox orator.” Hers was just the kind of talent that the allies dearly hoped to help foster among the workers.

Her fame soon spread to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which retained her to represent “girl strikers.” She was sent by the WTUL and also by the ILGWU to various organizations of the wealthy, where, as she later wrote, she “aroused the conscience of the rich” by presenting to them the story of the difficult plight of the working girl, “mov[ing them] to tears” and getting them to donate needed money so that striking workers could eat while they struggled for better factory conditions.

As a young woman, Newman had several relationships with men, including a socialist comrade named Frank Bohn, but she shunned heterosexual marriage. As her biographer, Ann Schofield, observes, “Her need for an independent life outweighed her desire for security.” However, in 1917 Newman was sent to Philadelphia to serve as head of a WTUL chapter, and there she became acquainted with Frieda Miller, who was an economics professor at Bryn Mawr College. Not long after they met, Newman nursed Miller back to health from a long bout with the flu; Miller quit her teaching job, and she and Newman were soon working together full-time for labor reform in the WTUL. The lesbian partnership between them, which dramatically transcended both class and ethnicity, was a personal illustration of the WTUL’s passionate philosophy, which insisted that such differences were insignificant in comparison to the deep emotional connections that were possible between women, whatever their background.

In contrast to Newman’s early circumstances, Miller had grown up with a grandfather who owned a large manufacturing firm. She was sent to college and then attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, where she studied economics, sociology, political science, and law from 1911 to 1915. Frieda Miller represented the ideal for Newman, according to the daughter they raised together: “She was blonde, well-educated, comfortable in society.” She was everything that Newman was not. Yet their living and working relationship endured for more than fifty years.

Though Frieda Miller’s education and background opened more doors to her professionally than were open to Pauline Newman, both women had exceptional careers as labor reformers. Miller, who became a friend of Frances Perkins when Perkins was the industrial commissioner of New York, was appointed by her to head the state labor department’s Division of Women in Industry in 1929. Miller played an important role in helping to transform the concerns of the WTUL into public policy. For example, she was instrumental in the passage of New York’s minimum wage law for women and minors in 1933. In 1936, again through Perkins’s help, she was appointed as one of the first American delegates to a permanent world body, the International Labor Organization (then under the jurisdiction of the League of Nations), whose task was to improve labor standards. Two years later, Governor Lehman made her industrial commissioner of New York, where she was in charge of implementing the state’s new unemployment insurance act. She remained in that position until 1943, when she became special assistant for labor to the American Embassy in Great Britain.

In 1944, with the support of Frances Perkins, Miller was made director of the Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor, a position she kept until 1953 (when she was asked by the Republican Eisenhower administration to resign). She was especially concerned about reintegrating women into the economy when they were displaced by homecoming male veterans who reclaimed prewar jobs. Miller fought valiantly, but against overwhelmingly powerful opposition, to guarantee women continued equal opportunity and equal pay.

Like Miller, Pauline Newman also worked to turn WTUL concerns into public policy. Newman served on the New York State Minimum Wage Board and on a state committee that advised on issues regarding equal pay legislation. She was sent by the Public Health Service to investigate working conditions for women in the U.S. Army in Germany. She was on the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the U.S. Women’s Bureau.

Although neither woman had an interest in heterosexual family life, they created a lesbian family together, never pausing in their reform and public policy work. In 1923, Pauline Newman and Frieda Miller went to Europe for the Third International Congress of Working Women. In Germany, Frieda adopted (or, by some accounts, gave birth to) a baby girl, Elisabeth, who became the daughter of both women. When Elisabeth later married and had two sons, both Newman and Miller were considered the boys’ grandmothers.

Pauline’s letters to Frieda reveal something of how their relationship combined shared commitment to social and political issues with emotional intimacy and a commitment to raising a child. On occasion the two women were separated, as in August 1927, when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Typically, in the letter Pauline wrote to Frieda after the executions, her political engagement merged with their relationship. “Dear Girl,” she began, and then spoke of her sadness “not so much for Sacco and Vanzetti as for America and for justice. . . . I am sorry you were not with me last evening [when the news of the execution was received]. . . . I wanted, tho it be only sorrow—to share it with you. . . . It is still raining, and the heart is heavy while the spirit wanders toward you—where it might find some peace!” Frieda’s letters to Pauline, whom she sometimes addressed as “Darling Paul,” also combined political observations with revelations of their intimacy.

While Frieda often traveled abroad on business, Pauline finished raising Elisabeth. Pauline’s letters during this time are filled with concern about the AFL, the Equal Rights Amendment (which she opposed, fearing it would wipe out protective labor laws), and especially her domesticity. “I spent my weekend getting the meals. (How do you like that? And we are still alive too!),” Pauline wrote to Frieda, who was on her first international assignment, in Santiago, Chile, attending an inter-American labor conference.

Through much of Frieda’s travels, Pauline kept the home fires burning, though occasionally she protested Frieda’s long absences, which sometimes took her to dangerous places. In 1944, for example, when Frieda was at the American embassy in London during the German bombings of England, Pauline begged her to return home to safety: “The sun is out today and there is spring in the air—and hope in my heart that you will come soon to Elisabeth and to your P—.” She reminded Frieda of her responsibility to take care of herself for the sake of the family, recognizing that although she and Elisabeth were very close, the girl (who was now a student at Vassar) needed Frieda in her life because “I am no substitute for you. I have no wish to be. I love both of you too much to mind that.”

Despite Pauline’s occasional gripes over Frieda’s travels and a period in the 1960s in which she was seriously alienated from Frieda, she clearly helped to make it possible for both of them to enjoy careers while they also enjoyed the satisfactions of family life. For her part, Frieda helped Pauline to gain national-level appointments to the World War II Women’s Committee on Defense Manpower, advisory committees of the Women’s Bureau, and a 1950 White House conference on children and youth. Few heterosexual couples in the early and mid-twentieth century could have achieved so much in public life while tending to a family life.

In a letter of condolence to Pauline when Frieda died, in 1973, a doctor friend characterized their full personal and professional lives and the unfortunate amnesia during the second wave of feminism about women like them. “You and Frieda had so much together and shared so many fine and wonderful things in life that you will have memories to comfort you,” she wrote. “You know how tremendously I admire you and Frieda—and the women of your time—who went out and moved mountains—Your accomplishments are for all times—and I wish some of our women’s libbers would do some homework and read history!”

 

In 1912, the newly formed Progressive Party held its first national convention. The delegates were addressed by their presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, who praised them for having spent their lives “in the endless crusade against wrong.” Many of those “endless crusaders,” including Jane Addams, who made the speech that seconded Roosevelt’s nomination for the presidency, were what later generations would describe as lesbian or bisexual. Though few of these women had biological offspring, they epitomized the mother-heart as Anna Shaw meant that term.

Linda Gordon, in her study of the history of welfare from 1890 to 1935, observes that 28 percent of the leading women reformers she examined were partnered in romantic, long-term Boston marriages with other women. As she also points out, that figure is conservative, since it refers only to women known to have had one long-term partner, not to women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, who was married to a man but had romantic involvements with other women. A scrutiny of the history of social reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century leaves one with the distinct impression that women who were in love with one another played dominant and absolutely indispensable roles in the development of America’s social conscience.