IN AUGUST 1820, census takers fanned out across the state of Vermont to execute the decennial record of the nation’s population. An appointed recorder visited roughly 130 households in Weybridge, noting the race, sex, age, and occupation of the inhabitants within each. The only names he took were the heads of household. A great many Benjamins, Samuels, and Williams filled his rolls. About halfway through his record, after knocking at the doors of Asaph Hayward and Benjamin Hagar, the visitor inscribed the first woman’s name into the record. Occupying a small house near the Hagar farm, he found two women, in the age group 26–44 years, who operated a commercial business. In careful penmanship, he recorded the proper spelling of the head of the household: “Charity Bryant.”1
The census taker ten years later had fine handwriting, but poor spelling. Between the Hayward and Hagar farms, he enumerated a household headed by “Carity Briand,” including two women, one aged 40–50 and the other 20–30.2 Sylvia was actually thirty-five at the time, but compared to most Weybridge women her age, who bore the physical strain of multiple pregnancies, Sylvia likely appeared quite young. In 1840, the census taker got both Charity’s name and Sylvia’s age right. He also recorded a third woman aged 30–40 living in the household, one of the couple’s sewing assistants.3 The 1840 census included many more women as heads of household than had been the case twenty years before, but Sylvia remained unnamed within the federal population count until 1850, the year that dependents’ names finally entered the rolls. In that Seventh Census of the United States, Sylvia Drake appeared for the first time in the official records of the American population. She was sixty-six years old.4
By 1850, the legal doctrine of “coverture” that had long subsumed married women’s civic identities under the identities of their husbands was beginning to weaken. The passage of married women’s property acts in many states entitled wives to own property separately from their husbands; an emergent women’s rights movement called for women’s prerogative to make their own decisions about childbearing; and wives and other dependent members of households finally had their names entered into the census. But the dismantling of coverture was a slow-moving process. Wives living with their husbands did not become coequal heads of household in 1850; they retained their subordinate position beneath their husbands. Accordingly, when Sylvia Drake was counted in the seventh decennial U.S. census, her name fell below Charity Bryant’s.5
From the July day in 1807 that Sylvia came to live with Charity until the October day in 1851 that death divided them, Charity headed the women’s household in their own eyes, as well as in the eyes of their family, their friends, and their community. William Cullen Bryant likened Charity to a “husband,” and Sylvia to her “fond wife.”6 Charity used the term “my help-meet” to describe Sylvia, adopting a common synonym for wife, given to Eve in the book of Genesis. By extension, Charity figured herself as the Adam-like patriarch within the household.7 With less eloquence but great clarity, Hiram Hurlburt defined Charity’s role in simple terms: “Miss Bryant was the man.”8
Charity’s role as head of household, husband, or the man, however definitive, never overwrote her female identity as Miss Bryant. Charity did not pass as male-bodied. Rather short, probably as a consequence of her sickly childhood, she wore traditional women’s garments.9 At work she wrapped her hair in a turban to keep it from her eyes, and she wore a plain dress made from woolen circassian and a calico apron. She went without adornment, but on special occasions she might don plaited ruffles, displaying her skill as a tailor.10 Her appearance projected a certain masculinity. She carried herself like a man and bore a strong resemblance to her brother Peter.11 Charity’s mixture of characteristics presented some confusion to a traditional rural community like Weybridge, where men and women performed very different social roles, but the division of Charity and Sylvia’s marriage along the conventional lines of husband and wife made the union more comprehensible to the community, not less. It made them recognizable as a couple rather than as two independent single women.
It helped that Charity’s combination of masculine and feminine qualities recalled the well-known archetype of the female husband, a popular antihero in Anglo-American culture. The term “female husband” first appeared in a late seventeenth-century humorous ballad about a hermaphrodite, raised as a woman, who impregnated a woman and then married her.12 The character of the female husband was popularized a century later in British novelist Henry Fielding’s true-crime pamphlet The Female Husband (1746), which related the picaresque adventures of female-bodied George/Mary Hamilton, who dressed as a man and married several women before his true identity was revealed.13 Fielding’s work launched a century of humorous writings about female-bodied cross-dressers who married women.
