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An accurate understanding of the “Boston Marriages” era (from approximately the mid-19th century to the 1920s) exemplifies many challenges which face modern social historians. In some contexts, it is difficult to discern queer romantic and sexual desire in a definitive historical sense (my recent post on “the English Sappho” Katherine Philips also explores this issue). Likewise, as this asexual/aromantic author can verify, queerness need not have a sexual or romantic component at all for it to be present. The purportedly lesbian phenomenon of the Boston Marriage intersects both of these problems.
and affection is a particular challenge for historians
But what characterized a Boston Marriage, making it distinct from otherwise typical friendships, what may have influenced generations of women to pursue them, and what do these relationships tell us today about the broad spectrum of queer love and affection?
“The Bostonians”
The term “Boston Marriages” originates from 1886 and, ironically, from a novel penned by a man, Henry James.[1] His work “The Bostonians” sparked a definitive name for a trend, however, that was already well-established in American and Western European society by the time of its publication.
The phrase itself referred to women, concentrated in and around New England in the late-industrial era United States, of significant means who partnered with one another instead of pursuing a traditional mixed-gender marriage.[2] In many ways, a Boston Marriage looked not unlike a traditional marriage of the Victorian era: its participants would cohabit a single home, share both public and intimate aspects of their lives (including a bedchamber) and showed deep, loving and often lifelong devotion to one another. Evidence suggests that most women who pursued Boston marriages were wealthy, well-connected, and enjoyed considerable social privilege.[3]
Notably, these “marriages” were publicly accepted and seemingly widespread among American elites – even if they were never formalized as “marriages” in the legal sense of a mixed-gender marriage of the era. Female intimacy was a common, even encouraged, aspect of Victorian femininity; effusive, passionate expressions of affection between women were a perfectly normal expectation, and not exclusively associated with Boston Marriages or with queerness at all in that time period.[4]
pursued by elite, privileged women
While a modern reader might assume that such arrangements must have been out of explicitly lesbian sexual desire, historians believe that a range of reasons could have motivated women to join Boston Marriages. One resource notes that “Boston marriages offered equality, support and independence to wealthy women who were determined to push outside of the domestic sphere.”[5] Women could, much as other couples then and now, combine their resources in pursuing activities and professional recognition that would be usually closed off to a Victorian woman in a traditional marriage arrangement.
Interestingly, Boston Marriages were closely associated with women’s university environments. One source suggests that Wellesley College during this period coined its own “Wellesley Marriages” as nearly all of its female professors (saving one) was in a domestic arrangement with another woman.[6] While it is possible that all of these women were indeed lesbians, it is also possible that those environments which fostered rare opportunities for female agency in turn fostered Boston Marriages for cultural and socio-economic reasons.
“With love that is deep and true”
A few famous (or infamous) examples of Boston Marriages elucidate how their participants saw themselves and their relationships.
One of the earliest examples of Boston Marriages was the so-called Ladies of Llangollen, a.k.a. Eleanor Charlotte Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. This pair of women fled their comfortable homes (both were relatives of nobility) as young women around 1780 and settled independently in Northern Wales. They eventually shared a refurbished Welsh cottage, usually relying on relatives for financial support, and became known as local curiosities.
The women lived together in apparent contentment for nearly five decades (Sarah outlived Eleanor by just two years), but reportedly scoffed at the notion (rumored in their community) that they were sexual lovers.[7] They reportedly had numerous famous visitors, including Queen Charlotte, European nobles and even Anne Lister, a.k.a. “Gentleman Jack”. The Ladies were ultimately buried together, under one headstone, along with their lifelong servant Mary Caryll.
Another example towards the end of the 19th century is that of Alice James and Katharine Loring. This pair were likely the inspiration for Henry James (Alice’s brother) and his eventual novel.[8] Katharine was born in Massachusetts and would become a key influencer of the American education system. She founded an academic society with the specific goal of encouraging women’s empowerment. Katharine met Alice in the 1870s, and the women would eventually teach together. Alice wrote glowingly of Katharine’s virtues to her friends, and the pair lived and traveled as a public couple for nearly two decades until they settled in England. They were only separated by Alice’s death in 1892.
Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Corman were another famous couple. Bates’s claim to fame is the patriotic song “America the Beautiful”, which she first published as a poem in 1910. She was, like some of the women noted already, a native of Massachusetts but developed a deep abiding love for the natural beauty of the United States throughout her life.[9] Bates met Katharine Corman at Wellesley College in 1890, where she immediately recognized a kindred spirit in their shared commitment to social reforms and pacifism.[10] The women lived and traveled together throughout the next two decades, and Bates herself became a major advocate for world peace and the newly formed post-World War I League of Nations. Sadly, Coman would perish from breast cancer in 1915, and a grieving Bates wrote a loving tribute to her departed companion.
Finally, no discussion of Boston Marriages would be complete without Sarah Orne Jewett and Anne Adams Fields. Jewett was born in Maine in 1849 and would become a renowned American novelist and poet. Jewett is thought to have enjoyed numerous intense friendships, or perhaps affairs, with other women in her early years. She eventually developed a close friendship with a married couple, Anne Fields and her husband James Thomas Fields (himself the publisher and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where some of Sarah’s works were featured).[11]
When Thomas passed away in 1881, Sarah and Anne cohabited together for the remainder of Sarah’s life. Both women were accomplished writers and would spend time with the brightest literary lights of the late 19th century in the United States and in Europe. Wherever the pair went, they were treated as an otherwise regular couple. Sarah and Anne were known to wear nuptial rings, and Sarah’s surviving love poems to Anne bear witness to their shared tenderness. On the occasion of their “anniversary”, Sarah would write to Anne that:
We have not been sorry darling, We loved each other so,
We will not take back promises, We made a year ago
And so again, my darling, I give myself to you
With graver thought than a year ago, With love that is deep and true[12]
Just Friends?
