Rachel Hope Cleves. Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 296 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8.
Reviewed by Emily Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University)
Published on H-AmRel (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Bobby L. Smiley (Vanderbilt University)
In a cemetery in Weybridge, Vermont, there is a headstone to the memory of Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant, who died in that town in 1868 and 1851, respectively. Their burial under a single headstone is a striking testament to their unity in life and their family’s recognition of that unity. Charity and Sylvia, as Rachel Hope Cleves explains, were married. In Charity and Sylvia, Cleves tells the story of these two women as an early history of same-sex marriage. In early nineteenth-century rural Vermont, these two women were able to build a life together for themselves, earning the recognition and respect of their community and their families.
The book is organized largely as a dual biography, with nineteen short chapters covering particular chronological and thematic moments in the women’s lives. Roughly the first half of the book covers the period before Charity and Sylvia met, and the second half focuses on their union and its meaning for the women and those around them. Throughout, Cleves works with a limited body of sources—limited because Charity destroyed many of her own papers—and closely reads them for clues into the women’s sexuality and their neighbors’ and families’ responses. With a skillful and creative reading of the silences and innuendos in this archive, she uncovers an important history of same-sex sexuality in early America. Far from a tragedy, this is ultimately the story of the acceptance that two women found in their rural community, though Cleves also argues that a lingering sense of sinfulness marked these women’s perceptions of themselves.
The earlier part of Charity’s story conforms more with what we might expect to see in an early nineteenth-century history of lesbianism. Cleves presents us with a woman who loved other women and found herself out of place and even scorned in the communities in which she lived. While she was able to find other women with whom she shared “romantic friendships,” some of which Cleves suggests were consummated, she was also plagued by gossip and rumor. Romantic friendships between women, Cleves points out, were not necessarily (or even often) seen as problematic. The sensibility that such relationships fostered was in fact appreciated at the time. But when Charity declared that she would never marry, and when her friendships with other women seemed to delay or interfere with those women’s paths toward marriage, Charity met with censure. She shuttled between the homes of different family members when it became too difficult to remain in one place. The letters do not explicitly state the content of the gossip about Charity, which Cleves explains as part of a general wariness to put unsubstantiated rumors in writing. But Cleves does excellent work here in reading what is said and unsaid in order to explain what it was that made people talk: Charity’s sexuality. To get at this, Cleves looks not only at surviving letters but also at a cache of poetry that Charity wrote for her female friends and lovers, uncovering the textual references that would have revealed hidden meanings for their intended readers. Cleves’s readings here are illuminating, thoughtful, and convincing. She paints a vivid picture of an unhappy but passionate woman who was seeking to find the place where she might fit in.
Sylvia’s early life was different from Charity’s in many ways. She had a happier life in rural Weybridge and never had to face the sort of gossip that plagued Charity. When the two women met, Sylvia was living at home. Charity, then working as a tailor, had come to visit Sylvia’s relatives. Within months, the two had decided to live together. To the family, they explained that Charity was hiring Sylvia as a full-time assistant, but Cleves’s close readings of Charity’s writings at the time reveal that this was far from just an economic arrangement. The women were going into housekeeping together, and were beginning a lifelong emotional and sexual partnership as well as an economic one. It was, in other words, a marriage. Cleves is convincing on this throughout but particularly in the beautiful final chapter on Sylvia’s widowhood.
In chapters on the marriage of Charity and Sylvia, Cleves continues to grapple with the unanswered questions of what happened behind closed doors and what that meant to the women themselves, but she also focuses on the ways in which their relationship was read as a marriage by those who observed them. One of the central and important arguments here is that the women did not meet with scorn, but were accepted and even embraced by their town and family members. That acceptance did not come out of a lack of understanding the nature of their relationship. They were not, as Cleves usefully explains, in the closet. In fact, the community understood Charity and Sylvia to be married because they acted like other married couples, dividing their labor and public life according to the gendered organization that their neighbors recognized. This is an important contribution to our understanding of how marriage worked in this period; even when it was between two women, marriage was a gendered institution. Charity, as one relative later explained, “was the man” in their union, taking on the public face of the couple and serving as the head of the household (p. 132). In the discussion of Charity and Sylvia’s marriage in this context, Cleves is able to bring in insights to nineteenth-century marriage in general and the limitations of coverture. Together, Charity and Sylvia were able to enjoy the benefits of the single life (independence) while still experiencing the love, partnership, and sexual pleasures of marriage.
This raises the obvious question of why Charity was able to receive public acceptance with Sylvia in a way that she did not with her previous lovers. This was a tremendous part of the book, for it points to the ways that the women’s sexuality was only one part of their whole identities. The answers that Cleves provides are actually quite simple. The community accepted their union because Charity and Sylvia were an important part of that community. Particularly in a rural community that needed people like them, their sexual relationship could be ignored in favor of paying attention to what they contributed to the town. They were valued members of their community for their work as skilled tailors, for their training of apprentices, for their assistance in the education of nieces and nephews, and for their leadership in the church. The women’s sexuality was an “open secret” (p. xii). It was not that no one knew that they had, or may have had, a sexual relationship with each other. It was that no one dwelled on the sexual implications of their marriage because their positions in the community were so valued. This was a “strategic silencing” that focused on the women’s positive contributions to their neighbors and families rather than on any potential discomfort with what happened behind closed doors (p. 203).