Female husbands were not merely figments of the imagination, dreamed up by satirists and pornographers. The term described a real, if incongruous, variety of gender and sexual expression familiar in North America as well as Great Britain.14 American newspapers in the late 1700s and early 1800s carried so many stories of female husbands that they became repetitious.15 In 1829 a Maine newspaper published a humorous anecdote in which a woman who sought a summons against her husband was asked by the judge, “What, another female husband?” Actually, she reassured the judge, her husband was just a bigamist.16 In general, the stories about female husbands, though sensational, did not treat their subjects as villains. The female husband’s escapades were disreputable but impressive. She personified admirable masculine qualities including mastery, courage, and initiative.
Charity shared these personality characteristics with the archetypal female husband, which made her appear appropriate to head the household. William Cullen Bryant wrote that his aunt was “more enterprising and spirited in her temper” than her companion, and thus naturally “represent[ed] the male head of the family.”17 Hiram Hurlburt remembered how the first time that he entered the women’s shop, as a boy, Charity had pointed a finger at him and commanded “you will wait.” She then put Hiram in his place by naming his family lineage, before permitting him to approach the cutting table. Charity’s demonstration of mastery led Hiram to conclude that it was “perfectly proper” for her to be “the man.”18 Since her youth, Charity had expressed a superior temperament that led her family to teasingly address her as “your ladyship.”19 After the move to Vermont, her dominating personality enabled her to transition from a lady to a female husband.
As a female husband, Charity did not claim all the legal privileges of coverture that were due to a male husband. The state recognized her as the quasi-head of household, but Sylvia maintained her own independent identity as a feme sole, the official legal status for an unmarried woman. For example, Weybridge village tax records listed Charity’s name before Sylvia’s in accountings of their common property, but the secondary appearance of Drake’s name in the records indicates a compromise between the strict application of coverture, which would have erased Drake’s name altogether, and the treatment of the two women as individual femes sole, which should have separated and divided ownership of their property between them. The local government recognized the financial integrity of their joint assets, which included the lease on a quarter-acre of land, a variety of buildings on that land, and financial instruments of fluctuating value.20 Considering that Sylvia’s male relatives served in many key civic positions in the town—including as tithing man, town clerk, treasurer, and collector of taxes—it can be concluded that the Drakes recognized Charity’s status as a female husband and Sylvia’s role as her help-meet.21
Charity’s name also came first in the Weybridge land records, with Sylvia’s name appearing afterward, whereas a conventional wife would not be listed in the records at all. When the women’s longtime landlord Sarah Hagar grew feeble in the 1830s, she established an indenture with Charity and Sylvia protecting their rights to the property they occupied after her death, while guaranteeing that after their own deaths the land would pass to the next generation of Hagars. The contract guaranteed Charity and Sylvia’s claim to “peacefully possess, occupy, and enjoy all the buildings heretofore erected by the said Charity and Sylvia … during the natural lives of the said Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake.”22 In 1843, after Sarah died, her son and inheritor Henry W. Hagar entered into a new indenture with Charity and Sylvia, again promising “the said Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake” the right to continue occupying their property for their “natural lives.”23 Four decades before, Charity and Sylvia had moved onto Sarah Hagar’s property because she was one of Weybridge’s only female landlords, and the arrangement protected the women from gossip. By 1843, no one was going to raise questions about Aunt Charity and Aunt Sylvia living on Henry’s farm. Not only were the women old and venerable, by that time female-headed households had become far more common in Weybridge. Still, deeds cosigned by two femes sole in a joint capacity remained highly unusual.
