Maybe it was two women in your history textbook. Maybe it was your unmarried great aunt and her live-in ‘best friend’. We are all familiar with the story: two women are designated close friends by historians, family members and society, despite the pair’s decision to unite and entwine their lives like any marriage between a man and a woman.  

A Boston Marriage is a term historians use for the cohabitation of two women who live together, independent from the financial support of men, usually between the 18th and early 20th centuries. The concept of Boston Marriages ultimately erases the idea that these women were lesbians who kept their sex lives private. They’re just gals bein’ really, really – really – close pals.

The Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, are referred to as being in a Boston Marriage. But the pair were clearly more than close friends: they risked their lives to sail the Irish sea in the late 18th century, in order to covertly set up a home in Northern Wales. The Ladies even named their dog Sappho.

Anne Lister wrote about Butler and Ponsonby in her diary, after visiting the women: “I cannot help thinking that surely it was not platonic. Heaven forgive me, but I look within myself & doubt. I feel the infirmity of our nature & hesitate to pronounce such attachments uncemented by something more tender still than friendship.”

Sexless?

Lesbians have understandably avoided publicizing their sexual activity over the past few centuries. Some, like lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, were quick to deny that same-sex unions were more than “romantic friendships.” There are, however, contemporary lesbian scholars who challenge the supposed sexlessness of same-sex relationships in history. How many lesbians deemed by historians to be ‘sexless’, including those perceived to be in Boston Marriages, were forced to repress their desires? How many had the language to articulate the desires that did exist? 

While we can’t answer these questions with full certainty, historians should not assume that lesbians of the past were ‘sexless’ when society didn’t allow for the mention, let alone liberation, of lesbian sexual desire. 19th Century lesbians might not have perceived physical intimacy between women as sexual because of society’s heteronormative definition of sex; the Oxford English Dictionary still defines sexual intercourse as “the sexual contact between individuals involving penetration.” 

That which sexually arouses is not sexless. Historians should only label historical relationships as sexless if the individuals involved deemed it so. Likewise, we cannot say that two women cohabitating together were definitely sexual, but if they are fleeing their home country to be together and calling their dog Sappho, then the clues are there. History already desexualizes lesbians. Historians do not require the same level of proof to assume a heterosexual relationship from history was sexual. 

Not only is sexual intercourse viewed through a heteronormative lens, but relationships are too.  Kathleen A. Brehony wrote the following, in her 1993 essay Coming to consciousness: Some reflections on the Boston marriage (1993):

“To complicate matters even more, most lesbian relationships seem to be built upon this model of heterosexual, monogamous marriages. But since the legal role of “spouse” is unavailable to lesbians and gay men in the United States (and throughout most of the world) we have settled, by and large, for the role of “lover.” And the word seems to imply that a fundamental aspect of the relationship is sexual.”

Even in today’s society, sexual relationships are usually only viewed as “real” if there is penetration – especially by a penis. Therefore, lesbians are not always seen to be having “real sex.” Heteronormative dictionary and social definitions of sex downplay lesbian relationships to feed the lesbophobic belief that lesbians are gal pals. Lesbian relationships are conveniently disregarded and stamped as fictitious. 

What stops historians from being open to the idea that lesbians have had sexual relationships throughout history? Naomi McCormick, author of the book, “Sexual Salvation: Affirming Women’s Sexual Rights and Pleasures” (1994) coined the term “genital proof.” She explains that “Because women’s sexuality is socially constructed by men, contemporary sexologists are inclined to demand genital proof of sexual orientation.” So what counts as “enough” evidence to convince historians that a woman could have been a lesbian when “genital proof” is impossible to find? 

Language-less

A lesbian is a lesbian–a woman exclusively attracted to other women–even if she does not know the word for it. Jenn Shapland, the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), researched Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers’ sexual orientation. McCullers, like most people from history, is often assumed to have been heterosexual, but there is evidence to support she was not. Shapland opens her book on McCullers by writing the following: 

“Reeves [McCullers’ husband-to-be] asked Carson if she was a lesbian on the front porch of Carson’s house on Stark Avenue, after everyone had gone to bed. . . Carson answered with a swift denial, wished aloud that she wasn’t one, then expressed plain uncertainty. . . In her recollection, Carson told Reeves that she had loved a woman named Vera, another named Mary Tucker, but she wasn’t sure what he referred to when he said lesbians. She asked him, as though lesbians might be a club that she considers joining, or an unfamiliar species she might study: How do lesbians behave? Where do they live? How do they interact? Despite Carson’s status as a maybe-lesbian, Reeves asked Carson when they would be married. She was nineteen.”

