A Queer History of the United States (11 page)

Acting Free

Women who fought for equal rights and social change during this time sought justice with soldier-like conviction. Women in the United States had greater mobility than those in some European societies; after the Civil War, as a result of their involvement with the suffrage and abolition movements, they had greater access to public space than before. In 1848 the first national suffrage gathering was held in Seneca Falls, New York, igniting vigorous public discussion about women’s rights. The struggle for suffrage became more organized after the war and gave women an institutionalized public voice.

In addition, new printing technologies increased the number of national newspapers and magazines. While there were already women editors (in 1828 six women began editing national and local periodicals), their numbers increased dramatically in the 1860s. Magazines aimed at women often had large audiences—Sarah J. Hale’s
Godey’s Lady’s Book
had a readership of 150,000 in 1860—and were culturally and politically influential.
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These magazines’ messages were often sharply dichotomized. They promoted the joys of the domestic sphere as assertively as they insisted on the cultural and moral importance of women to the nation.

Women’s new visibility as citizens and intellectuals was reinforced by the increased growth of women’s colleges. Frequently called “female seminaries,” these institutions were predicated on women being as intelligent as men. Their all-female environments were havens for romantic female friendships as well as female mentoring. These relationships did not happen without criticism. Lillian Faderman notes that in 1838, journalist Harry F. Harrington wrote in
The Ladies’ Companion
that women who wanted a serious education were “mental hermaphrodites” and “semi women.”
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This public discussion of women as disenfranchised citizens was an important step in creating the idea of women as a community. Implicit in this idea was the potential of same-sex desire to bind that community together. In the years after the war, there were many ways in which women who loved women were visible and had a decisive impact on society.

Charlotte Cushman, one of the most famous Shakespearian actors of the nineteenth century, was unabashedly open about her intimate relationships with women. She became famous at a time when the connection between gender and citizenship in America was becoming more complicated. Born in Boston in 1816, she was raised as a Unitarian; Ralph Waldo Emerson was the pastor of her church. By age twenty, she was acclaimed for playing vivid character parts and male roles. Cushman’s Romeo (her sister Susan played Juliet) was so famous that a figurine of the balcony scene was manufactured by the noted British pottery company Staffordshire.

Cushman had a huge following and led a very public life. Beginning in 1848, she and writer Matilda Hays were publicly acknowledged as a couple. In 1852 they moved to Rome, where they were part of a loosely connected colony of artists, including Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis, George Sand, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Over the next few years, Cushman and Hays were involved in a series of affairs with other women. The affairs culminated in Hays’s threatening to sue Cushman for the income she lost after giving up her own career to support her lover emotionally. Cushman then partnered with Stebbins (with whom she had been having an affair). That relationship lasted until Cushman’s death in 1876. During this time she had other lovers, including Emma Crow, who was twenty-three years younger.

Cushman’s fame allowed her social freedoms unknown to most women of the time. After her 1874 farewell performance in New York, twenty-five thousand people gathered outside her hotel and gave her a prolonged ovation. She was able to dress in a masculine fashion and be remarkably pubic with her affections. Elizabeth Barrett Browning noted in a letter that “I understand that [Cushman] and Miss Hays have made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike . . . it is a female marriage.”
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In 1860 Cushman wrote to Crow, “Ah what delirium is in the memory. Every nerve in me thrills as I look back & feel you in my arms, held to my breast so closely, so entirely mine in every sense as I was yours. Ah, my very sweet, very precious, full, full of extasy.”
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Most important, having her own income allowed Cushman to travel, support other women artists, and create her own community. Cushman’s determination to build a tight-knit friendship network—what artist and critic William Wetmore Story called “a Harem (Scarem) of emancipated females”—attests to the independence that women gained by earning an income and living outside of a heterosexual marriage.

In this context, Cushman’s persona manifested the idea that women could be powerful, charismatic, and independent as well as womanly, charming, and idolized. Cushman’s penchant for male attire, as well as her ability to convincingly play a man (and in the case of Romeo, a sexualized romantic young man) added to her ability to embody what was becoming a new prototype of American women. Theater historian Faye E. Dudden suggests that Cushman’s Romeo “undermined the assumption that gender was natural, inborn, undeniable, and suggested instead that it was something assumed, learned, performed.”
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Cushman’s visibility as a female performer of international renown also viscerally appealed to women. In 1858, at age twenty-six, Louisa May Alcott, author of
Little Women,
was so struck by Cushman that she noted in her diary she “had a stage struck fit”; later she based Miss Cameron, a character in
Jo’s Boys,
on Cushman. Kate Field, later a noted actor and journalist, wrote at age twenty, “The other day upon returning from Boston after having been excited by Miss Cushman, I shut myself up and wrote some verses to her.”
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These young women, both unmarried and at the beginning of their careers, found inspiration in Cushman, as well as a clear vision of what was possible for them to achieve.

There are numerous documented instances of women living together as domestic partners and being socially accepted as a couple. The common term for this arrangement was “Boston marriage,” suggested by the title of Henry James’s 1886 novel
The Bostonians.
Such relationships were found throughout society. However, little documentation of working-class women who lived as couples exists, because there are fewer records of the lives of less-affluent people.

