Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (7 page)

my Eve looks into my eyes with brief bright glances, with long rapturous embraces,—when her sweet life beneath and her warm enfolding arms appease my hunger, and quiet my [illegible] and carry my body to the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love!

These later letters even suggest that their sexual relationship included remarkable erotic fantasy and role playing. For example, Rose writes Evangeline:

Ah, my Cleopatra is a very dangerous Queen, but I will look her straight in those wide open eyes that look so imperious and will crush those Antony-seeking lips, until her arms close over (alas, for my hair with all those armlets), and she becomes my prisoner because I am her Captain…. How much kissing can Cleopatra stand?

The sexual relationship between the two women apparently cooled after a few years, and Evangeline, at the age of thirty-six, married the seventy-four year old Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. When the bishop died five years later, however, the correspondence between the two women began again. In 1910 they went off together to Bagni di Lucca, Italy, where they made their home until Rose died in 1918. Before Evangeline’s death in 1930 she directed her executors to bury her near Rose in Italy.
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Their correspondence is not unique, although not many early extant letters between women go quite so far as to talk about carrying each others’ bodies “to the summit of joy.” But frequently they do refer to caresses that are unmistakably erotic. Among the papers of feminist leader Anna Dickinson there is a letter signed “Ida” that recalls, “This time last evening you were sitting on my knee, nestled close to my heart and I was the happiest of mortals.” The letter does not stop with such a maternal description. Ida goes on to remember Anna in bed, “tempting me to kiss her sweet mouth and to caress her until—well, poor little me, poor ‘booful princess.’ How can I leave thee, queen of my loving heart.”
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Similarly, Emma Goldman kept for posterity several 1912 letters from Almeda Sperry, a woman who had been a prostitute and was so strongly affected by Goldman’s lecture on white slave traffic that she became an anarchist worker alongside Goldman. The two spent a vacation in the country together, but prior to their trip Almeda wrote Emma that just before she falls asleep she imagines that “I kiss your body with biting kisses—I inhale the sweet pungent odor of you and you plead with me for relief.” The letter obviously did not frighten Goldman into canceling their vacation plans. After their return Almeda wrote her again, recalling Emma taking her in her arms and “your beautiful throat that I kissed with reverent tenderness…. And your bosom—ah, your sweet bosom, unconfined.” Their erotic relationship was apparently culminated, as still another letter from Almeda suggests:

Dearest. … If I had only had courage enuf to kill myself when you reached the climax then—then I would have known happiness, for at that moment I had complete possession of you. Now you see the yearning I am possessed with—the yearning to possess you at all times and it is impossible. What greater suffering can there be—what greater heaven—what greater hell? And how the will to live sticks in me when I wish to live after possessing you. Satisfied? Ah God, no! At this moment I am listening to the rhythm of the pulse coming thru your throat. I am surg[ing] along with your life blood, coursing thru the secret places of your body.

I wish to escape from you but I am harried from place to place in my thots. I cannot escape from the rhythmic spurt of your love juice.
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But women did not necessarily perceive themselves as lesbians simply because they lived such experiences and wrote and received such letters. Some even dismissed entirely the significance of those experiences in identifying their sexual orientation. Several years after Emma Goldman’s relationship with Almeda Sperry, in 1928, the same year the famous lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness
was published, Goldman wrote of her shock that a woman friend had run off with Djuna Barnes: “Really, the Lesbians are a crazy lot. Their antagonism to the male is almost a disease with them. I simply can’t bear such narrowness.” Although she had held another woman to her “unconfined bosom” and shared her “love juice” with her, Goldman did not hate men, so she felt she was not “one of them.”
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As the century progressed, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss the new implications of such “slips.” Even romantic friendship came to signify lesbianism, once women’s close relationships began to appear especially threatening to the establishment of companionate marriage (see pp. 90–91). The start of a transition in views is suggested in Wanda Fraiken Neff’s 1928 novel about Vassar,
We Sing Diana.
In 1913 violent crushes between young women were considered “the great human experience” and it was so common for first-year students to smash on one particular professor that she was called “the Freshman disease.” But when the main character returns to teach at Vassar seven years later, all has changed: everything is attributed to sex, undergraduate speech is full of Freudianisms, and “Intimacy between two girls was watched with keen distrustful eyes. Among one’s classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions.” It is no wonder that M. Carey Thomas, having spent her whole life loving women, later felt compelled to express negative attitudes about homosexuality and to fear that public discussion of it would make life difficult for all women who lived together.
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It was to a large extent the work of the sexologists, which was disseminated slowly to the layman but finally became part of popular wisdom after World War I, that accounts for the altered views of women’s intimacy with each other. It may be said that the sexologists changed the course of same-sex relationships not only because they cast suspicion on romantic friendships, but also because they helped to make possible the establishment of lesbian communities through their theories, which separated off the lesbian from the rest of womankind and presented new concepts to describe certain feelings and preferences that had before been within the spectrum of “normal” female experiences. Many early twentieth-century women who loved other women rejected those new concepts as being irrelevant to them because they could still see their feelings as “romantic friendship.” But by the end of World War I the tolerance for any manifestations of what would earlier have been considered “romantic friendship” had virtually disappeared, as women were urged to forget their pioneering experiments in education and the professions and to find happiness in the new companionate marriage. Subsequent generations of women who loved other women soon came to have no choice but to consider themselves lesbians or to make herculean efforts of rationalization in order to explain to themselves how they were different from real lesbians.

