[October 11th
marks the 30th annual National Coming
Out Day, an important occasion in the unfolding story of gay rights in
America. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of figures and stories from
the history of gay rights, leading up to a special weekend post on gay
identities in American popular culture!]
On three
prominent historical examples of a complex, ambiguous,
homosocial interpersonal relationship.
1)
Alice James and
Katherine Loring: The term “Boston marriage” is thought to have originated
in reference to Henry
James’ The Bostonians (1886),
which depicts such a long-term co-habitating relationship between two women
(although James never uses the phrase “Boston marriage” to describe that
situation). James based that depiction in large part on the relationship between
his youngest sister Alice and her long-term companion Katherine Peabody
Loring, a prominent educator and progressive reformer. In a famous 1879 letter
describing Loring to her friend Sara Darwin, Alice James reflected how such
relationships could still rely upon, yet also complicate and blur, lines of
gender and sexuality: “I wish you could know Katharine Loring [...] she is a
most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which
distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine
virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to
driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North America.”
2)
Sarah Orne
Jewett and Annie Adams Fields: Neither Alice James nor Katherine Loring
ever married, which reflects one way in which such a Boston marriage could
develop. The long-term relationship between the wonderful regionalist
author Sarah Orne Jewett and the poet and social reformer Annie
Adams Fields began in a very different way: Jewett became very close to
Fields and her husband, Atlantic Monthly editor James Thomas Fields; when
James passed away unexpectedly at the age of 63 in 1881, Jewett (then 32) and
Annie Fields (then 47) moved in together and co-habited for the remaining few
decades of Jewett’s life (she was injured in a carriage accident in 1902 and
died of a stroke in 1909), traveling extensively and making their home into a
center of late 19th century literary and cultural life. Without
pretending to be able to remark on the intimate or romantic feelings of any of
the subjects of today’s post (or pretty much any of my other
non-autobiographical posts!), I would say that Jewett and Fields’ relationship
could be described at least in part as a professional partnership, in addition to
the personal motivations and meanings it undoubtedly also featured.
3)
Katharine Lee Bates and
Katharine Ellis Coman: Boston marriages became so common in the late 19th
century among the faculty of Wellesley College that they were also referred to
as Wellesley
marriages; historian Lillian
Faderman, the preeminent scholar of women’s homosocial relationships (and
lesbian histories more broadly), has documented that among 53 women faculty at
Wellesley toward the end of the century, only one was married to a man. One the
more famous such Wellesley marriages was the one between Katharine
Lee Bates (a poetry professor who composed the words to “America the
Beautiful,” first as the 1895 poem “Pikes Peak”
which was then set to Samuel
A. Ward’s music as “America” in 1910) and Katharine
Ellis Coman (an economics professor whose 1905 The
Industrial History of the United States is considered the first such
book-length account). I’m not sure there’s ever been a more influential
AmericanStudies power couple than Bates and Coman, one more reason to better
remember these complex and crucial relationships.
Next story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?
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