Charity assumed even more authority in the couple’s private business dealings than she did in their dealings with civic authorities. Charity and Sylvia kept detailed records of the tailoring work they performed for clients, and the payments they received in exchange, during the forty years they ran their business. In a cash-poor farming economy like Weybridge’s, where businesses depended on the exchange of goods and credit more than direct payment, businesses needed to keep careful track. While each day Sylvia recorded in her diary the sewing that the women and their assistants performed, Charity maintained the accounts for their clients. Her name alone appeared on these records.
A typical account, detailing work done for Mr. Jehiel Wright during 1827 and 1828, listed each of the items sewed for the client, the price for each item, the goods received in payment (for example, a portion of wheat valued at $3), and closed with a final reckoning of the obligation. At the bottom, the record read “due to Miss Briant $3.83,” which was followed by Charity’s signature next to the words “Rec’d payment.”24 The debt was formally recorded as being owed to Charity, and Charity alone made formal acknowledgment of its payment. Almost the only exception to the rule of Charity’s name appearing alone on the business dealings was in the case of exchanges the women made with Sylvia’s brother Asaph Drake. When Charity and Sylvia did work for Asaph, or received food and services from him, they recorded the transactions in both their names. Still, even in those accounts, Charity’s name came first. When Asaph lent the women $50 in December 1818, the note was made “jointly to Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake.”25 In 1834, when Asaph rented his horses to the women for a journey to Massachusetts, both Charity’s and Sylvia’s names appeared on the record, but only Charity signed off on the repayment of their debt.26
Taking responsibility for settling debts with clients required more from Charity than simple accounting skills and the ability to sign her name. The early nineteenth century was a period of great economic instability. Currency fluctuations, financial panics, and crop failures all resulted in frequent bankruptcies.27 Charity’s brothers Peter and Bezaliel, as well as her sister Silence’s husband, Ichabod, and her nephews Oliver and Daniel, all endured bankruptcies. The same plague of failures hit the families of Weybridge. It made collecting debts tricky. Charity and Sylvia avoided some of the worst financial crises by maintaining accounts for years, leaving time for debtors to acquire the resources to repay them. But sometimes Charity had to collect on debtors who could not easily satisfy their obligations. Sylvia made note in her diary one evening in 1822, a few years after the Panic of 1819, that Charity was writing “dunning letters.”28 Reminding the importunate of debts they owed was not a task for the faint-hearted. It required fortitude, a willingness to brave resistance and rejection, and a heart steeled to misfortune. But it had to be done for Charity and Sylvia to remain afloat.
Charity and Sylvia’s union depended on the preservation of their independent household, and that required Charity to assume a husband’s social role in collecting debts. Charity also took on debts for the women’s business in her name alone.29 Being a tailor necessitated frequent outlays for the purchase of fabric and notions such as thread and buttons. Charity bought these items in Middlebury, the nearest market town to Weybridge. Sylvia rarely if ever accompanied Charity on her shopping trips, although her state of health made her more fit than Charity for the long walk or ride to Middlebury. Even in the dead of winter, after days of feeling ill, Charity went into town to buy necessaries, leaving Sylvia at home.30 If Charity gained status by asserting herself as head of household in the women’s business dealings, Sylvia flexed the prerogative of domestic femininity to remain at home on a cold Vermont winter day.
