Charity and Sylvia
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Average rating4.7
Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in nineteenth century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age twenty. She spent the next decade of her life traveling throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived. At age twenty-nine, still defiantly single, Charity visited friends in Weybridge, Vermont. There she met a pious and studious young woman named Sylvia Drake. The two soon became so inseparable that Charity decided to rent rooms in Weybridge. In 1809, they moved into their own home together, and over the years, came to be recognized, essentially, as a married couple. Revered by their community, Charity and Sylvia operated a tailor shop employing many local women, served as guiding lights within their church, and participated in raising their many nieces and nephews. Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of their extraordinary forty-four year union. Drawing on an array of original documents including diaries, letters, and poetry, Cleves traces their lives in sharp detail. Providing an illuminating glimpse into a relationship that turns conventional notions of same-sex marriage on their head, and reveals early America to be a place both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society might imagine, Charity and Sylvia is a significant contribution to our limited knowledge of LGBT history in early America.
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I found this randomly at HPB a while ago. They had an end cap full (probably remainders) and it sounded right up my alley. This was so fascinating and such good scholarship (so many citations! Makes my history heart happy!). I loved reading about late 18th-early 19th century New England through Charity and Sylvia's relationship. This is so much more though. Cleves touches on early American education, business, religion, law, and so much more in telling this story. I wish it was a bit more chronological rather than thematic, but the story did move on well. Such a good history.
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.
