Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

by Rachel Hope Cleves

Hardcover, 2014

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Oxford University Press (2014), Edition: 1, 296 pages

Description

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of the extraordinary marriage of two ordinary early American women. Their story, drawn from the women's personal writings and other original documents, reveals that same-sex marriage is not as new as we think.

Rating

½ (21 ratings; 3.8)

User reviews

LibraryThing member rivkat

In the first post-Revolutionary generation, Charity and Sylvia met each other—one after a few earlier love affairs, one apparently falling in love for the first time—and pretty immediately moved in together (cue jokes); they never left each other again. Their letters and even some public

writing about them reveal that they spoke of each other using the same words opposite-sex spouses did; their families knew that they were to each other what spouses were supposed to be, although no one ever talked about sex. Cleves argues that they were tolerated and even respected because they made themselves helpful community members. Although there was gossip when they were young, when they were together and economically successful as trained seamstresses, the gossip subsided and they were pillars of the community.

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LibraryThing member banjo123

We read this for my Lesbian book group, not the best choice, because most of the group found it very dry. It is academic. It apparently won a prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic---they are the kind of historians who study shopping lists, I think. Actually, I did

like the book. I imagined I was back in college and reading this for a Women's History class, and kept down the expectations for exciting narrative non-fiction.

The story is interesting. Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake met in 1807, and soon afterwards moved in together into their own small house. They were able to make a living as seamstresses, and built a life together until Charity's death in 1851. When Sylvia died in 1868, she was buried in the same grave, and the two share a tombstone. Apparently there relationship was accepted and they were well regarded by family and community. Cleves talks about an "open closet," where the community was able to accept the relationship by acknowledging it as like a marriage, but never speaking about the sexual implications.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were two women who shared a home for 44-years in Weybridge, Vermont in the first half of the 19th century. They were generally recognized by their community as being in a marriage even if the nature of the relationship was treated more as an open secret. Through a

remarkable amount of scholarship, Rachel Hope Cleves exhaustively examined the surviving records of Charity and Sylvia, their families and communities, and other women who were involved in lesbian relationships in the time periods to reframe our understanding of how a same sex marriage could thrive in a time period we'd expect that such a thing would be unthinkable. Interestingly, Charity and Sylvia were able to maintain their good standing in the Weybridge community by being active members in the church. They also became beloved aunts to both their blood relations and many younger members of their community including the young women who apprenticed in their tailor ship. This in an excellent microhistory of the LGBTQ experience in early America.

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