SIXTY-SIX YEARS OLD when her companion died, Sylvia Drake may never before have spent an evening on her own. She grew up as the youngest daughter in a family of eight children, driven by her father’s bankruptcy into the homes of others during her childhood, and raised in the rude cottages of frontier Vermont. It is possible that Sylvia had never slept in a bed by herself before meeting Charity at age twenty-two. After Sylvia joined Charity in her Weybridge lodgings, there is no evidence that they spent a further night apart.1 Acquiring their own twelve-by-twelve-foot home on the first day of 1809, the two women lived the next forty-two years in the closest proximity. Such intimacy imbued the women’s home with more emptiness, following Charity’s death, than any little dwelling could possibly possess.
No one who knew the women could imagine Sylvia occupying the small cottage on her own. “We think of your habitation … and are ready to exclaim, how desolate must that habitation now appear to our friend who survives,” wrote the women’s longtime correspondent the Reverend Eli Moody, after receiving news of Charity’s death. Charity’s niece Caroline Rankin felt the same way. “I know you must feel nothing but utter desolation and loneliness in every step you take in your home there will be so many little things to remind you of her and that she has left it forever.” Grandniece Emma Rankin asked if her great-aunt would “remain in your house” since it would be “so lonely to live all alone.” Of course, Sylvia had done more than share a house with Charity. For years she had devoted herself to answering Charity’s “every want and ministering to her every necessity,” in Caroline’s words. A day spent apart from her beloved friend was almost as alien to Sylvia as a night.2
The magnitude of Sylvia’s loss could hardly be expressed. This poverty of language prevented some from writing immediately. Even William Cullen Bryant’s ever-busy pen paused before the task. A telegram to New York City informed the poet of his aunt’s death straight away. Later that fall he visited with his cousin Caroline, who described her final trip to Weybridge and recounted Charity’s last days. Sensible to his family responsibilities, Cullen wrote an informative letter to his brother Cyrus, sharing the details of Aunt Charity’s passing with their Illinois relations. Of course, he knew that his responsibilities did not end there. Long a favorite of both Charity and Sylvia, Cullen told Cyrus that he had “been thinking of writing to Miss Drake,” but he confessed “I have not yet done it.” Rarely at a loss for words, Cullen found this ending hard to write.3
One word came easily to every friend and relative who wrote to Sylvia following Charity’s death: loneliness. Days after Charity’s death, Cyrus Bryant Drake, trained for the pulpit thanks to his aunts’ beneficence, wrote to Sylvia, “your loneliness must be very marked.” The now-middle-aged minister consoled his elderly aunt that “you are not alone but have the presence of Him who can give light in darkness + joy in sorrow.” As spiritual emissaries, the many ministers Sylvia knew could reach beyond their own limited capacities to offer solace. Eli Moody frankly acknowledged in his consolation letter to Sylvia that he could not “fully realize what must be your lonely state,” but he assured his old friend that she would find “support and comfort” in the spiritual realm. A third minister, the Reverend D. D. Cook, wrote with perhaps the most welcome religious counsel. Cook’s letter advised his “lonely & afflicted friend” that Charity remained watching over her: “who is more likely to be commissioned as your ministering spirit than she, who more likely to be sent to watch around your bed in the still and lonesome hours of night, and guard and protect you.” This domestic vision may have helped lighten the gloom that shadowed the cottage.4
In contrast to their male counterparts, the women who wrote letters of condolence generally expressed their sympathies in less flowery language, perhaps reflecting their more limited educations. Sylvia’s niece Polly Drake, who had migrated to western New York, wrote in plainspoken terms, “I feel sad on your account dear Aunt knowing that you must be very lonely.” Clarissa Moody added her voice to her husband’s in a to-the-point postscript at the bottom of his letter: “you must have learned the meaning of the word alone.” Unable to find a better word to describe Sylvia’s loss, her women friends used lonely to convey a deeper meaning than it typically expressed. Charity’s death had taken away part of Sylvia, like a tree trunk split by lightning, one half left standing.5
What all Sylvia’s correspondents stumbled was over how to describe the nature of her loss, since the most adequate words, widow and husband, were problematic. Charity and Sylvia were generally known as a married couple, and Charity was regarded as Sylvia’s husband, but their sex precluded most friends and relatives from naming them as spouses, especially in writing. Communal acceptance of their union rested on its silencing. The women’s old friend Diann Smith, a schoolteacher and the widow of their former minister Harvey Smith, identified the problem in a condolence letter that it took her more than a year to send, a fact for which she apologized. Diann reminded Sylvia that God took care of “the widow,” although “you do not as literally represent that class as I do, yet you must feel the same loneliness, which enters into the core of the heart.” Her words simultaneously included and excluded Sylvia in the category of widowhood, recognizing her emotional state as equivalent while denying her the formal name.
