Carol Faulkner marvels at the story Rachel Hope Cleves tells in Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, a “dual biography of two women who lived together in Weybridge, Vermont, for forty-four years”:
Cleves traces the backgrounds and marriage of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake in remarkable detail, piecing together town histories, family papers, their poems, and what remains of their correspondence (unsurprisingly, much was destroyed). When the couple met in 1807, Charity was 29, seven years older than Sylvia. Charity had several previous relationships with other women, but she and Sylvia quickly became inseparable. They moved in together, on property rented from a widowed female landlord, and supported themselves as tailors.
At first, and for their relatives’ sake, Sylvia was Charity’s “assistant.” Soon, the two women became equal partners, jointly running their business, and owning their house and personal property. In public records, Charity’s name often appeared above Sylvia’s, establishing her civic identity as the husband of the relationship, a household order that their neighbors understood. The couple shared a bed, a fact that would have been clear to early visitors to their one-room house, but they later built additions, establishing some privacy and upholding the community’s reticence about their sex lives.
In an earlier review, Laura Miller described Charity and Sylvia as that rare academic book “capable of bringing tears to a reader’s eyes,” noting these details about the historical context for their life together:
Charity Bryant was born to a well-regarded Massachusetts family in 1777. A running theme of “Charity and Sylvia” is the remarkable generational divide between those Americans who came of age before the Revolutionary War, in a world dominated by tradition, and the generation raised after it. Many of the latter — known as the “rising generation” by their elders — had been orphaned or beggared by the war or by disease. Furthermore, Cleves writes, “the war for independence had not only broken the political bonds of empire, creating a new nation, it had torn the social fabric of the colonial world, birthing a new American culture.”
If it was possible to jettison England and her king, why not other authorities, as well? For while in colonial America, “no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life,” after the Revolution, “an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy.”
Last month, Maria Popova excerpted the following passage from the book, about how the two women’s marriage somehow found a measure of acceptance in their town:
Like queer people in many times and places, Charity and Sylvia preserved their reputations by persuading their community to treat the matter of their sexuality as an open secret. Although it is commonly assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret. The ignorance that defines the closet is as likely to be a carefully constructed edifice as it is to be a total absence of knowledge. The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts…
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. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality.
The Dish 