Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (5 page)

Katherine Anne Porter has described such women as “a company of Amazons” that nineteenth century America produced among its many prodigies:

Not-men, not-women, answerable to no function of either sex, whose careers were carried on, and how successfully, in whatever field they chose: They were educators, writers, editors, politicians, artists, world travellers, and international hostesses, who lived in public and by the public and played out their self-assumed, self-created roles in such masterly freedom as only a few medieval queens had equalled. Freedom to them meant precisely freedom from men and their stuffy rules for women. They usurped with a high hand the traditional privileges of movement, choice, and the use of direct, personal power.
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Porter was wrong in seeing them as “not-men, not-women.” They were indeed women, but not of the old mold. Out of the darkness of the nineteenth century they miraculously created a new and sadly short-lived definition of a woman who could do anything, be anything, go anywhere she pleased. Porter was half-right in seeing the importance to them in having “freedom from men and their stuffy rules for women.” But writing in 1947, eons removed from the institution of romantic friendship with which those women had been intimately familiar, Porter was unable to assess how crucially important it also was to them to be tied to another like-minded soul. In giving up men they relinquished not only wifehood and motherhood, but a life of subordination and dependence. In selecting other women they chose not only a relationship of equals but one of shared frustrations, experiences, interests, and goals with which only the most saintly of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century men could have sympathized. Such private sharing was essential to these women, who often found themselves quite alone in uncharted territory. They could endure their trials as pioneers in the outside world much better knowing that their life partner understood those trials completely because she suffered them, too.

“Poets and Lovers Evermore”

In a poem of the 1890s two Englishwomen, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, “romantic friends” who wrote twenty-five plays and eight books of poetry together under the pseudonym Michael Field, declared of themselves: “My love and I took hands and swore/ Against the world to be/ Poets and lovers evermore.”
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Many early professional women in America also clasped hands and swore, generally not to be poets together, but often to be doctors, professors, ministers, union organizers, social workers, or pacifist lecturers together—and “lovers evermore.”

They were often barred from those careers that had long been male preserves. But fueled by the power they gave each other, they could establish their own professions in teaching and administration at women’s colleges, founding and serving in settlement houses, establishing and running institutions for social and political reform, and bringing reform concerns to existing institutions. In these ways thousands of them were able to serve their own needs to be financially independent and creatively employed, as well as their social and political interests in betterment such as had concerned women of their class since the fiery mid-nineteenth-century women abolitionists saw the necessity for female participation in reform work. Perhaps they were able to play roles of prominence as professional figures despite the prevalent opinion that woman’s place was in the home because what they did could often be seen as housekeeping on a large scale—teaching, nurturing, healing—domestic duties brought into the public sphere. They were eventually able to convince great portions of the country—particularly the East and Midwest—that the growing horrors perpetrated by industrialization and urbanization begged to be cured by their mass mothering skills.

But in creating jobs for themselves through their skills they achieved the economic freedom (such as their middle class counterparts in the past never could) to live as what the later twentieth century would consider lesbians, though the early twentieth century was still reluctant to attribute sexuality to such proper-seeming maiden ladies and would have preferred to describe them, as historian Judith Schwarz has pointed out, as “close friends and devoted companions.” Whether or not their relationships were specifically sexual, had they lived today they would at least have been described as falling somewhere on what Adrienne Rich has called the “lesbian continuum.” Their numbers included Emily Blackwell, the pioneering physician and co-founder of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, and the woman she lived with for almost thirty years until her death in 1910, Elizabeth Cushier, an eminent gynecological surgeon; renowned biographer Katharine Anthony and progressive educator Elisabeth Irwin, who developed a teaching system for the New York schools and with whom Anthony raised several adopted children in the course of a thirty year relationship; pairs of women such as Mary Dreir and Lenora O’Reilly, and Helen Marot and Caroline Pratt, who lived most of their adult lives together and organized the Women’s Trade Union League, spearheading its battles to regulate women’s hours in factories, fighting clothing and cigar sweatshops, forcing the appointment of women factory inspectors; Vida Scudder, who was a professor at Wellesley but fled from Back Bay Boston privilege to identify herself with the tenement population, establishing the Rivington Street Settlement House and founding the College Settlements Association to bring libraries, summer schools, trade unions, and “culture” into poor communities, and whose “devoted companion” was Florence Converse, a professor and novelist; Frances Witherspoon, head of the New York Women’s Peace Party, co-founder of the New York Bureau of Legal Advice for conscientious objectors, and Tracy Mygatt, with whom she lived her entire adult life and with whom she built the War Resisters League into a large and strong pacifist organization. The list of female contributors to twentieth-century social progress and decency who constructed their personal lives around other women is endless.
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Some of those women were cultural feminists, fueled by their belief that male values created the tragedies connected with industrialization, war, and mindless urbanization and that it was the responsibility of women, with their superior sensibilities, to straighten the world out again. Their love of women was at least in part the result of their moral chauvinism. Others were less convinced of women’s natural superiority, but they wanted to wrest from society the opportunities and training that would give women the advantages men had and thus permit them to be more whole as human beings. Their love of women was at least in part a search for allies to help wage the battle against women’s social impoverishment. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House Settlement, president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, founder of the Summer School for Women in Industry to serve urban working women, and first president of the National College Women’s Equal Suffrage League, represent these two different types. They are similar, however, in that they both managed to find kindred spirits, “devoted companions,” who would work with them to promote the success of their endeavors.