Carson McCullers clearly loved women, but even she was unsure of what this meant. In an article for The Paris Review, Jenn Shapland reflected on her findings:

“In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down . . .  A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian.”

Even when McCullers realized she loved women, Shapland writes, she didn’t have the language to express it. Without a lesbian vocabulary, how can we name who we are? How can we find each other? Perhaps it’s our duty, as lesbians living in 2022, to claim historical lesbians like McCullers because she couldn’t do so herself. 

Do historians resist suspecting that women who clearly loved women were lesbians–when they automatically conceive of any woman being heterosexual–because they view lesbianism as an insult? As Shapland writes, “Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight.” 

Even contemporary lesbians do not have the language to articulate what they feel. Marilyn Frye, the author of Lesbian philosophies and cultures (1990), writes the following,  about her experience researching gay male sexuality: 

“It was astounding to me for one thing in particular, namely, that its pages constituted a huge lexicon of words: words for acts and activities, their sub-acts, preludes and denouements, their stylistic variation, their sequences. Gay male sex, I realized then, is articulate.” (Page 310)

Gay men have a specific language; an avenue to articulately express their unique experiences. When lesbians do claim terms, they are often sub-labels used to further categorize them rather than depict the nuance of lesbian sexual experiences. Various lesbian scholars have written about how these mini-identities can be more restricting than liberating. Rita Mae Brown’s 1992 essay Take a Lesbian to Lunch extrapolates this perfectly when she says:

“Oppression runs deep, and among our own we act it out on each other with as much viciousness (sometimes) as the very culture which produced the oppression. It was in gay bars that I learned that a world of women can only work if we destroy the male value system, the male pattern for human relationships (if you can call it human). These methods employ role play, economic exploitation, dominance and passivity, and material proof of your social rank – they can only keep people apart and fighting with one another.”

Lesbians deserved terms like “lesbianism” and “homosexuality” throughout history, as well as communities, documentation, and literature on other lesbians’ experiences. However, do we need terms like “top” and “bottom” (or other terms we’ve borrowed from gay men) to describe lesbian relationships? Do these words apply to lesbian sex in the same way they do to gay male sex? Rather than co-opting gay male sexuality by compiling a clinical dictionary of similar sex terms, how can we form a qualitative, extensive language that is rooted in lesbian sexuality? 

Lesbian sex is paradoxical: love between women (and without men) is desexualized, but the male gaze fetishizes lesbians as something for men to penetrate. How do we express lesbian sexuality without attracting male fantasies?

A close-knit lesbian community is essential. All who are comfortable can share their sexual beliefs and experiences until a language naturally emerges. However, consent must be emphasized: to not dump our sexual inclinations, questions, and concerns on uncomfortable ears. Due to our sexualization as both women and lesbians, sex talk can quickly trigger feelings of objectification and powerlessness.

Language under the patriarchy can be rooted in misogyny. Language is not merely a tool to communicate, but one to liberate as well. As feminist literary scholar Hélène Cixous wrote in her 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa: 

“Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history —by her own movement.” 

While Cixous didn’t mean this from a lesbian perspective, lesbians can still use it to understand how language works against women and, even more so, lesbians. We must “write ourselves” if we want to lay claim to our bodies.

Language is used to establish power among the privileged elite by reflecting what society values. Society has not always valued women. Especially not relationships between women. It is not a question of “Were Boston Marriages sexual and/or romantic relationships between women?” Rather, “could society acknowledge and rise above its heteronomative perception of sex and sexual relationships?” 

Lesbians did not always have the freedom, or even literacy, to document the “genital proof” needed to satisfy lesbian-erasing historians. It is the duty of lesbians today to apply our language to lesbians of the past; to write and define what they could not. It is our job to be the Jenn Shaplands for the Carson McCullers.