Free Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

Introduction
    In 1843 the American author William Cullen Bryant wrote an essay for the Evening Post in which he glowingly described a trip to Vermont, where, among nature’s beauties, he had the opportunity to observe a beautiful “female friendship” between two revered “maiden ladies.” Bryant was not alone in his boundless admiration for the pair and the peaceful and loving relationship they established together, as he said when he gave their history:
In their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for 40 years, during which they have shared each others’ occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other tenderly in sickness…. They slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each others relations, and … I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled with roses, … and I would speak of the friendly attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them. 1
    If such a description of love between two women had been published in an American newpaper a century later, surely the editor’s desk would have been piled high with correspondence about immorality in Vermont (slept on the same pillow!) and the two women in question would have felt constrained to sue Bryant for defamation of character in order to clear their good names. In 1843, however, the two ladies were flattered and the newspaper’s readers were charmed.
    What is apparent through this example and hundreds of others that have now been well documented by social historians is that women’s intimate relationships were universally encouraged in centuries outside of our own. There were, of course, some limitations placed on those relationships as far as society was concerned. For instance, if an eligible male came along, the women were not to feel that they could send him on his way in favor of their romantic friendship; they were not to hope that they could find gainful employment to support such a same-sex love relationship permanently or that they could usurp any other male privileges in support of that relationship; and they were not to intimate in any way that an erotic element might possibly exist in their love for each other. Outside of those strictures, female same-sex love—or “romantic friendship,” as it was long called—was a respected social institution in America.
    What went on in secret between two women who were passionately attached to each other, as William Cullen Bryant’s friends were, is naturally more difficult to reconstruct than their contemporaries’ attitude toward what they thought they were seeing. There were few women before our era who would have committed confessions regarding erotic exchanges to writing. Trial records indicate that females of the lower classes who were vulnerable to harassment by the criminal courts sometimes had sexual relations with each other, but there is no comparable record in America for “respectable” women. One might speculate that since they generally lived in a culture that sought to deny the possiblitity of women’s autonomous sexuality, many of them cultivated their own asexuality, and while they might have kissed and hugged on the same pillow, their intimate relations never crossed the boundary to the genitally sexual. But surely for some of them kissing and hugging led eventually to other things and their ways of loving each other were no different from what the twentieth century would describe with certainty as “lesbian.”
    However, such a description of love between two women would have been unlikely in earlier times because the concept barely existed. While some outrageous, lawless women might have stooped to unspeakable activity with other females, there was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the