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After I finish up Charity and Sylvia, the numbering on the LHMP entries may get jumbled for a while. I realized that I'd skipped a run of numbers and need to go back and fill them in. (I also realized when doing some database housekeeping that I'd failed to assign a number to a work that I'd blogged in a non-standard fashion.) And the book that I've already assigned the next (catch-up) number to (Gay American History) may well take longer to process than the remainder of the current book, so if I want to carry through with blogging every day for Pride Month, I need to do 3 more quick items to stay on track.

Why is Gay American History taking so long to review when it's basically an anthology of excerpts from historic documents? Normally those just involve typing up a list of the relevant contents. Ah, but I've started on another side project: a database of key vocabulary in primary sources. So working on a publication that's rich in primary source material means spending a lot of time creating vocabulary records. At some point I also want to go back and pull vocabulary from the hundreds of publications I processed before I dreamed up this side project, but that's a task for future-me. The idea is to know how people talked (or at least wrote) about erotic activity between women, how they described women engaging in such activity, and to a lesser extent, how they described relevant aspects of gender transgression. (The original idea was just to focus on sexual vocabulary, but there's been a little scope-creep.)

I've written on parts of this topic before, as in the podcast episode "When Did We Become Lesbians?" and the discussion of historic usage of "lesbian" versus "Sapphic". But there's a lot more nuance than the usage of one or two specific words. Some of the language is overtly hostile, some is vaguely euphemistic, some is technical jargon, some is gutter slang. But all together it can provide a picture of how your historic characters might have described themselves and their activities, or how they might have heard others talking about them. And let me assure you, there was always some way to talk about women who loved women, even in contexts where that was not understood as a fixed category.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/06/21 - listen here)

Usually when I put together a podcast essay, I have a number of sources to draw on and am able to create my own synthesized understanding of the topic. In the case of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a long-term romantic couple living in Vermont in the early 19th century, I am entirely reliant on a single publication: Rachel Hope Cleves’ Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. As a result, I feel like today’s podcast is more in the line of a book report than an original essay, and in consequence it’s somewhat shorter than usual. And yet—given that I’m in the middle of blogging this book for the Project, and because the story is so fascinating—I can’t resist putting together this episode about them.

We often think of American romantic friendships and “Boston marriages” as belonging entirely to the later 19th century. But such relationships can be found earlier, as we see here. We also often find opinions divided between positions such as Lillian Faderman’s that 19th century romantic friendships were never sexual—that women of that era were so steeped in the stereotypes about women’s sexual passivity that they couldn’t even imagine engaging in sex together—and the equally suspect wishful thinking that treats every romantic friendship as solidly lesbian in sexual terms. But Cleves teases out a more nuanced understanding—that women in romantic friendships fully understood there were boundaries to what would be publicly acceptable, and showing us the process of self-censorship that women engaged in, both in terms of subtly coding the nature of their desires and activities in the records they left, and the physical censorship of destroying records they felt would cause problems for their reputation or the reputation of their families. It was this understanding and careful management that allowed Charity and Sylvia to share their lives in what was acknowledged publicly to be a marriage-like bond, celebrated by their families and community, without provoking a degree of backlash or condemnation that would have destroyed their place in those networks.

Both women were born in Massachusetts either during or in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolutionary War. Charity was the elder, while Sylvia was born 7 years later. They had a number of things in common. Both came from large families that lived in rural towns, both aspired to a higher level of education than was common for young women, both were poets and copious letter writers, and both came into young adulthood with an understanding that they were completely uninterested in a conventional marriage.

Their differences are also striking. Charity’s family was comfortably well off, and when her siblings left home it was for person freedoms, not out of necessity. Charity’s mother died shortly after her birth and she sought in vain all her life for parental support and approval. In contrast, Sylvia’s family, though close and loving, had lost their land and were desperately poor. Even at her birth the family had scattered either to find support with relatives or seek employment. In a pattern that was fairly normal for unmarried young women in New England at the time, both found themselves moving between the households of various relatives, not always by choice.

Charity found both a certain degree of economic independence and a circle of like-minded young women by becoming a teacher. As schoolteachers were often female (because they could be paid less) and were required to be unmarried, and because casual socializing between men and women was heavily scrutinized, a teacher’s life was ideal for someone like Charity who found herself romantically attracted to other women. In her early 20s, Charity went through a series of emotionally charged intimate friendships with other women, celebrated in the poems she wrote, but also the most likely cause of the malicious gossip she alludes to in many letters.