The letters of Rebecca Primus, who lived in Maryland, to her intimate friend Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, written between 1854 and 1868, give us a sense of how a middle-class African American wrote:

My Cherish Friend,

My head is better today Last night it pain me very hard O My Dear dear Rebecca when you press me to your Dear Bosom . . . happy I was, last night I gave anything if I could only layed my poor aching head on your bosom O Dear how soon will it be I will be able to do it I suppose you think me very foolish if you do tis all the same to me. Dear Rebecca when I am away from you I feel so unhappy it seems to me the hours and days are like weeks and months.
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Even women who did leave a detailed record of their lives, such as Louisa May Alcott, were often not forthcoming about their erotic desires, or may have foregone romantic relationships to pursue their work. Alcott, who published twenty-nine books and story collections in forty-four years, told poet Louise Chandler Moulton in 1873 that she had remained a spinster “because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” A bold statement that gives few details. Like most of the reform-minded women in her circle, Alcott was an ardent feminist and questioned how women’s relationships with men affected their place in society. In the 1870s she and friends, including Julia Ward Howe, recommended that women not use “Mrs.” or “Miss” to avoid discrimination.
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Many women found, along with their affectional and sexual desires, that female partners were more conducive to their lives as educators and reformers. Boston marriages were prominent at women’s colleges, where professors and administrators such as Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley at Mount Holyoke, and M. Cary Thomas and Mary Garrett at Bryn Mawr, were famously coupled. These arrangements were instrumental in promoting women’s higher education and mentoring female students. Other noted Boston marriages included upper-middle-class couples such as Annie Fields and writer Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice James (the sister of Henry and William James) and Katherine Loring, sculptor Anne Whitney and painter Abby Adelaide Manning, poet Amy Lowell (of the Boston Lowells) and actor Ada Dwyer Russell. These couples, all based in or around Boston, were only the most public in their time. Their visibility in a society that primarily values opposite-sex relationships is important. These women had, through social position, inherited wealth and access to powerful male figures, giving them substantial political and social clout in shaping discussions and public opinions. People with economic advantages were often social and cultural leaders, but never before were women, unattached to men, able to be this independent or so prominently involved with other women.
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It is impossible to ascertain whether women in Boston marriages, or any romantic friendships, engaged in sexual activity with one another. No direct documentation exists to prove that they did, just as such no documentation, except for the birth of children, exists for heterosexual relationships. There is no reason to presume that these women did not engage in any number of forms of sexual play, from caressing and fondling to genital orgasm. Some of their letters and journals certainly indicate that their passions were physical as well as emotional. It is clear that the tenderness and love these women had for one another was publicly accepted, even valorized, and that these relationships were integral to many social institutions.

New Bodies for the Body Politic

In the years after the Civil War, American artists, in direct response to so many war deaths, began representing the male body in new ways. The need to promote a single national identity after the war led to a plethora of patriotic artwork, much of which glorified politicians and soldiers and valorized the male body as heroic. Many of these works were sculpted by women—such as Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, and Anne Whitney—who made their lives with other women. (Some other sculptors, such as Vinnie Ream Hoxie and Adelaide Johnston, were married, outspoken feminists.) Hosmer’s colossal bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton; Anne Whitney’s larger-than-life recreations of Charles Sumner, Samuel Adams, and Lief Erickson; Emma Stebbins’s imposing statue of Horace Mann; Edmonia Lewis’s marble sculptures of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, John Brown, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln—all glorified the patriotic American male body.

Viscerally, these imposing works of public art represented the gender of a new body politic: the strong, indomitable, progressive American man who symbolized freedom and resilience in the face of injustice—and who, if Whitman was correct, contained within himself the potential for an expansive same-sex desire. In the public discussion over the changing nature of American masculinity, these statues represent the antithesis of the persecuting society. That these representations were being created by women who were outside of traditional gender or sexual roles indicates that significant shifts had occurred in who had permission to represent American patriotism.

As these commanding masculine statues of politicians and generals were erected across the United States, other artists, almost all of whom were men who desired men, were creating a different image of American masculinity: the male nude. Classical Greek and Roman statuary had depicted the male nude, but until the Italian Renaissance, Anglo-European sensibilities had discouraged displays of the male body and genitals. Although this attitude was due in part to the Christian church’s stigmatization of sexuality, it also stemmed from the fact that such representations often implied physical, psychological, and emotional vulnerability, which was viewed as unmasculine. But after the Civil War highlighted the vulnerability of the male body, and as public discussion of same-sex male desire became more common, images of male nudity were considered increasingly acceptable. In the 1870s, English art critic John Addington Symonds wrote about Michelangelo’s and da Vinci’s nudes, explicitly associating them with contemporary male-male desire. At the same time, in Sicily, German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden began taking photographs of local young male peasants in “classical” poses. His work with clothed models garnered popular attention in Europe and America.

Von Gloeden’s more explicitly erotic photos of nude males, many of them in sexually suggestive poses, also gained attention among American and European men who identified as lovers of men. In the 1880s, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of photographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman. (Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a traditional “wedding portrait” of Whitman and Duckett.)
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The Swimming Hole
, Eakins’s famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman’s images of an eroticized pastoral scene from “Song of Myself”:

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.