breathedout | "Mannish" women in post-Revolutionary New England (Reply)

Although social sanction [around romantic friendships between unmarried women] made it easy for her to enter into intense friendships with the women she met while teaching, something about Charity troubled onlookers as those intimacies developed. Within months of her arrival in each town where she taught, Charity became the subject of vicious gossip.

The rumors about Charity likely concerned her sexual propriety. [… They] appear to have been tied to Charity’s masculine demeanor and her relationships with other women Far from a coquette, Charity dressed with a notable lack of adornment and avoided superficial chatter. Her appearance struck some who knew her as mannish. She did not wear her hair short or have her garments tailored like a man’s, as the independently wealthy Anne Lister did. Charity strove to preserve the feminine respectability that secured her teaching positions, but she still managed to convey a certain masculinity. [Her friend] Lydia commented more than once on Charity’s resemblance to her brother Peter both in “countenance” and “motions.”

Eighteenth-century culture regarded masculine women with deep suspicion. Social critics often attacked outspoken women as mannish in order to silence them. English satirists depicted American “daughters of liberty” during the Revolutionary era as mannish-looking. […] Underlying this hostility was the strong association between female masculinity and lesbianism, although eighteenth-century writers would not have used this term. Instead they might refer to sex between women as “tribadism,” another classically derived term, directed against mannish women, who supposedly used their oversized clitorises to rub against, or even penetrate other women. A woman who cultivated her masculine charms could be seen as hoping to attract a female lover. […]

Charity’s emerging identity as a single woman tipped the scales against her. Like mannish women, spinsters were objects of derision in eighteenth-century America, especially in family-oriented New England. As Charity advanced through her early twenties without entering into courtships with men, her single status became more notable. Again, she stood at the vanguard of a tremendous shift in American culture. During the colonial period, no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life, but after the Revolution an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy. As rates of female singlehood surpassed 10 percent in the antebellum era, new suspicions about spinsters emerged, including a recognition of their affinity to lesbians.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-sex Marriage in Early America

Excuse the long quote, but I find a LOT of this to be of interest and/or good reminders about late 18th and early 19th conceptions of female/female romanticism and eroticism, to wit:

Lady/lady romantic love and “carnal encounters” were, contrary to a lot of received modern notions, an acknowledged possibility at this time—one which ministers and other authority figures warned against, and which became a source of anxiety and vicious gossip when it was suspected (and which was also used as a weapon against non-conforming women of all descriptions).

While the obsession with romantic friendships within the culture of sensibility did provide a context for the expression of same-sex attraction, romantic friendships were only viewed as socially acceptable as long as they were seen as instrumental to, rather than interfering with, marriage prospects (see the increasing suspicion directed at Charity the older she got while remaining unmarried and unreceptive to courting).

Perceived “mannishness,” even in the absence of obvious outward signifiers, could cast a suspicious light on behavior that might, on its own, be viewed as socially acceptable.

Those statistics on the shift in numbers of women choosing to remain unmarried after the American Revolution are fascinating!

(Note from 2018: FYI for my queer history peeps, there's a TON more in the Charity & Sylvia tag on my journal, including an overall rec of the book if you're interested.)