The at least tacit public sanctioning of these and other Boston Marriages suggests that these unions were, in their own day, thought of as “just friends” arrangements. But in light of what is known today about the broad spectrum of queer society and relationships, it seems probable that “gal pals” is insufficient to elucidate the depth and intensity of these partnerships. As ever, historians are divided on this issue, or even if these relationships should be categorized as “queer” at all.
Some sources explicitly describe these relationships as an avenue for romantic and sexual, even erotic, exploration.[13] Boston Marriages, in this sense, could have provided a means by which lesbians could live authentic lives effectively flying under the radar of a deeply homophobic social context. Other sources emphasize the typically “romantic” gestures that were well-known to occur publicly among women in Boston Marriages: referring to one another by spousal names, physical affection including kisses, sharing close living quarters and beds.[14] It is not a stretch of the imagination to consider how intense private displays of affection among these couples might have been in light of their public behavior. This perspective is bolstered by the decline of Boston Marriages around the 1920s, when heightened public backlash against perceived queer behavior became widespread throughout the United States and Western Europe. If Boston Marriages were never sexual or romantic, why would they have disappeared coincidentally during a period of repression?
But a separate perspective also bears consideration – that of queerplatonic love. Stefani Goerlich, LMSW, is among those who argue that Boston Marriages closely resemble what we might call today a “QPR” or queerplatonic relationship.[15] She describes these relationships as “includ[ing] more, or deeper, commitment than simple friendship but which don’t feel romantic or sexual to those involved.”[16] Historians Esther Rothblum and Kathleen Brehony make similar assertions in their seminal book “Boston marriages: romantic but asexual relationships among contemporary lesbians.”[17] Their scholarship argues that lesbian identity need not be defined, or even connected to, sexual activity – and that such asexual relationships merit the recognition afforded to allosexual relationships. Though this definition does not precisely fit the modern version of “queerplatonic” with its emphasis on romantic attraction, it concurs on the notion that a lesbian relationship need not be sexual in order to be queer.
The “truth” of what Boston Marriages “really were” thus most likely falls somewhere in the middle. Perhaps these marriages could be described as “all of the above.” Or rather, each “marriage” was unique and special to each of the couples that engaged in it. It is probable that some of these relationships were simply formalized friendships, others were explicitly sexual, or romantic, or some combination, and still others were early versions of queerplatonic relationships. What does seem clear is that Boston Marriages provide a model of what queer connections could, and did, look like in an otherwise hostile Victorian society.
The model has not disappeared, either. Some women today claim to enjoy modern versions of Boston Marriages in what could also been seen as QPRs. Over a century later, in a strained economic context which has especially affected millennial and Gen Z women, could the Boston Marriage be primed for a comeback? After all, history often repeats itself.
[1] Wynne Flint, “Boston Marriages: Two Healthy Unmarried Women Cohabiting Legally,” History Daily, https://historydaily.org/boston-marriages-two-healthy-unmarried-women-cohabiting-legally/6.
[2] Erin Blakemore, “Women Got ‘Married’ Long Before Gay Marriage”, History.com, updated June 20, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/women-got-married-long-before-gay-marriage.
[3] Jeffrey Langstraat, “New Boston marriages : news representations, respectability, and the politics of same-sex marriage,” Boston College, May 2009, pg. 1, http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1351.
[4] Lauren Miller, “Friendships, Lesbianism and Identity in Victorian Britain,” The York Historian, December 7, 2017, https://theyorkhistorian.com/2017/07/06/friendships-lesbianism-and-identity-in-victorian-britain/.
[5] Blakemore, ibid.
[6] Flint, ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] The Sarah Orne Jewett House, https://jewett.house/timeline/katharine-loring-and-alice-james/.
[9] National Park Service, “Katharine Lee Bates,” updated April 8, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/people/katharine-lee-bates.htm.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Sarah Orne Jewett,” American Literature, https://americanliterature.com/author/sarah-orne-jewett.
[12] Sarah Orne Jewett, “Do You Remember, Darling”, as reprinted in Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Eagle Russett, Laurie Crumpacker (editors), “Second to None: From 1865 to the present (Volume 2 of Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women), University of Nebraska Press, pg. 47, https://books.google.com/books?id=TuHezno_YFYC&lpg=PA47&ots=grj1FFWBcP&dq=%2522Do%2520you%2520remember%252C%2520darling%2522%2520sarah%2520orne%2520jewett&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q=%2522Do%2520you%2520remember%2C%2520darling%2522%2520sarah%2520orne%2520jewett&f=false.
[13] Langstraat, ibid.
[14] Blakemore, ibid.
[15] Goerlich, Stefani: “Queerplatonic Relationships: A New Term for an Old Custom”, Psychology Today, September 6, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bound-together/202109/queerplatonic-relationships-new-term-old-custom
[16] Ibid.
[17] Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Boston-Marriages-Romantic-Relationships-Contemproary/dp/0870238760