Closed doors do not satisfy historians, of course, and so Cleves leads us through her analysis of the texts that do remain to try and uncover what she can of the women’s sexuality. Much of this writing was religious in its themes, and readers of H-AmRel will perhaps be particularly interested in Cleves’s discussion of Charity and Sylvia’s religious lives. This is the subject of two entire chapters (13 and 16) and a thread throughout the book as a whole. One of the central points of Cleves’s argument is that the women’s union was able to gain community acceptance largely because both women were seen as spiritual leaders of the town. Sylvia was a long-time teacher in the Sunday School. Together, the women took leadership of the Weybridge Female Benevolent Society. They befriended the string of ministers who served their town, all of whom regarded the pair as “sisters in Christ” and exemplars of Christian womanhood (p. 158).
I found this documentation of the women’s acceptance by their ministers and church communities to be a fascinating and centrally important part of the book. Cleves clearly wants the book to speak to current discussions of same-sex marriage, and here she has a really important opening into religious communities’ acceptance of same-sex couples. It seems remarkable from the twenty-first-century debates on these issues that the women’s sexuality would be a nonissue for these ministers, and yet in light of the evidence that Cleves presents, it is also not at all surprising. She does a tremendous job here of resetting the discussion of religion and marriage in this way.
And yet, at the same time as Cleves documents this acceptance, she also finds evidence that the women themselves believed they were living sinful lives, and that their sin was sexual in its essence. Sylvia’s diary in particular describes a sense of her own sinfulness. She worried that she would be seen as a false teacher, instructing her Sunday School students in the tenets of faith while not living up to a righteous standard herself. Charity, for all of her connection with religious leadership in the community, still went through periods of frequent absence from church services. Sylvia attributed this to illness, but Cleves points out that frequently the illness that kept Charity at home on a Sunday would not prevent her from being at her work on a Monday. What do we make of this?
For Cleves, this is evidence of the women’s conviction that their sexual relationship was sinful. As elsewhere in the book, Cleves reaches this conclusion through a close reading of the few documents that remain. While that practice is creative and illuminating in other chapters, here she seems less willing to consider alternate causes of the women’s self-perceived sins, reducing their spirituality here to their sexual practices. Surely Sylvia was not the only Sunday School teacher to worry about the example she offered to her students. Cleves acknowledges that Sylvia frequently admonished herself for speaking in anger and that others commonly used the phrase “unclean lips” to refer to blasphemy, and yet she concludes that Sylvia’s use of that phrase in her diary was a euphemism for her sexual sins (pp. 128-129 and 184). Sporadic church attendance was common enough that it had a name, “Sabbath sickness,” and yet Charity’s own lack of attendance is read only as an effect of the discomfort she felt in church as a result of her belief that her sexual relationship with Sylvia was sinful and her unwillingness to give that up (p. 164). Unlike in the rest of the book, where Cleves does an excellent job of writing about the ways that the women’s sexuality fit into the other aspects of their lives as women in the early Republic, here the women’s identity as Christians seems reduced to the tensions that they would have felt in light of the presumed sinfulness of their sexuality.
Certainly that is an important issue to cover in this study, and many of the instances that Cleves cites do seem to indicate a significant tension in the women’s faith lives between the deep and sustaining pleasure they gained from their relationship and their worries about the potential sinfulness of its eroticism. However, Cleves’s emphasis on the overwhelming sense of sin in the women’s own minds, particularly when contrasted to their religious community’s marked acceptance of the women and its acknowledgment of their marriage, seems out of keeping with the rest of her analysis. If their ministers did not seem to dwell (or even to mention) the sin of their union, why are we so quick to assume that the women’s overwhelming sense of their own sexual sin would have colored every aspect of their religious life? If other women and men of their time and place also described themselves as sinners, why assume that Charity and Sylvia’s struggles with a sense of their sinfulness stemmed solely from spiritual anxieties about their sexuality?
Charity and Sylvia presents an important contribution to the history of sexuality and of women in the early Republic. Cleves sheds light on the lives of two ordinary women who were made extraordinary for their ability to make a life for themselves as part of a same-sex marriage. She tells their story with care and creativity, inviting readers to understand the ways that these women’s sexuality both did and did not challenge the culture in which they lived. For historians of religion, it also seems to open the door to a deeper discussion of the ways in which Christians of this period incorporated their sexual and their spiritual selves.
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Citation:
Emily Conroy-Krutz. Review of Cleves, Rachel Hope, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.
H-AmRel, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44316
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