Because the label “lesbian” implies
sexual
identification, historians have denied that those pioneering women for whom same-sex intimacies were so crucial had much in common with contemporary lesbians since, to the historians’ relief, there is little concrete evidence of the sexuality of “romantic friends.”
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But those early career women who spent their lives with devoted companions share with their class counterparts today the most crucial perceptions, values, antipathies, and loves that shaped their existence. Professional women who are lesbians at the end of the twentieth century are the descendants of those pioneering women of a century ago.

A Worm in the Bud: The Early
Sexologists and Love Between Women

Avoid girls who are too affectionate and demonstrative in their manner of talking and acting with you
….
When sleeping in the same bed with another girl, old or young, avoid ‘snuggling up’ close together…. and, after going to bed, if you are sleeping alone or with others, just bear in mind that beds are sleeping places. When you go to bed, go to sleep just as quickly as you can.

—
Irving D. Steinhardt,
Ten Sex Talks With Girls,
1914

Because nineteenth-century women of the working class were largely illiterate and thus have left little in the way of letters, journals, or autobiographies, it is difficult to know to what extent some form of romantic friendship may have been prevalent among them. Historians such as Marion Goldman have suggested a picture of relationships between nineteenth-century American prostitutes that appears to have commonalities with nineteenth-century middle-class romantic friends. They spent all their free time together, traveled together, protected each other, loved each other. Goldman talks about two who were so devoted that they even tried to die together. The deviance of prostitutes’ roles, which set them apart and circumscribed their activities, encouraged them in a “female solidarity and bonding” that were not unlike romantic friendship. However, because their sexuality was so much more available to them than to the typical nineteenth-century middle-class woman, love between women who were prostitutes was much more likely to have manifested itself in genital relations.
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Women in penal institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seem also to have engaged in some form of romantic friendships. The early twentieth-century psychologist Margaret Otis described such passionate but apparently largely nonsexual relationships between black and white women in reform schools. Otis claimed that those relationships occurred only along cross-racial lines, “the difference in color … tak[ing] the place of difference in sex” and the black woman generally playing the “man’s role.” But since the black and white women were physically segregated in the institutions Otis observed, the relationships usually could have no consummation outside of romantic notes passed surreptitiously between the women and quick utterances of endearment and high sentiments—which would have rendered those affections as emotionally intense and ungenital as most romantic friendships probably were. Had the women not been segregated, however, the nature of the relationships might have been quite different.
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But in the era when romantic friendships between middle-class women in America were an important social institution, during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, they appear not to have been common for working-class women, perhaps because the intimacy necessary for the development of such relationships required leisure and some degree of social privacy. Working-class women, who were generally employed in a domestic setting, had little of either. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, their situation began to change. American working-class women made a move into the public sphere parallel with their middle-class counterparts, taking the new jobs that were opening up with the rapid growth of American corporations and industry. There was now employment for them outside of homes, not only in factories but also in service occupations such as sales and clerical work, and the number of women in unskilled and semi-skilled occupations grew rapidly. The low-paid female wage worker figured heavily in the tripling of the female labor force between 1870 and 1900 (from 1.8 million to 5.3 million, twice the increase in the number of women in the general population).
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Many young working-class women left parents’ or domestic employers’ homes and moved to big cities where they were on their own—away from perpetual supervision and scrutiny for the first time. Such a move accounts for their changing heterosexual practices—which seem to have constituted a (hetero)sexual revolution that preceded the revolution of the 1920s by at least a couple of decades. But such a move also drew young working-class women together in ways that would have been impractical or impossible earlier. Because they lived and worked away from a domestic setting and often made less than subsistence wages, they frequently shared rooms, sometimes on a long-term basis. One historian gives several examples of women who not only lived together but moved together from city to city to find work, and she suggests that such long-term partnerships indicated “close personal bonds that existed among some lower-paid working women similar to the bonds of love and friendship [among] nineteenth century American middle-class women.”
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But that many of those relationships were really similar to romantic friendship as middle-class women experienced it is perhaps dubious. Working-class women may have realistically felt that they did not have the luxury to engage in a connection that neither promoted survival as its chief aim nor promised starker sensual pleasures that could help them forget the bleakness of their labors. The most convincing depictions of these relationships suggest that they were far more concretely oriented—either sexually or practically—than those between romantic friends usually appear to have been. Kathy Peiss, for example, in
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York,
observes that working-class women’s same-sex friendships generally occurred in a context that permitted them to negotiate the world of heterosexual commercial amusements in order to make appropriate heterosexual contacts without being accosted by unwelcomed advances as lone women would be. Peiss contrasts this arrangement to the romantic friendships of middle-class women whose purpose was often to help them maintain their privatized same-sex world.
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