Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia

Saturday, June 21, 2025 - 20:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/06/21 - listen here)

Usually when I put together a podcast essay, I have a number of sources to draw on and am able to create my own synthesized understanding of the topic. In the case of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a long-term romantic couple living in Vermont in the early 19th century, I am entirely reliant on a single publication: Rachel Hope Cleves’ Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. As a result, I feel like today’s podcast is more in the line of a book report than an original essay, and in consequence it’s somewhat shorter than usual. And yet—given that I’m in the middle of blogging this book for the Project, and because the story is so fascinating—I can’t resist putting together this episode about them.

We often think of American romantic friendships and “Boston marriages” as belonging entirely to the later 19th century. But such relationships can be found earlier, as we see here. We also often find opinions divided between positions such as Lillian Faderman’s that 19th century romantic friendships were never sexual—that women of that era were so steeped in the stereotypes about women’s sexual passivity that they couldn’t even imagine engaging in sex together—and the equally suspect wishful thinking that treats every romantic friendship as solidly lesbian in sexual terms. But Cleves teases out a more nuanced understanding—that women in romantic friendships fully understood there were boundaries to what would be publicly acceptable, and showing us the process of self-censorship that women engaged in, both in terms of subtly coding the nature of their desires and activities in the records they left, and the physical censorship of destroying records they felt would cause problems for their reputation or the reputation of their families. It was this understanding and careful management that allowed Charity and Sylvia to share their lives in what was acknowledged publicly to be a marriage-like bond, celebrated by their families and community, without provoking a degree of backlash or condemnation that would have destroyed their place in those networks.

Both women were born in Massachusetts either during or in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolutionary War. Charity was the elder, while Sylvia was born 7 years later. They had a number of things in common. Both came from large families that lived in rural towns, both aspired to a higher level of education than was common for young women, both were poets and copious letter writers, and both came into young adulthood with an understanding that they were completely uninterested in a conventional marriage.

Their differences are also striking. Charity’s family was comfortably well off, and when her siblings left home it was for person freedoms, not out of necessity. Charity’s mother died shortly after her birth and she sought in vain all her life for parental support and approval. In contrast, Sylvia’s family, though close and loving, had lost their land and were desperately poor. Even at her birth the family had scattered either to find support with relatives or seek employment. In a pattern that was fairly normal for unmarried young women in New England at the time, both found themselves moving between the households of various relatives, not always by choice.

Charity found both a certain degree of economic independence and a circle of like-minded young women by becoming a teacher. As schoolteachers were often female (because they could be paid less) and were required to be unmarried, and because casual socializing between men and women was heavily scrutinized, a teacher’s life was ideal for someone like Charity who found herself romantically attracted to other women. In her early 20s, Charity went through a series of emotionally charged intimate friendships with other women, celebrated in the poems she wrote, but also the most likely cause of the malicious gossip she alludes to in many letters.

The specific nature of the gossip is never recorded, but it caused her to return to her parents’ home for a time, and complicated relations with two of the siblings that she boarded with at various times. Cleves points out that the social problems generated by Charity’s intimate friendships need not indicate that her community was concerned specifically about sexual relationships. It could be enough that the women’s close bonds were felt to make them less likely to marry. Marriage was not simply a social expectation, but a critical economic status. In the absence of employment that paid well enough to support an independent household—and remember what we said about women being paid less than men for the same work—a single woman would always require financial assistance or material support from others. The alternative to living with a family member was usually becoming a domestic servant in some other household. So a woman like Charity who disdains marriage and appears to encourage other women to feel the same, can be seen as a disruption to the economic stability of entire families.

Sylvia didn’t have the same opportunities to support herself that Charity did. Family necessity resulted in her moving to an even more rural area of Vermont, which not only eliminated her chance for more advanced schooling, but also greatly limited the options for female employment. Despite this, she too was still unmarried when she hit her 20s, and her family was beginning to accept that the state was permanent and groom her to be a lifelong companion for her aging mother.

And then Charity moved to Vermont. In a blazing stroke of serendipity, at a time when Charity wanted to get out of an increasingly fraught situation where she was living with the family of one of her girlfriends and they were getting very suspicious, she received an invitation to visit friends in Vermont for several months. The husband was a distant relative of Charity’s mother, and she had gotten to know the wife during one of her teaching stints and Charity had even been named godmother to two of their children. And the wife was Sylvia’s sister.

Charity and Sylvia hit it off almost immediately. While there, Charity began a tailoring business—a skill she’d picked up some years earlier—and Sylvia pitched in as assistant. Half a year later, Sylvia moved on to go live with her mother, as previously planned, but within a month, Charity enticed her back with the promise of a place of their own to live in, and the two were never again separated.

The tailoring business was what made the success of their relationship possible. By the end of the year, they were earning enough to lease property and build a combined home and shop. Having a separate and independent household that was not reliant on the generosity of a relative, and that afforded personal privacy meant that the stresses and pressures that had undermined Charity’s previous relationships were absent.

Over the decades, the business expanded, both in terms of volume and in building on to their home. They were able to hire assistants and apprentices. Charity and Sylvia became pillars of the community, founding a women’s charitable organization, supporting their local church, and both called “aunt” by their numerous nieces and nephews—as well as by many other children in the town. Their relatives and neighbors acknowledged their relationship even likening it to “a marriage”.

Charity and Sylvia shared a home and their lives for 44 years. After Charity died at age 74, Sylvia wore widow’s black for the rest of her life. And after she died at age 83, their families buried her with Charity and replaced the original headstone with one that commemorated both women.

I’ve omitted many of the details that Cleves includes in the book. She provides an extensive historical and social background as the context for their lives, as well as delving into their religious, economic, and medical backgrounds. But for now, let’s leave the story as the bare bones of their romantic life. As is so often the case when we have records of female romantic couples who achieved a “happy ever after” ending, we should not see them as unique or isolated, but rather as uniquely well documented. The historic and social conditions that enabled their successful relationship existed for many other women, and it’s not inappropriate to extrapolate that there were many other similarly happy couples who never made it into the pages of history.