Twentieth-century biographers have had a hard time trying to pin heterosexual interests to them. Jane Addams found her family’s efforts to launch her as a debutante and marry her to her stepbrother extremely distasteful. Those attempts, Addams recalled in her autobiography, led to “the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment,” from which she was extricated by Ellen Starr, whom she met in college. Ellen appears to have been Jane’s first serious attachment. For years they celebrated September 11—even when they were apart—as the anniversary of their first meeting. During their separations Jane stationed Ellen’s picture, as she wrote her, “where I can see you almost every minute.” It was Ellen who prodded Jane to leave her family, come to Chicago, and open Hull House together with her. On accepting the plan Jane wrote Ellen: “Let’s love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation.” It was Ellen’s devotion and emotional support that permitted Jane to cast off the self-doubts that had been plaguing her as a female who wanted to be both socially useful and independent during unsympathetic times and to commit herself to action: to create a settlement house in the midst of poverty where young, comfortably brought-up women who had spent years in study might now “learn of life from life itself,” as Addams later wrote. Under the guidance initially of both Addams and Starr these females of the leisure class investigated sweatshops and the dangerous trades and agitated for social reforms, helped newly arrived immigrants learn to make America their home, taught skills, and promoted cultural activities. They changed the lives of the poor and were themselves changed by their confrontation with realities from which they had always been sheltered.
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While providing such opportunities for these young women Jane Addams also lived a personal life that most biographers have attempted to gloss over, since the facts have made them uncomfortable. For example, although it is known that Jane and wealthy philanthropist Mary Rozet Smith, who later became her “devoted companion” (as biographers must acknowledge), always slept in the same room and the same bed, and when they traveled Jane even wired ahead to be sure they would get a hotel room with a double bed, nevertheless most historians have preferred to present Addams as asexual. William O’Neill says of her:

She gave her time, money and talents to the interests of the poor … and remained largely untouched by the passionate currents that swirled around her. The crowning irony of Jane Addams’ life, therefore, was that she compromised her intellect for the sake of human experiences which her nature prevented her from having. Life, as she meant the term, eluded her forever.

Perhaps “Life,” as O’Neill and other historians have meant the term (i.e., heterosexuality, marriage, family), eluded Addams, but love and passion did not. Similarly, Allen Davis has tried to explain away what he benightedly calls appearances of “perversion” in Jane Addams’ same-sex intimacies as being instead typical of nineteenth-century “innocent” sentimental friendship. As Blanche Cook points out, Addams was a “conventional lady with pearls,” and erotic passion between women has been considered perversion: the two concepts cannot be reconciled easily. But looking at the available facts, there can be no doubt that Addams was passionately involved with at least two women.
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Although Ellen Starr continued to work alongside Jane and to live at Hull House for many years, the early intensity of their relationship dwindled, and Mary Rozet Smith replaced Ellen in Jane’s affections. Jane’s relationship with Mary lasted forty years. Mary first came to Hull House in 1890 as another wealthy young lady anxious to make herself useful. In the initial correspondence between Jane and Mary, Jane always brought in Ellen, using the first person plural, writing, for example, “We will miss you.” But soon Ellen dropped out of the letters, and by 1893 Mary became a traveling companion on Jane’s lecture tours. Two years later Ellen went off to England alone to study bookbinding so that she could learn to construct a bookbindery at Hull House according to the plans of English socialist-aesthete William Morris and to provide artistic work for the community. The intimate side of her relationship with Jane was by then clearly over.
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Mary Smith and Jane Addams seem to have confided about their feelings for each other to confederates such as Florence Kelley, who wrote Mary at one separation in 1899: “The Lady [Jane] misses you more than the uninitiated would think she had time for.” Letters to each other when they were separated because of Jane’s busy schedule speak for themselves. Mary wrote Jane: “You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you now.” Jane addressed her “My Ever Dear” and wrote: “I miss you dreadfully and am yours ’til death.” They thought of themselves as wedded. In a 1902 letter, written during a three-week separation, Jane remarked: “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together.” In 1904 they purchased a home together near Bar Harbor, Maine. “Our house—it quite gives me a thrill to write the word,” Jane told Mary. “It was our house wasn’t it in a really truly ownership,” and she talked about their “healing domesticity.”
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The fact of their intimacy is confirmed no more by the knowledge that they always shared a double bed together than it is by a poem that Jane wrote Mary at the end of the century recalling their first meeting:

One day I came into Hull House,

(No spirit whispered who was there)

And in the kindergarten room

There sat upon a childish chair

A girl, both tall and fair to see,

(To look at her gives one a thrill).

But all I thought was, would she be

Best fitted to lead club, or drill?

You see, I had forgotten Love,

And only thought of Hull House then.

That is the way with women folks

When they attempt the things of men;

They grow intense, and love the thing

Which they so tenderly do rear,

And think that nothing lies beyond

Which claims from them a smile or tear.

Like mothers who work long and late

To rear their children fittingly,