Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America
by Rachel Hope Cleves
Oxford. 296 pages, $29.95
IT IS EARLY 19th-century America. Two New England women come to live and work together for more than forty years. They are respected in their community for their excellent tailoring skills, for their industrious support of local church and town charities, and for their generosity to nieces, nephews, and assistants. Along the way, their business survives two serious recessions, while the couple survive eighteen-hour workdays and punishing popular remedies such as opiates, emetics, and bleeding. They are intimate, and inseparable.
How do we know all this? On top of everything else, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake wrote the material for their own remarkable story. Using Charity’s letters and poems, Sylvia’s diary, local tax records, and more, Rachel Hope Cleves has assembled evidence of the couple’s de facto marriage as well as the strategies they used to gain acceptance from relatives and neighbors in an age when a woman was supposed to marry a man or, barring that, remain as an unpaid caretaker in the family home. They accomplished this by securing financial independence and becoming models of civic behavior. Cleves teaches history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where her work focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, and violence. In this wide-ranging and meticulously researched study, she shows the challenges her subjects faced in building an openly coupled life—and how the pair’s resourcefulness, stamina, and mutual devotion helped them stake new claims to “familial, economic and spiritual authority.” What about their intimate lives? Here, Cleves challenges acclaimed scholar Lillian Faderman’s suggestion in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1991) that genital sex between lesbians was hard to imagine before the 20th century, finding strong evidence in her subjects’ writings that their relationship included sexual intimacy. In the diary she kept for decades, Sylvia routinely described herself as guilty of “unclean sin,” a common epithet for same-sex contact, and both women expressed such remorse. “Charity and Sylvia’s struggle … to overcome their sinfulness provides some of the best textual evidence of their erotic relationship,” states Cleves. The two lived “in a manner contrary to their beliefs [and]they lived with this paradox.” Cleves confirms not only the women’s intimacy, but also their marital constancy as reflected in their diaries. When Charity writes in her memoir that on July 3, 1807, Sylvia Drake had “consented to be my help-meet and came to be my companion in labor [strike-through in the original],” Cleves construes the statement to mean the pair had committed themselves to each other, not for business reasons (as the deletion indicates) but for love. Every word in this short statement is charged with meaning to support such a conclusion: for example, “help-meet” resonates as “wife” in the sense used by Blackstone in his Commentaries for jurists. Cleves introduces her subjects as individuals, devoting almost half of her account to the women’s lives before they met. Both were youngest children from large Massachusetts families, having grown up at a time when the American Revolution had stoked desires for greater individual liberty. Sylvia, born in Easton in 1784, yearned for an education. When her father’s death and family bankruptcy made that impossible, she and her mother moved to Vermont to live with Sylvia’s older brother and his wife. Charity, born in 1777, disdained marriage to a man but yearned for a union of souls, and the love poems she wrote in her own voice are all addressed to women. Assertive at a time when outspoken women were attacked as mannish, Charity stirred further criticism by dressing without adornment. Gossip about her erotic connections with female friends in and around her hometown of North Bridgewater (now Brockton) prompted Charity’s parents to banish her from their house at the age of twenty. For almost a decade, she bunked with siblings and earned a living by teaching school. Her letters show that while she “did not much like the students,” she did like having time during recess to write. Romance bloomed with a fellow teacher, and Charity was invited to live in her house—only to be booted out by the friend’s parents when they (correctly) surmised that the women had developed a “secret bond.” Nearing thirty and without a home, Charity took up an invitation to visit married friends in Weybridge, Vermont, where she arrived by sleigh in February 1807. Talk about serendipity! In the first place, Weybridge was hundreds of miles from home, far enough to escape vicious rumors. It was a new town of about 500 people, most of whom, Cleves notes, had “little time for religion, education, or culture.” The town’s first church was just five years old. And the townspeople needed a tailor. Charity, who had learned to sew, was also adept at cutting, a highly valued, largely male skill. As chance would also have it, Sylvia Drake, the younger sister of Polly Hayward, with whom Charity was staying, lived nearby. The circumstances of their first meeting are not recorded, but Cleves surmises that “the women’s histories and personas complemented each other and compelled an immediate mutual attraction.” Within three months, they were in love. This time, Charity was prepared to act on her feelings in a practical way. Most urgently, she and Sylvia needed an income and a place to live. While Sylvia was away with her mother, Charity rented a room in which to live and start sewing clothes. When Sylvia returned, Charity persuaded the Drakes to let her move in as a full-time tailor’s assistant. The chance to link up with the genteel Bryants—Charity’s nephew William Cullen Bryant would become a noted poet—likely strengthened her case. Astonishingly, from July 1807 until Charity died of a heart attack in 1851, the women were never apart. From the outset, they worked to give their union a “public face.” After setting up housekeeping, they undertook what Cleves calls a “bridal tour” to visit family and friends in Massachusetts. Soon after, Charity gave Sylvia a ring. With their garment-making in demand, the women built a twelve-foot-square house, later adding several small rooms. Charity is listed as “head of household” in census records with Sylvia’s name eventually beneath. Town records show that they paid their taxes regularly. But owning a home and business was only first steps to respectability. Both women became full members of the Congregational Church, performing tasks of upkeep, counseling, and governance. Sylvia also taught Sunday school, and Cleves plausibly suggests that Christian service may have conferred a kind of “religious sanction” on their union. Beyond this, the couple offered advice and support to many in the next generation, going so far as to pay nephew Cyrus Drake’s college tuition. How closely did Charity and Sylvia’s union mirror a conventional marriage? The couple built a life of independence, respectability, and privacy. They were viewed as akin to a wedded pair, and when Sylvia died sixteen years after Charity, they were buried together. At the same time, Cleves acknowledges the cost of their offbeat alliance—from having to endure persistent familial disapproval to having to toil endlessly for only a modest return. The diaries reveal that they were usually exhausted and frequently ill, worn down by repetitive cutting and stitching, plus the toll of having always to be on the right side of civic opinion. With Charity and Sylvia Cleves has stitched together a coherent, captivating account, one filled with vibrant details, and she offers a provocative conclusion: however astonishing their story, it might not be that uncommon. “The history of sexual non-conformity is not only a saga of oppression and suffering; it is also a tale of creative ingenuity and accommodation,” Cleves observes. “The historical record is littered with Charities and Sylvias; we need only open our eyes and see.” Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
by George Vertue, 1725
