Rachel Hope ClevesBesprekingen

Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were two women who shared a home for 44-years in Weybridge, Vermont in the first half of the 19th century. They were generally recognized by their community as being in a marriage even if the nature of the relationship was treated more as an open secret. Through a remarkable amount of scholarship, Rachel Hope Cleves exhaustively examined the surviving records of Charity and Sylvia, their families and communities, and other women who were involved in lesbian relationships in the time periods to reframe our understanding of how a same sex marriage could thrive in a time period we'd expect that such a thing would be unthinkable. Interestingly, Charity and Sylvia were able to maintain their good standing in the Weybridge community by being active members in the church. They also became beloved aunts to both their blood relations and many younger members of their community including the young women who apprenticed in their tailor ship. This in an excellent microhistory of the LGBTQ experience in early America.

Reading history books, especially ones like this about the everyday lives of a few people, really makes me want a time machine. The only glimpse we get into their lives is through their writings that survived, and Charity asked a lot of her friends and family to destroy her letters, so there's not always a lot to go on. I want to go back in time and observe them from behind a tree or something. Pretend to be a turn-of-the-19th-century lady and become friends with them. But time travel is impossible I guess, so we just have letters and ledgers and wonderful people like Rachel Hope Cleves to read and interpret them.

Charity and Sylvia had such stressful lives that were yet still full of love and family! They were tailors who worked incredibly long hours to weather all of the financial instability of their time, they couldn't find time to sleep much which made them ill all the time and I can't imagine cutting and sewing fabric for sometimes up to 20 hours a day was great for repetitive stress injuries. Plus all the blood loss, which was prescribed by the doctors of the time FOR EVERYTHING. They were into each other in a way that wasn't socially sanctioned at the time, so they worried about how people would talk about them and about their families not accepting their unorthodox living situation. They agonized for their entire lives about how their lifestyle was an affront to God...they were in constant spiritual pain thinking that their attraction to each other was a major sin and that living as they did made them hypocrites. But, their family (mostly) accepted them, the church loved them, their local community regarded them as beloved aunts to look up to as spiritual mentors, and their contributions meant that everyone was also able to accept them as basically a married couple without having to actually talk about it. They appear to have done good, in comparison to other young ladies who were ostracized for never marrying and deciding instead to work for themselves, and to many of their male family and friends who underwent bankruptcy more than once. Despite their social and spiritual worries, they remained together for 44 years, so it must have been worth it.

In the first post-Revolutionary generation, Charity and Sylvia met each other—one after a few earlier love affairs, one apparently falling in love for the first time—and pretty immediately moved in together (cue jokes); they never left each other again. Their letters and even some public writing about them reveal that they spoke of each other using the same words opposite-sex spouses did; their families knew that they were to each other what spouses were supposed to be, although no one ever talked about sex. Cleves argues that they were tolerated and even respected because they made themselves helpful community members. Although there was gossip when they were young, when they were together and economically successful as trained seamstresses, the gossip subsided and they were pillars of the community.

This was interesting! There were a lot of cute moments in it, it just wasn't the most mind-blowing thing I've read about this topic. Cleves does a really good job of being accessible and clear with her evidence, and she uses her sources really well--she's uncovered a rich archive and she uses it well. Her engagement with the question of "lesbian" and her use of the term throughout is extremely lacking--I imagine she felt like she didn't need to engage in that debate, but it was definitely an interesting choice to leave it out (especially given her engagement with Faderman at the end.) I think this could be really useful in some history of sexuality or history of marriage classes for undergrads depending on what you pair it with; it's definitely accessible enough for them!

We read this for my Lesbian book group, not the best choice, because most of the group found it very dry. It is academic. It apparently won a prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic---they are the kind of historians who study shopping lists, I think. Actually, I did like the book. I imagined I was back in college and reading this for a Women's History class, and kept down the expectations for exciting narrative non-fiction.

The story is interesting. Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake met in 1807, and soon afterwards moved in together into their own small house. They were able to make a living as seamstresses, and built a life together until Charity's death in 1851. When Sylvia died in 1868, she was buried in the same grave, and the two share a tombstone. Apparently there relationship was accepted and they were well regarded by family and community. Cleves talks about an "open closet," where the community was able to accept the relationship by acknowledging it as like a marriage, but never speaking about the sexual implications.

there was some interesting information here and i appreciate that the ostensible reason for cleves doing the research is to make the point that same sex marriage has been more accepted through history than we remember.

but this wasn't done in the most accessible or the most interesting way. i understand also that there is a lot missing in terms of the "story" to these women, so cleves couldn't have written a detailed "reading" of their lives in the way that we're used to reading fiction. but certainly she could have made this read less like text, because there is a lot that is actually of interest here, it's just kind of hard to get through. it is a slim book that i spent many many hours with, and it still took me 2 full weeks to read.

i personally would also have appreciated more informative footnotes, not just the details of which letters (from whom to whom and the date) the knowledge came from, but an explanation about why things mattered or what they meant in the big picture. also, while the book is organized in chronological/historical order, it doesn't actually keep to that way entirely, and i think it would be easier to follow if it did. plus (but this isn't cleves' fault at all) the number of people with the same name made this tough for me.

this has potential and i'm not disinterested in these women's lives necessarily, but this was not an easy book to read or get through. (other paired women that lived in similar time periods are mentioned throughout. i think i would have preferred a book where charity and sylvia were merely a chapter. cleves stretched the information she had about their lives perhaps a bit too far, and maybe it would have made for easier reading if it was condensed rather than stretched, and matched with a handful of these other women, so we could really see that their lives and marriages - as they were - weren't so unusual at all.)

"The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized." so as long as the sexual part of being gay wasn't spoken of, it was allowed in many places in history. she backs this up throughout the book, rather than specifically when she says it. i thought this was kind of fascinating to think about and reflect upon.

charity certainly came across, early on, as quite the experienced lover and wooer. i felt really badly for lydia, who really seemed to be jilted with no explanation at all. their ability to remain friends, and close friends at that, reminded me to some extent of lesbian community today.

this has no bearing on the topic of the book, but holy crap: "Many doctors recommended that patients take mercury past salivation, after which point patients' teeth and sometimes their tongues, palates, and even jawbones could fall from their mouths."

"The self-congratulatory certitude that modern times represented an apogee of tolerance compared to the benighted wasteland of the past has made it hard to fit women like Charity and Sylvia into the historical memory. How could two women have forged a marriage in a traditional New England village, governed by the old faith, and been accepted by their family and friends despite every evidence that they were lovers? Our shock at this tale indicates a failure of imagination. The history of sexual nonconformity is not only a saga of oppression and suffering; it is also a tale of creative ingenuity and accommodation."

Text book.