To be clear, Sylvia did not defer to Charity in public financial matters because she lacked a feeling of ownership over their work. She saw their business as belonging to both of them, and she asserted her claim to an equal share in the marital property. When the women made gifts to Weybridge’s Female Benevolent Society, which Charity led, they put both their names down for a single contribution. When the Society reimbursed the women for purchases they had made on behalf of the organization, Charity and Sylvia exempted $4 from the total as “their own tax.”31
Sylvia valued her claim to their joint property for more than material reasons; she derived self-worth from her financial independence. One wintry evening, in a gloomy mood, Sylvia sat down to write out an informal will for the eventual disposition of her property. She described the small wealth that she had accumulated as the result of her own hard work, ably supported by Charity:
Should the sudden stroke of death lay my frail body cold in the grave perhaps some friend might like to know my wish respecting my little that I leave, Hard work + close calculation will not accumulate properties unless you have confidence + a disposition to demand something for your labour. To the beloved Miss Bryant I am indebted for all the confidence I possess + generally for making a demand for my just due. We have toiled day + night almost, And now it is my wish she should enjoy peaceable + quiet by and during her natural life my share of the house we have built together, all the household furniture with some little exceptions which I shall name. The interest of my share of the notes held by Brother Asaph Drake, + Anna Bell esq + all the book, accounts.32
Sylvia’s will makes clear that she saw herself as an equal partner in the tailoring business, an equal possessor of the house, and an equal holder of the accounts Charity signed. Charity’s name on the financial documents did not signify that she was the boss and Sylvia was the assistant, but that she was the head of household and Sylvia her help-meet. Charity signed the accounts in Sylvia’s name as well as her own. In this way, their union followed the logic of coverture, which subsumed a wife’s identity under her husband’s. But Sylvia preserved a feme sole’s independent claim to the property she helped the household to acquire.
Sylvia’s role as a wife in the marriage also involved exerting control over the private realm that fell to ordinary nineteenth-century wives. Sylvia took charge of feeding the family and keeping the house. She kept records of the foods brought to the house by neighbors, family, and friends: “Laura brings us calves feet,” “Emma brings us bread milk + watermelon,” “Edwin calls brings us apple sauce venison + sausages.”33 The deliveries might appear simple gifts, but Sylvia kept careful track of every calf’s foot and watermelon she received. In return for these deliveries, Sylvia made presents of food or work herself.
In the rural nineteenth-century economy, one person’s surplus supplied another person’s need. In one diary entry, Sylvia recorded a complicated chain of food exchanges between herself, her landlord, her doctor, and her sister: “Mrs Hr bring us load Apples. I bake ginger bread. give Mrs Hr salt pork + fresh Dr P send us fresh pork send him salt pork send sister a little piece. She send us samp Mrs Hr bring us samp.”34 A surviving food-exchange record, which Sylvia kept for the year 1846–47, noted names, dates, and amounts with precision. Each tablespoon of sugar was counted in future obligations. The record is a rare testimony to the complexity of the food-exchange economy, which contributed as significantly to a family’s upkeep as the monetary economy of the business world.35
Sylvia also prepared all the food for the couple, assisted by the apprentices who lived with them. Sylvia’s diary is filled with accounts of baking bread, biscuits, cakes, “pyes,” and “cookeys.”36 Although cooking could be a chore, the women approached food as a pleasure and were glad to serve tasty meals to their guests. “Bake sparerib boil onions + Mrs Hr dine with us + Miss W with Henry,” Sylvia recorded after a shared dinner.37 She was equally happy to enjoy the good cooking of others. “Laura gave me some pancakes, which I found very comfortably warm,” she noted on a sick day when an apprentice cooked.38 Charity almost never prepared food for the family, preferring to avoid such domestic labor.
Sylvia also did all the housekeeping, which she resented for its tedium. Maintaining even a small house in the age before running water or electricity took an enormous outlay of time and effort. “Making fires sweeping washing dishes + cooking as usual occupy most of the day,” Sylvia grumbled in a January 1822 diary entry.39 By working long into the night, Sylvia managed to combine these responsibilities with her sewing work. Another diary entry captures this fatiguing double load:
I spend Monday in taking care of meat baking sew the sleevelings + pockets + one seam on Mr Fs tunic And make the buttonholes on one side make the button holes on Mr Lees pts + on Edwins sew down + stick the lapells to Mr Pratts box 0 + make the button holes. Make Edwins vest + Mr Bacons Bake twice in the oven + wash + iron a little.40
Charity worked as hard as Sylvia, but she spent nearly all her time working on clothes.41 She did perform some of the simple home repairs and furniture maintenance that typically fell to a husband. On a warm summer afternoon (the quiet season for their business), Sylvia noted that while Charity “mends the table + c + c Miss P + I knead bread + biscuit.”42 But at other times, Charity enjoyed her husbandly freedom from domestic responsibilities. On a summer day that Sylvia spent occupied by “a great washing” and mopping, Charity rode to Middlebury to attend the college commencement ceremonies and dine with a Mr. Merril. As Charity and her host sat down to a dinner prepared by women, and discussed the Latin and English orations of the young men who matriculated that day, Charity performed her role as husband before the community.43
In their social relations, as in their civic and business dealings, Charity positioned herself as the head of household. The couple maintained a busy correspondence over the years with friends, relatives, and ministers. Almost always the letters came addressed to Charity on the outside, although the greetings inside might extend to both women. Charity presented the couple’s public face. Even Sylvia’s own relations often observed this rule. When Sylvia’s nephew Azel Hayward wrote to the women in 1825, giving an account of his legal studies in Massachusetts, he addressed the letter to Charity, then began with the words “Dear Aunts.”44 The rule for letter-writing put the husband’s name on the outside of the envelope.
