By the second or third year of school, the more intuitive, rebellious girl had come to grasp the underpinnings of the institution. Perhaps she’d learned that nuptial came from nupta, the Latin word for veil, or covering. In French the word was couverte, which gave rise to the full-surrender marital state known as couverture. As adapted in the United States from British common law, married women had no legal rights and were in essence the property of men, who owned and got to keep it all, including any children, in the case of divorce. As that translated on a day-to-day basis: He ventured forth into the world; she stayed inside. As it was said of these appointed spheres: “He for the world and commerce; she for the domestic, the nursery.” Or, as Milton had earlier expressed it: “He for God only; she for God in him.”
By graduation, such a girl would have understood the mechanics of Victorian marriage, and what historian Barbara Welter dubbed “the Cult of True Womanhood.” True womanhood was the brainchild of the “domestic feminists” (oxymoron notwithstanding), a group of reform-minded women who sought a conservative way to mediate their problem. Their problem, roughly summarized: What exactly should intelligent married women do, given that they didn’t belong in the world but had opinions and ideas too big for the house?
The best-known domestic feminist was Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe (she watched the kids while Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher now best remembered for his role in a sex scandal. As she and others viewed it, the Wife, exercising subtle manipulations—an exquisitely hypnotic feminine style—might exert some quiet influence over her husband, encouraging him to take certain desired actions out there in the world. At the same time, she’d project a radiant moral force over her children. Think of her as a human aerosol can, her sweet lingering residue infusing the house with calm, a sense of order for her brood, and, when needed, an undetectable means for mesmerizing her husband to get her way.
Not all marriages followed the stage directions—one partner set to play the whispering, encouraging angel and one to play the boss. But there was an inherent deceit in many male-female transactions. Consider that most men and women, husbands and wives, did not always know each other at the start of marriage. They knew only what to expect. No matter how pleasant on the surface, marriage could be what one young college girl called “a trial of inequality.” And not always in the ways expected. Activist Mary Dodge, who preferred instead of “singly blessed” the term “nobly discontent,” had put it this way: “True, he may be as good as she, but he might not be good enough for her.”
The best relationship a woman had was often with her girlfriends.
Sketches from the mid-and late nineteenth century show two women huddled together at the center of a dark velvet davenport, holding hands. During the Civil War era, they were dressed in crinolines so wide that the women look like matching parachutes—ready to jump, together. Later, in photographs, they’re shown strolling, bustles out and arms linked. A magazine illustration common throughout the Victorian age shows one writing a letter to the other, who is pictured inside a daydream cartoon balloon, the edges frilly, like a valentine, the beloved’s imagined face angelic.
Special friends usually met at boarding school, and typically their parents encouraged the duet. In the ideal parental scenario, two young girls would be “smashed”—think of best friends going steady—and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience. Once they’d mastered these skills they would be able, theoretically at least, to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.
At the time there were far fewer taboos on touching between same-sex friends and it was common for affectionate girls to kiss each other, to sleep in the same bed, and to engage in what we’d consider foreplay—and possibly more. The term “lesbian”—the very idea—did not in its current sense yet exist. Until it was redefined, circa 1919, to discredit “new spinsters,” that is, independent, professional singles, the word conjured a series of images from antiquity, usually transvestites, for example, a medieval Frenchwoman clad in armor and perched on a horse. Many girls’ school professors, prime examples of the singly blessed, lived with special friends—smashes that had turned into lifelong partnerships. To their students, what could have seemed more natural than women in pairs?
The intense devotion of many a smash is revealed in girls’ most secretive correspondence. One girl wrote of “the thrill of our pet dovey times” and a “burning sensation, both when I am with you—as you will know—and when I am alone and imagining back.” Studies made in 1900 of twenty thousand “Boston marriages”—two women who lived as sisters or lovers—and of numerous smashes revealed episodes of mutual masturbation. Other couples give no hint of overt sexual activity—or what we’d consider overt sexual activity—but were, rather, said to be playful and affectionate.
Whatever the precise nature of the bond, smashed girls likely remained friends for life, whether or not one of them married. “My every nerve springs forward at attention when I hear the post arrive!!” wrote a married friend to another who was far off and unwed. In long letters illustrated with ink drawings—self-portraits, fancy matching gowns, two women out strolling—they reaffirmed their feelings for each other and helped each other negotiate the requirements of married life. One engaged New Englander revealed to her dearest friend in 1782 a shocking decision: she would never change her name. “I think it a good [name] and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage. I am sure to confront a tribunal.”
Threatened by these connections, some men called them immature, proof that women underneath were really children who could not put away girlish toys and dolls and sit properly alongside their mates. As far back as 1847, a visitor to the United States, one Domingo Sarmiento, concurred: “Americans have developed customs which have no parallel on this earth—the unmarried woman flies about with her friends as if it were a butterfly.”
The more unusual man found beauty in these friendships, sometimes collecting and reading aloud women’s letters to one another. For this odd connoisseur, female love letters were refined works of sentimental expression, the prose equivalent of a hand-carved miniature or cameo. Scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes that Goethe published the love letters sent between his fiancée, Bettina, and a countess she was deeply attached to; Margaret Fuller, respected New England intellectual, found a U.S. publisher for the volume. To underscore how important these bonds were in the young (and older) female life, consider the life span of one early study on the subject, The Friendships of Women, by William R. Alger. It was published in Boston in 1869 and by 1890 had reached its twelfth printing.
It was obvious still that to marry was to win at the era’s female lottery—if not necessarily hit the jackpot—but the point is that a few women actively, and without trace of pathos, had begun to question the contest. In articles entitled “A Loyal Woman’s No,” and “The Difficulties That Accrue to Our Sex from the Marriage Bond,” they argued for allowing some female lives to evolve on their own terms, possibly with their own chosen friends or family. As one midcentury woman, a self-styled biological researcher, wrote to her “dearest dear”: “I cannot wait these days to turn 30! Then I may put away all pretense of being marriageable and concentrate on my interests.”