... having been breathed out

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.

• 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!

The term ‘female husband’ first appeared in a late seventeenth-century humorous ballad about a hermaphrodite, raised as a woman, who impregnated a woman and then married her. The character of the female husband was popularized a century later in British novelist Henry Fielding’s true-crime pamphlet The Female Husband (1746), which related the picaresque adventures of female-bodied George/Mary Hamilton, who dressed as a man and married several women before his true identity was revealed. Fielding’s work launched a century of humorous writings about female-bodied cross-dressers who married women.

Female husbands were not merely figments of the imagination, dreamed up by satirists and pornographers. The term described a real, if incongruous, variety of gender and sexual expression familiar in North America as well as Great Britain. American newspapers in the late 1700s and early 1800s carried so many stories of female husbands that they became repetitious. In 1829 a Maine newspaper published a humorous anecdote in which a woman who sought a summons against her husband was asked by the judge, 'What, another female husband?’ Actually, she reassured the judge, her husband was just a bigamist. In general, the stories about female husbands, though sensational, did not treat their subjects as villains. The female husband’s escapades were disreputable but impressive. She personified admirable masculine qualities including mastery, courage, and initiative.

Charity [Bryant] shared these personality characteristics with the archetypal female husband, which made her appear appropriate to head the household. William Cullen Bryant wrote that his aunt was 'more enterprising and spirited in her temper’ than her companion, and thus naturally 'represent[ed] the male head of the family.’ [Neighbor] Hiram Hurlburt remembered how the first time that he entered the women’s shop, as a boy, Charity had pointed a finger at him and commanded, 'you will wait.’ She then put Hiram in his place by naming his family lineage, before permitting him to approach the cutting table. Charity’s demonstration of mastery led Hiram to conclude that it was 'perfectly proper’ for her to be 'the man.’ Since her youth, Charity had expressed a superior temperament that led her family to teasingly address her as 'your ladyship.’ After the move to Vermont, her domineering personality enabled her to transition from a lady to a female husband.

Although women’s sexual behavior was carefully scrutinized in the honor culture [of late 18th- and early 19th-century New England], being the subject of sexual gossip did not necessarily leave a permanent disability. Women could regain their social standing with proper application. The records of the church Charity [Bryant] attended as a young woman are filled with evidence of premarital pregnancies. When parents who had conceived a child before marriage wanted their child to be baptized they first had to make a formal apology for fornication. This might appear to be evidence of a harsh social stigma, but it is really the opposite. The pattern of confession-baptism was so routine the the church records used the same stylized language to record the process each time. It is just what people did. They courted, had sex, got pregnant, got married, had children, confessed, and had their children baptized, in that order. […]

There was more trouble when girl became pregnant and the father did not marry her. But, again, there were routines for dealing with this common situation. The county courts routinely handled ‘prosecutions’ for fornication that were really glorified legal proceedings to secure child support. An unmarried mother would appear before the court, confess herself guilty of fornication, name the father, and the court would assign financial obligations to him. Sometimes the mothers were fined small amounts, but the proceedings were less about punishment than arranging matters to prevent an infant from becoming financially dependent on the town.

Exchanging handwritten poems was a common practice among respectable young women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The tradition began in part as an adaptation to the social stigma against published women authors. Women exchanged handwritten poems and copied friends’ compositions into their own commonplace books, so they could circulate their writings without offending propriety by having their writings appear in print. Friends valued these handwritten gifts for material and emotional reasons. […] Most of all, poems had value as gifts because they signaled emotional intimacy and trust between the giver and the getter. Poems symbolized a connection that ran deeper than superficial pleasantries.

Even copying out the work of a famous author for a friend was a sign of emotional intimacy. Choosing just the right lines required familiarity, a knowledge of poetry, and good taste. Writing personalized verses required something more—creativity, of course, but also the willingness to pin your heart on your sleeve. Fashionable ladies of the time might have breezily composed poems for each other without much effort. But the daughters of ordinary families in Massachusetts assigned a great deal of importance to the task. They wrote poems to amuse each other, but also to convey true sentiments and to establish lasting intimacies. To make the task easier, most aspiring poets chose to write in an established genre like the acrostic, where the first letter of each line spelled out a name. More confident poets wrote rebuses, or poems that contained secret messages to be decoded.