Correspondents also found themselves in a linguistic bind when they sought to name Charity’s relation to Sylvia. Denied the term husband, friends and family had to write their way around the women’s connection. Nephew Cyrus Bryant Drake called Charity by the descriptive but awkward phrase: “one with whom you have lived so many years.” D. D. Cook also described Charity as Sylvia’s longtime cohabitant, and he stressed the emotional dimension of their relationship, calling Charity “her whose society and intercourse you have so long and so happily enjoyed.” Despite their deep feelings for Sylvia, the language problem gave the condolences of old friends a stilted tone.6
Sylvia lost more than a word in her exclusion from the category of widowhood. Early American women assumed the name of widow as a powerful identity following the deaths of their husbands; it conferred qualities of holiness, authority, and piteousness that commanded a certain respect, or at least compassion, from others. The word served as a title in nineteenth-century New England. After the death of her husband, a surviving wife became the Widow So-and-So. The parable of the widow’s mite, which was well known at the time, depicted the widow as a worthy figure who deserved consideration. To be a widow might be the “most Forlorn and Dismal of all states,” as Abigail Adams put it, but that very extremity made the status meaningful. Without the title of widow, Sylvia lacked recognition of both the honor and the suffering it imputed.7
The one person willing to name Sylvia as widow was Charity. Her last acrostic for Sylvia appended a line beginning with W at the end. The theme of the acrostic, the women’s inevitable separation through death, suggests that the W stood for widow. The inspiration for the poem may have been Sylvia’s worries, which she confided to her diary one evening around the time Charity wrote her verses, about a newly widowed woman in their community. “Could think of nothing else for a long time after retiring but the loss sustaind by the afflictd widow,” Sylvia recorded. “Mans days is determind.” Voicing her concerns to Charity in their shared bed likely influenced the latter to put pen to paper.8
“Swiftly our moment pass away / Yes! And how swiftly all our years,” read the acrostic’s opening lines. The phrase “all our years” evoked a line from Psalm 90, often read at funerals: “for all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.” In Charity’s telling, her own death would make Sylvia a widow. Like the funereal psalm, Charity’s acrostic dwelt on the fleeting quality of life and the need for wisdom to guide men toward the righteous path, away from iniquities and “secret sins.” Despite people’s wishes to the contrary, their days soon passed “down to the Shades of endless night.” Finally, under the penultimate line starting with E, Charity drew a short line. The last sentence admonished Sylvia to “Wait on the Lord, & strength renew.” In total, the first letters of the poem’s first lines spelled out “Sylvia Drake | W.” During the years that Sylvia had to wait before their reunion in the afterlife, Charity’s poetic testimony to her widowhood offered a source of comfort.9
As it turned out, Sylvia had a long time to wait. She survived Charity by sixteen and a half years. During the final decade and a half of her life, Sylvia followed the widow’s convention of wearing only black. She spent the first half of her widowhood living in the cottage, which had been Charity’s wish. In an 1847 birthday poem for Sylvia, Charity foretold her approaching death and voiced her desire that Sylvia’s property rights be secured:
As more than seven years
Your senior I am found;
I may be first to leave
This little spot of Ground
On which so many years
Our dwelling place has been
…
While you sojourn Here
May no rude Changes come
To cross your daily path,
And mar your peaceful Home.10
In another act of writing, more important than verses, Charity left a will that sought to guarantee Sylvia’s claim on her home. The will named Sylvia executrix and indicated that Charity’s real estate was “owned by the deceasd in common with Drake.” Charity did not neglect her Bryant relations in the will. She distributed articles of clothing and other valuable keepsakes to her beloved nephews and nieces. Sylvia worried about their reactions to the will, but two of Silence’s children wrote to promise her their lasting friendship. Oliver Bryant assured Sylvia she need not worry about “offending any of our family by any disposition of matters and things relating to yourself and Aunt C,” and he expressed his desire to continue their correspondence. Grandniece Emma Rankin also professed her love and insisted, “we shall always be glad to hear from you whenever you feel as if you could write.” Without objections from Charity’s relatives, the probate court approved Sylvia’s handling of the will, and the year after Charity’s death she appeared in the village’s tax records as the sole owner of the women’s residence.11