In polite conversation and writing, married women often went unnamed except by their status as a man’s relation. When Jonathan Hovey, a former Weybridge minister, wrote a letter to Sylvia’s brother Asaph in 1820, he observed this rule for Charity and Sylvia, bidding hello to all his former Weybridge friends including “Brother Southworth + his family—to Miss Bryant + yr sister—to Esq. Wright + his family—to Esq. Kellog + his family—to the Mr. Bills and their families—to Mr. Hagar + his family—Mr. Brewster + his family etc. etc. etc. etc.”45 Hovey named only the husbands and left their dependents unspecified, interweaving Charity and the unnamed Sylvia seamlessly into the mix. Just as at the dinner table, Charity joined the ranks of the esquires, misters, and brethren, while Sylvia took her place among the family.
However, if Charity was the husband and Sylvia the wife within their marriage, they were a different sort of husband and wife than most married couples of their day. At one level, their union reinforced the era’s unequal model of marriage by demonstrating the naturalness of pairing a dominant husband and submissive wife, even in a relationship between two women. But Charity’s role as husband also undermined the conventional justification for husbands’ authority over wives as an expression of men’s supposed physical and spiritual superiority. Charity’s example opened the question of what made a husband’s dominance and a wife’s submission natural, or whether the division between roles had to be hierarchical at all.46
In addition, the women’s conformity to the traditional roles of husband and wife, both in public and in private, had important limits. Each combined her married role with an identity as a spinster, which, in some ways, acted as a precursor for twentieth-century lesbian identity.47 Somehow the incongruous parts fit together into a redefined vision of marriage. At twenty-three, Charity had declared her desire never to be married: “thousands in the world may call me a fool but I do not feel that their different opinions would add to my internal felicity.”48 When, on meeting Sylvia, Charity chose to marry after all, she did not entirely forswear her earlier objections. This may be one reason that in their private addresses to each other Charity and Sylvia used synonyms for spouse that connoted their equal standing within the relationship, rather than the ranked titles of husband and wife.
Sylvia often used companion to describe Charity, a word that operated as a common synonym for husband or wife. The word frequently appeared in obituaries to describe both widowers and widows.49 As in those death notices, Sylvia used the word “companion” to convey the longevity of her and Charity’s union. A diary entry from 1835 described Charity as “her who has been my companion ever since 1807.”50 In a loving flourish, Sylvia once referred to Charity as the “companion of my way.”51 This use of the word connected Charity and Sylvia to the tradition of romantic friendship by echoing lines from an elegy written by Philadelphia poet Hannah Griffits for a deceased friend, the “dear belov’d companion of my way / Friend of my youth, and partner of my heart.”52 Sylvia seemed to know this poem, echoing it elsewhere in her writings.53 When Sylvia labeled Charity the “companion of my way,” she represented her as both a romantic friend and as a spouse, two overlapping categories in her mind.
