LIVE! From the Second Floor

In the 1890s, when over 90% of American women married, 59% of Radcliffe graduates remained legally single, as did 57% of Bryn Mawr graduates and 51% of Wellesley graduates. They didn’t marry men, but many of them lived in what was called a “Boston marriage,” a romantic same-sex domestic relationship. College had not only prepared these women to be economically independent of men; it had also given them permission to fall in love with each other. They’d been pioneers together, sharing the excitement of learning and preparing for a profession, which was still new to women. In the absence of male distractions, they’d dared to see one another as heroes and lovers. Love between women students, or women students and their women professors, was so common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s colleges that a whole vocabulary was developed to describe it: A woman had a “mash,” “pash,” “crush,” or “rave” on another woman; the two were said to be “spooning,” “smashing,” “flaming,” “twosing,” etc.

The male author of a popular 1906 book on the American girl trivialized these love relationships by calling them “a mere forerunner” to heterosexual love, “just as a ragdoll is to the infant.” These same-sex passions, he said, would end at the altar, “when one is the other’s bridesmaid.” But, in fact, many of them ended only with the death of one of the women—fifty or sixty years later. Martha May Eliot and Ethel Dunham are a case in point: They met as undergraduates at Bryn Mawr in 1910, attended medical school together, became pioneering doctors—and lived together until Ethel died in 1969.

Rituals of romance were indulged in happily between women’s college students. For instance, while dances didn’t include men, they did include dates: Often one of the women would wear a tuxedo, and the other would wear a gown; the tuxedo-ed one would call for her date with flowers or candy in hand. Women’s college magazines regularly recorded same-sex romances with poems in which a woman enumerates the beauties of the woman she loves and hopes for their union. Typically, a student at Sophie Newcomb, a New Orleans women’s college, wrote in the Newcomb Arcade in 1912:

The song that is on My Lady’s lips,

That she sings in her voice of gold,

Doth pass to my soul with its message of hope,

With its meaning manifold. [italics mine.]

These mashes and pashes were also common between women students and their women professors, and they often led to long-term relationships. For example, Mary Woolley had been Jeannette Marks’ professor at Wellesley. A couple of years later, Mary became the president of Mount Holyoke, and not long after that Jeannette became a professor on her faculty: They lived together in the president’s house on campus for almost forty years. Sophia Packard had been the teacher of Harriet Giles in the 1850s, together they founded Spelman College for African-American woman in 1881; and they too lived together till death did them part.

As M. Carey Thomas suggested in a letter to her mother in 1880, higher education for women, which opened professions to them as well, meant that love between women no longer had to be “a mere forerunner” to heterosexual marriage. Carey had gone off to the University of Zurich with Mamie Gwinn, her woman lover, so that both might study for Ph.D.’s (which were not yet permitted to women in American universities). In Carey’s letter to her mother, she virtually out-ed herself:

If it were only possible for women to select women as well as men for a “life’s love”…all reason for an intellectual woman’s marriage wd be gone. It is possible, but if families would only regard it in that light! Apriori, women understand women better, are more sympathetic, more unselfish, etc. I believe that will be—indeed is already becoming—one of the effects of advanced education for women.

Three years later, Carey became the first Dean of the College at Bryn Mawr, and Mamie became a Bryn Mawr professor. Their relationship lasted until 1894, when Mamie left both Carey and Bryn Mawr; but lesbianism was clearly no “rag doll” in the life of M. Carey Thomas. That same year she became lovers with the heiress Mary Garrett, who informed the trustees of Bryn Mawr, “Whenever Miss M. Carey Thomas should become President of your College, I will pay into her hands the sum of ten thousand dollars yearly [a vast amount of money in 1894], so long as I live and she remains President.” M. Carey Thomas became Bryn Mawr’s second president, using Mary’s generous gift to establish pioneering programs in women’s higher education. The two women lived together on the Bryn Mawr campus, in the President’s house, until Mary’s death twenty-one years later.

Adapted by the author from her book To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History