Handling the details of the estate and running the tailoring business on her own kept Sylvia very busy in the years immediately following Charity’s death. In fact, despite the concerns of well-intentioned relations and friends, Sylvia had little time alone in the cottage at first.12 But without Charity by her side, as age magnified her own infirmities, the business began to fail. By the mid-1850s, Sylvia had to turn to her well-off brother Asaph for financial support. She stopped sewing for her living, although she kept making clothes for the family, and the village stopped taxing her personal property after 1855. Still she continued to live in the cottage until the summer of 1859, when she abandoned the old dwelling to join her brother Asaph, and his unmarried daughter Sylvia Louisa, in his elegant brick house.13
Although Sylvia enjoyed “the stillness + quiet + all the conveniences + comforts” that Asaph’s fine house afforded, she made the move not only for her own benefit but also to care for her elderly widowed brother. In 1859, Asaph had developed a putrefying infection in his right hand that caused him debilitating pain. Sylvia, long practiced in nursing from her years of caring for Charity, took responsibility for dressing the wound, a regimen that tortured the old man. Although Asaph sought to have the diseased portion removed by a doctor in Boston, he never recovered the use of the hand. Asaph’s difficulties, and Sylvia’s responsibilities, were compounded in 1863 when he went blind. At some point, his daughter Polly Angelina Shaw and her husband, Fordyce, returned from living in Massachusetts and also moved into the house. Increasingly irritable with old age, Sylvia reportedly “made it very hard” for Fordyce Shaw. Still, she continued to contribute to the community, hosting prayer meetings at Asaph’s brick house and mentoring the village youth.14
Orpha Jewett, born nine months after Charity’s death (on July 3, 1852, Sylvia and Charity’s forty-fifth anniversary), was one of the village youth who attended prayer meetings at Asaph Drake’s house during Sylvia’s final years. She kept note of the occasions in a diary she started at the beginning of 1868. On the evening of January 31, the fifteen-year-old recorded a full house at Old Deacon Drake’s. Sylvia must have been pleased by this showing of religious spirit in Weybridge. If she had been alive to see it, she would have been equally pleased by the spirited gathering that followed her funeral not three weeks later. Sylvia Drake passed away on February 13, 1868, at the advanced age of eighty-three. Five days later, Orpha noted in her diary, “Aunt Silvy was buried.” The Reverend Cozzens preached. Afterward, the villagers held a “very good meeting” at the church.15
Tucked inside the back-cover flap of Orpha’s little red diary are a series of newspaper clippings from the year of Sylvia’s death, including a humorous bit on the subject of old women. “There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:—1, That dear old soul; 2, That old woman; 3, That old witch.” Orpha’s account of the funeral suggests that most people in Weybridge regarded Sylvia as a specimen of the first kind. She had outlived almost everybody who knew her before she met Charity, and few people remained who might see the two women’s connection as outside the town’s natural order. The many nieces and nephews—biological and acquired—who mourned her passing had grown up to venerate their aunts’ Christian household.16
Even Fordyce Shaw, who had lived uneasily with Sylvia during her final years, agreed to set aside any personal irritation to commemorate his aunt as she deserved. In the summer of 1868 he approved the request of W. N. Oliver, owner of the Rutland Marble Works, to inscribe Sylvia and Charity’s headstone with raised letters instead of carved, a decision that increased the price for the monument. Oliver explained, “I propose this as I think [you] desire a fine job and do not care to stand about 10 or 15 dollars if the money is well earned as in this case it will be.” Fordyce agreed, and the temporary marker that Sylvia had purchased after Charity’s death was replaced by a single headstone marking both their bodies.17 The combined memorial ensured that the town’s recognition of the women’s union would last long beyond the living memories of those who had known them. In death, Charity and Sylvia realized a fantasy of eternal union expressed by many women lovers both before and after, yet seldom achieved.18 Their joint gravestone is a rare monument to the women’s perseverance in spending their lives and deaths together.
Sylvia’s will also preserved evidence of the connection with Charity that had defined her life. The first instruction in the will set aside half of her property, both personal and real, for Mary B. Rankin and Oliver Bryant, the children of Charity’s sister Silence Bryant. Charity and Sylvia had earned their property through joint effort, and each possessed just title to half the accumulated wealth. In traditional Anglo-American law, when a husband died his wife inherited a life interest in one-third of the property, to be distributed among the children following her death. Charity, on the other hand, left all her real property to Sylvia, with the understanding that following Sylvia’s death the property would be evenly divided between the two women’s respective families.
