Lesbian marriage in early America

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/29/lesbian_marriage_in_early_america/



Vermont became the first state to vote for same-sex marriage in 2009, almost exactly 202 years after Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake moved into a rented room together in the village of Weybridge. At 30, Charity was Sylvia’s senior by seven years, and she had had a rocky early adulthood. Her intense relationships with a series of young women had provoked nasty gossip in several New England towns, forcing her to move around the region, bouncing from household to household as a guest of friends and relatives. Yet once Charity and Sylvia set up housekeeping — and a tailoring business — together, they would not be separated for a single night over the next 44 years. When they were much older, the poet William Cullen Bryant, Charity’s nephew, wrote a celebrated account of their partnership, describing their bond as “no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage,” and another local memoirist of the period noted that he had always heard “it mentioned that Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other.”

Rachel Hope Cleves’ new book, “Charity and Sylvia: A Same Sex Marriage in Early America,” is a slim, tender tribute to this marriage-in-all-but-law. A professor of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Cleves applies rigorous historical techniques to the couple’s story, poring over caches of letters, diaries and shopping lists in local archives and looking up census reports. She takes great pains to substantiate her conviction that — contrary to what some historians have argued — the relationship between Charity and Sylvia was most definitely erotic. Yet none of this documentation weighs the book down. Academic histories capable of bringing tears to a reader’s eyes are rare, but “Charity and Sylvia” is one of them.

Charity Bryant was born to a well-regarded Massachusetts family in 1777. A running theme of “Charity and Sylvia” is the remarkable generational divide between those Americans who came of age before the Revolutionary War, in a world dominated by tradition, and the generation raised after it. Many of the latter — known as the “rising generation” by their elders — had been orphaned or beggared by the war or by disease. Furthermore, Cleves writes, “the war for independence had not only broken the political bonds of empire, creating a new nation, it had torn the social fabric of the colonial world, birthing a new American culture.” If it was possible to jettison England and her king, why not other authorities, as well? For while in colonial America, “no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life,” after the Revolution, “an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy.”

Marriage was a grueling and dangerous profession for all but the richest colonial women. It typically involved back-to-back pregnancies (Charity’s own mother gave birth to nine children before she died at age 39), any one of which might kill the mother, as well as a mammoth burden of housework and childcare in an era before running water or indoor plumbing. Add to that the loss of the female partner’s individual and property rights, and you wonder why more women didn’t flee the altar. Or, rather, you do until you learn that opportunities for respectable women to make an independent living were scarce. At first, Charity worked as a schoolteacher, a job she valued for the freedom it gave her to read, think and write — and also for the entree it gave her to what Cleves characterizes as “a loose network of bookish young women who formed primary romantic relationships with each other.”