That overlap is even more obvious in both women’s frequent naming of each other as friend, again a common synonym for spouse.54 Sylvia stressed the women’s mutual devotion by referring to Charity as her “beloved friend,” coincidentally the same term of address that self-assertive wife Abigail Adams used for her husband, President John Adams.55 Charity reciprocated, describing herself as Sylvia’s friend in most of her poems.56 Like Sylvia, she sometimes embellished the word, calling Sylvia the “friend of my heart” or her “faithfull friend.”57 The word friend implied no diminution of feelings to either Charity and Sylvia. Charity swore to the tremendous value she placed on the word friend, as “from the dearest of Titles I would not be free / For what millions of treasure could buy.”58 The word testified to their love and to the reciprocity of their relationship. Friend put the women’s union on equal footing. They merged the unity of traditional marriage with the egalitarianism of romantic friendship.
Those who knew the women well also described their union in language that alluded to the roles they shared equally. Many people described the women as companions, echoing Sylvia. Minister Jonathan Hovey addressed the women as “Miss Charity Bryant & her beloved Companion,” capturing the intense emotions that could be associated with the word.59 Charity’s cousin Roland Howard sent greetings to Sylvia, bidding Charity to “tender my respects to your companion.”60 Lydia Richards described the women as partners, another word that served as a vernacular for spouse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that captured Charity and Sylvia’s balanced footing within their union.61 Charity’s closest cousin, Vesta Guild, described Sylvia in a letter to Charity as “your other self,” capturing both the marital oneness linking Charity and Sylvia and the symmetry of the women’s positions within their marriage.62
Charity and Sylvia’s union challenged traditional marriage by reimagining the roles of husband and wife, and in so doing it troubled the sexual order with the suggestion that they share an erotic bond. Early Americans understood the relationship between husband and wife as sexual by definition. The marriage ceremony included in the Book of Common Prayer, for example, stated that marriage had two main purposes: to encourage procreation and to offer a legitimate outlet for sexual passions. Ministers advised marrying couples that marriage was ordained as “a remedy against sin, and to prevent fornication.”63 The appropriate release of sexual passions within marriage extended to people who could not have children, which is why elderly widowers and widows got remarried long after the close of their childbearing years. The belief that marriage existed to impose order on people’s sexual passions extended to women as well as to men. Early New Englanders acknowledged that women had a right to sexual satisfaction, and even some women past menopause sued for divorce on the grounds that their husbands were incapable or unwilling to provide sex.64
The association between marriage and sex applied to relationships involving female husbands. Charity’s masculinity brought questions about her sexual relationship with Sylvia to the foreground because it was a running assumption that the desire for sexual intimacy with their own sex was a main reason that women became husbands.65 Readers enjoyed speculating about the sexual lives of female husbands; it made their stories thrilling.66 Restrictions on sexual speech led writers to introduce this possibility in an allusive fashion, raising the possibility in order to reject it, which planted the seed in a reader’s mind while still protecting the author against charges of obscenity.67 Writers also used euphemisms to depict female husbands as sexual offenders. For example, an 1842 New Hampshire newspaper reported the arrest of a female husband who was charged with committing “enormities,” a word used in prosecutions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sodomites.68
The traditional silencing of same-sex sexuality through the use of euphemisms like “enormities” became a saving grace for Charity and Sylvia. Public recognition of their union depended on the community’s willingness to avoid professing knowledge of its sexual implications. Their family, friends, and neighbors had to understand the possibility that Charity and Sylvia performed the sexual aspect of their roles as husband and wife, but they did not have to say as much. They could let silence preserve the open secret of the women’s lesbianism.69 This concession placed Charity and Sylvia in a vulnerable position. At any moment, the community had the power to withdraw their sanction for the women’s relationship by breaking the silence. Weybridge could not tolerate public lesbianism. The community held a power over Charity and Sylvia that regulated the women’s behavior. By adopting traditional marital roles and by devoting themselves to the health of the village’s church, youth, and economy, Charity and Sylvia enlisted the support of their neighbors. They secured toleration not by keeping their marriage a secret but by making their relationship as public-minded as possible.