Charity and Sylvia’s unusual arrangement reflected an egalitarian approach to marital property, which had once set them apart from nearly every other couple, but by the late 1860s was becoming a central principle of the first women’s rights movement.19 In 1805, two years before Charity and Sylvia established their union, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts issued a decision in the case of Martin v. Massachusetts confirming that the Revolution’s disruption of traditional political hierarchies would not extend to patriarchal control over property. Martin v. Massachusetts reinscribed coverture into American law for generations to come. Charity and Sylvia’s household, in which both women contributed labor to build wealth that they shared equally, represented a radical innovation.20
The women were decades ahead of their time. Sixty-three years later, when Sylvia passed away, American law was just beginning to catch up. The principles enumerated in the Declaration of Sentiments, signed at Seneca Falls in 1848, included the demand for married women to gain control over their own wages and their share of the joint marital property. Over the following two decades, feminists pursued the passage of “married women’s property acts” by state legislatures. As of 1865, twenty-nine states had passed such laws. And in 1868, the year of Sylvia’s death, passage of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process of law for all American citizens inspired feminists to launch a new campaign against the strictures of coverture (though sadly, they were not successful).21
Sylvia’s will further confirmed her commitment to women’s property rights by distributing the half of her property reserved for her Drake kin to her nieces rather than her nephews. She gave $10 each to the daughters of her sister Desire. She left $25 to her grandniece Harriet Emily Bowdish, who had been abandoned by her ne’er-do-well husband and gotten divorced in the year before Sylvia’s death. She left another $25 bequest to a blind grandniece, Ann L. Drake. The remainder of her property, if there was any, was to be divided into three parts and split between the church, her grandnieces Harriet Emily Bowdish and Sarah S. Child (who had named her son after Charity), and lastly her nephew Lauren—a miserable “sponge” who was unable to care for himself.
At the time of her death, Sylvia had $75 cash in hand, and notes for debts due to her totaling $750, which her executors might or might not be able to collect. Since she had distributed her furnishings to her nieces prior to her death, during the years she spent living with Asaph, she left behind personal property valued at only $10.75. These were items she kept in her chamber at Asaph’s house and used for daily living. They included a stove, kettle, warming pan, bedstead, a few chairs and tables, and the Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. Even these tokens she willed to grandniece Emmeline Drake.22 Sylvia’s preference for female heirs over male heirs, and her desire to use her share of the marital property to support indigent nieces, echoed the 1816 will of another better-known early American proto-feminist, Abigail Adams. One wonders whether Sylvia, whose hometown was not far from where Adams lived, had her example in mind.23
In contrast, when Sylvia’s brother Asaph died three years later, at age ninety-six, the division of his sizable property, valued at $14,334.11, adopted the usual pattern of preferring males to females. Although the heirs received shares based not on gender but on their degree of relation to Asaph—one-ninth for children or their surviving spouses, one-eighteenth for nearby grandchildren, and one-fifty-fourth for distant grandchildren—in the practical matter of dividing his several hundreds of acres, the will directed that lines were to be drawn in a way that benefited males over their female relations.24 Another of Sylvia’s brothers who died before her gave similar preference to male heirs. Oliver Drake left his widow, Ruth Drake, a fourth of his estate and the right to remain in their home “so long as she shall remain my widow and no longer.” He left cash legacies to only two of his sons, splitting the rest of his limited property among those of his eighteen children who outlived him.25
The Drakes had been a remarkably prolific family, and the villages surrounding Weybridge were crowded with the children and grandchildren of Sylvia’s brothers and sisters. Many of her nephews became substantial landowners, ministers, and industrialists. They restored the legacy of the Drake family, whose fortune had fallen so low during the Revolution. Asaph’s son Cyrus Bryant Drake served as secretary of the Vermont Domestic Missionary Society and invested his money wisely, dying a rich man. His brother Isaac Drake became the richest man in Weybridge, with a farm stretching over hundreds of acres. Sylvia’s brother Solomon, who lived in neighboring Bristol, also possessed a farm of several hundred acres, and he held numerous civic offices in the town. His son Thomas S. Drake, one of ten children, became president of the National Bank of Vergennes, managed an electrical plant, and invested in real estate.
