Lithograph of “the Ladies of Llangollen,” Eleanor Butler (1739–1829), right, and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), left. Butler and Ponsonby, both born of upper-class, Anglo-Irish families, lived openly as a couple in North Wales.
23 September 2024
A Boston marriage is term for a long-term cohabitation of two women that dates to the late nineteenth century. The term allows for the possibility of the relationship being a sexual one, but it does not require it. As such it not only gave women more freedom in structuring their economic and familial arrangements, it also gave a respectable social cover for a lesbian relationship, allowing the women to be public as a couple without being scandalous.
The earliest use of the term that I know of is in a 5 January 1893 letter to the journal The Open Court by Ednah Cheney (1824–1904), a Boston writer and social reformer. I quote the letter at length because it is an excellent example of how the term’s euphemism operates:
This seems very strange to one, who for many years has been accustomed to the existence of ties between women so intimate and persistent, that they are fully recognised by their friends, and of late have acquired, if not a local habitation, at least a name, for they have been christened “Boston Marriages.” This institution deserves to be recognised as a really valuable one for women in our present state of civilisation. With the great number of women in our state, in excess of the men, and with the present independence of women, which renders marriage, merely for a home, no longer acceptable, the proportion of those who can enter into that relation is diminished, and the “glorious phalanx of old maids” must find some substitute for the joys of family life. These relations so far as I have known, and I have known many of them, are not usually planned for convenience or economy, but grow out of a constantly increasing attachment, favored by circumstances, which make such a marriage the best refuge against the solitude of growing age.
In some cases women of the medical or other professions form a partnership at once social and professional; or frequently a physician finds comfort for her leisure hours in the society of one of literary tastes or possessing the fine art of housekeeping. Sometimes a wealthy but solitary woman is delighted to share heart and home with one less favored by fortune.
In some cases where family ties still have their claims, the parties do not live together, but are constant companions in the summer excursions or the winter studies and engagements, in which they are mutually interested. As far as I have known, these “Marriages” are of long continuance, and I can hardly recall an instance where a decided rupture has occurred. Of course I do not include in this statement those girlish intimacies which are only what flirtations are to serious matrimonial attachments. Naturally these relations are generally between women of middle age, who have learned much from the duties and sorrows of life, and perchance have known the pleasure, or more often the pains and disappointments of love. To such the tie affords a home for the heart, intellectual companionship, and often help in the pecuniary support, which gives value and worth to a period of life, too often very sad and lonely. As such I must look upon them as a great blessing which should not be interfered with or unduly fostered, but recognised in all simplicity and friendliness.
There is one danger attending such unions, when they are entered into by those who are not destitute of family ties, and the married woman and the mother, even sometimes the aunt and sister should be cautious of assuming a relation which may make her less faithful to the natural ties of family life. I rejoice to say that instances of such mistakes are rare, and that in many cases the friend becomes also one of the family, and helps to preserve and deepen the family affection.
I do not propose that we should formally adopt the Boston Marriage into our civil code, and celebrate it with ceremonies and festivities, for simplicity and privacy especially become it, but I do think it is good to think of it with respect, and welcome it as one of the helps to human welfare, and not let any jealous feelings mar the happiness of those concerned in it.
The term may have been inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel (serialized 1885–86) The Bostonians, whose primary plot arc concerns a triangle between Basil Ransom, his cousin Olive Chancellor, a feminist living in Boston, and Verena Tarrant, Olive’s young protégée. Olive and Verena live together, and Olive is training Verena to become a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. Basil wishes to marry Verena, who in turn is ambivalent about her feelings—she cares for both Olive and Basil. In the end, Verena elopes with Basil, but the narration indicates that their marriage will not be a happy one. The subtext that Olive is a lesbian who has sexual and romantic feelings for Verena is obvious, but the novel is less clear about whether or not a sexual relationship between Olive and Verena exists. The novel does not, of course, contain any explicit references to same-sex attraction. The book was not well received by critics upon its publication because of its negative portrayal of the suffrage movement as well as the lesbian subtext, which many considered indecent (but which probably helped its sales).
One often sees the claim that the term Wellesley marriage was used for such a cohabitation among female professors at Wellesley College (outside Boston) and other women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century. But the only primary source evidence that I have found for this term existing is a footnote remarking that Dorothy Walcott Weeks, a 1916 graduate of Wellesley, said in a 1978 interview with Patricia Palmieri that Wellesley marriage had been in use at the college during Week’s matriculation there. Recollections of usages like this one should be viewed skeptically, as memories are malleable and anachronistic language is often inserted into them, but in this case Weeks may very well have remembered accurately. The Wikipedia articles that discuss the term invariably point to Lillian Faderman’s 1999 book To Believe in Women as evidence for the term, but Faderman provides no primary source evidence for her claim that the term existed. But, given its slang nature and its subject being limited to the faculty of women’s colleges, the fact that Wellesley marriage does not appear in published sources from the period is not surprising. If more evidence for Wellesley marriage is to be found, it will likely be in archived letters and papers of professors and students at women’s colleges.
Sources:
Cheney, Ednah D. “Correspondence: Letter to ‘The Open Court.’” Open Court, 7.1, 5 January 1893, 3517–18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Archive.org.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. Boston marriage, n.
Palmieri, Patricia A. “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920.” In Nancy F. Cott, ed., History of Women in the United States, 12: Education, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993, 314–333 at 332, n.36. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Image credit: Richard James Lane, c. 1832, based on a drawing by Mary Leighton. Wellcome Collection. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.