The specific nature of the gossip is never recorded, but it caused her to return to her parents’ home for a time, and complicated relations with two of the siblings that she boarded with at various times. Cleves points out that the social problems generated by Charity’s intimate friendships need not indicate that her community was concerned specifically about sexual relationships. It could be enough that the women’s close bonds were felt to make them less likely to marry. Marriage was not simply a social expectation, but a critical economic status. In the absence of employment that paid well enough to support an independent household—and remember what we said about women being paid less than men for the same work—a single woman would always require financial assistance or material support from others. The alternative to living with a family member was usually becoming a domestic servant in some other household. So a woman like Charity who disdains marriage and appears to encourage other women to feel the same, can be seen as a disruption to the economic stability of entire families.

Sylvia didn’t have the same opportunities to support herself that Charity did. Family necessity resulted in her moving to an even more rural area of Vermont, which not only eliminated her chance for more advanced schooling, but also greatly limited the options for female employment. Despite this, she too was still unmarried when she hit her 20s, and her family was beginning to accept that the state was permanent and groom her to be a lifelong companion for her aging mother.

And then Charity moved to Vermont. In a blazing stroke of serendipity, at a time when Charity wanted to get out of an increasingly fraught situation where she was living with the family of one of her girlfriends and they were getting very suspicious, she received an invitation to visit friends in Vermont for several months. The husband was a distant relative of Charity’s mother, and she had gotten to know the wife during one of her teaching stints and Charity had even been named godmother to two of their children. And the wife was Sylvia’s sister.

Charity and Sylvia hit it off almost immediately. While there, Charity began a tailoring business—a skill she’d picked up some years earlier—and Sylvia pitched in as assistant. Half a year later, Sylvia moved on to go live with her mother, as previously planned, but within a month, Charity enticed her back with the promise of a place of their own to live in, and the two were never again separated.

The tailoring business was what made the success of their relationship possible. By the end of the year, they were earning enough to lease property and build a combined home and shop. Having a separate and independent household that was not reliant on the generosity of a relative, and that afforded personal privacy meant that the stresses and pressures that had undermined Charity’s previous relationships were absent.

Over the decades, the business expanded, both in terms of volume and in building on to their home. They were able to hire assistants and apprentices. Charity and Sylvia became pillars of the community, founding a women’s charitable organization, supporting their local church, and both called “aunt” by their numerous nieces and nephews—as well as by many other children in the town. Their relatives and neighbors acknowledged their relationship even likening it to “a marriage”.

Charity and Sylvia shared a home and their lives for 44 years. After Charity died at age 74, Sylvia wore widow’s black for the rest of her life. And after she died at age 83, their families buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.

I’ve omitted many of the details that Cleves includes in the book. She provides an extensive historical and social background as the context for their lives, as well as delving into their religious, economic, and medical backgrounds. But for now, let’s leave the story as the bare bones of their romantic life. As is so often the case when we have records of female romantic couples who achieved a “happy ever after” ending, we should not see them as unique or isolated, but rather as uniquely well documented. The historic and social conditions that enabled their successful relationship existed for many other women, and it’s not inappropriate to extrapolate that there were many other similarly happy couples who never made it into the pages of history.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• The lives of two women in early 19th century Vermont whose marriage-like relationship was accepted and even celebrated by their community
• Sources mentioned
  • Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
• This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
• Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate? No one generalization will hold for all times and places, but when examining the lives of Charity and Sylvia and the several other women that Charity had relationshps with, a common thread is an active disinterest in marriage, to the point where people who knew them had concluded that they'd end up "spinsters" entirely separate from any awareness of their romantic interest in women.

Now one might point out that, in a society with compulsory heterosexuality, a woman who is open to the idea of relationships with men is likely to go ahead and get married, even if she also has desires for women. And there are always women who resist heterosexual marriage for philosophical or health reasons. So a strict one-to-one connection between marriage resistance and sapphic desire isn't accurate. And I sometimes think the motif gets overused in fiction. But it isn't exactly wrong.

When I glanced at the calendar the other day and realized OMG I need a podcast topic for this Saturday, it was easy to decide that I'd write up a mini-bio of Charity and Sylvia this month. Usually, even when my essay research focuses around a specific publication or researcher, I have multiple sources to use, but this isn't the case for C&S. Pretty much there's just Cleves' book, so I'll introduce the topic with a lot more emphasis that I'm basically just doing a book report.

Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives. "Here is this thing that someone else felt; they could have felt this too." We know that this person was writing poetry about love between women in England at the same era, they might possibly have been familiar with it." Interspersed with quotations from their surviving correspondence, we also get descriptions of things they are asserted to have done, thought, and felt that are not cited to a specific source and that I interpret as being drawn from the author's imagination. I'm of two minds about this approach. One the one hand, it makes for a clearer storyline, in the same way that tv or movie presentations of people's lives fill in or omit details, or rearrange timelines, in order to present a more coherent story. But as someone who is looking for the verifiable facts of history in order to better be able to do similar extrapolations, I'd rather have a clear distinction made in my history books between fact and imagination.