Like many New England families, the Drakes traveled west in the nineteenth century. Thomas’s brother Ransom became a pharmacist in the Midwest, and his son Nelson Asaph Drake became surgeon to the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railways. Other cousins became respectable citizens in New York State, Canada, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and California.26
Unfortunately, the primary beneficiary of Sylvia’s will, Harriet Emily Bowdish, sank into a disabling paranoia in the years following Sylvia’s death. Her marriage fell apart when she became persuaded that her husband was conspiring with the hired girl to poison her. After their separation she moved in with her sister Sarah, who had two children, one named Willis Bryant Child. Eventually, Harriet Emily moved into the next-door homestead of her widowed, childless uncle Isaac. Her paranoia worsened over time. She became mortally afraid of burglars and was subject to “violent gusts of ill temper over seemingly small provocation,” which led her to say “the most intemperate and unreasonable things.” Her frequent self-medication from mysterious bottles may have contributed to her off-balance personality. After Cyrus Bryant Drake’s death in 1878, his unstable, unmarried daughter, Louisa Bryant Drake, moved in with Harriet Emily. She also had a “nervous sanguine temperament” and followed her aunt around the house like a shadow. When uncle Isaac died, unscrupulous male family members and neighbors sought to take advantage of the two single women. A hired man named Rollin Shaw isolated Harriet Emily and Louisa from the family, acquiring power of attorney and enriching himself from their property.27
The failure of her niece and grandniece to carve out satisfactory lives suggests that the world Sylvia left behind, although less restrictive than the world she had been born into, remained far from hospitable for single women. After Harriet Emily separated from her philandering husband, her sympathetic niece recalled, “male relatives chose to remain very quiet and neutral” rather than to offer any support. Louisa’s life seemed equally blighted. Despite being a “fine scholar fond of intellectual pursuits,” she lived a life of confinement that bore little resemblance to the illustrious achievements of her father, a Doctor of Divinity who served a term in the Vermont legislature. After Louisa’s death, her father’s wealth was bequeathed to his alma mater, Middlebury College, which his daughter never had the opportunity to attend.28
Yet the experience of another niece, who lived far from rural Weybridge, reveals that other new opportunities did open for women like Charity and Sylvia after their deaths. Julia Sands Bryant was William Cullen Bryant’s daughter. Born in 1831, the younger of his two children, she received the sort of privileged attention that her great-aunt, the youngest of ten, never had. She was, in her mother’s words, “the pet of the house,” and by age two her parents judged her “quite smart.” Her parents brought her to Europe for the first time at age three. Over the years she matured into a sophisticated and attractive young woman. Rumor had it that she turned down an offer of marriage from Samuel J. Tilden, future governor of New York State and Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1876.
But instead of becoming a political wife, like her mother and her sister, Julia formed a connection to “chum” Anna Rebecca Fairchild, a cousin who moved into the household at age eighteen. When William Cullen Bryant died in 1878, Julia and Anna moved to Paris, where they lived together for the next thirty years. At the time, Paris was home to a uniquely open lesbian subculture, depicted in Émile Zola’s novel Nana (1880). In Paris, Julia and Anna collected rare needlework. Julia left half her sizable wealth, around $250,000, to Anna on her death in 1907. All of her personal property, including her furniture and jewels, also went to Anna. The real estate was put into trust, with the interest going to Anna’s support and the principal to revert to Julia’s nieces and nephews after Anna’s death. Anna devoted her final years to preserving the Bryant family legacy.29
A significant degree of wealth differentiated the lives of Julia and Anna from their great-aunts. Charity and Sylvia sewed for a living; Julia and Anna collected exquisite lace. Still, the temporal and geographic distance between early national Vermont and fin-de-siècle Paris differentiated the women’s experiences to an even greater degree than their economic standing. Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and its closing decades, a cultural revolution had taken place. Charity and Sylvia were among a pioneer generation of women at the beginning of the century who sought to shape independent lives as neither wives nor mothers. By the end of the century, women like Julia and Anna, who loved and desired other women, could participate in a lesbian subculture with its own meeting places, literary culture, and lingo.30
In the twentieth century, lesbian subcultures spread throughout cities in the United States as well. Eventually, lesbianism would go mainstream, finding representation on network television and the pages of mass-market magazines, as well as within the language of nondiscrimination statutes. But this shift to the mainstream caused a curious amnesia. The self-congratulatory certitude that modern times represented an apogee of tolerance compared to the benighted wasteland of the past has made it hard to fit women like Charity and Sylvia into the historical memory. How could two women have forged a marriage in a traditional New England village, governed by the old faith, and been accepted by their family and friends despite every evidence that they were lovers? Our shock at this tale indicates a failure of imagination. The history of sexual nonconformity is not only a saga of oppression and suffering; it is also a tale of creative ingenuity and accommodation. It is a story of beloved aunts and winking nephews, of cruel gossip and endurance, of erotic touch and spiritual unease, of guarded reputations and public-mindedness, of private pleasures and willful ignorance. The historical record is littered with Charities and Sylvias; we need only open our eyes and see.