Chapter 15: Dear Aunts 1823
18th c
LHMP entry
Chapter 13: Wild Affections 1811
Chapter 11: The Tie That Binds July 1807
Chapter 9: Charity and Lydia 1806
Chapter 7: Never to Marry 1800
Chapter 5: So Many Friends 1799
Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787
Chapter 1: A Child of Melancholy 1777
Charity’s mother died of consumption shortly after Charity’s birth in 1777, in the middle of the Revolutionary War. She was the last of 10 children. Death haunted the family with three of Charity’s grandparents and her oldest brother also dying within the same 2-year period.
The book opens with a description of a pair of cut silhouettes, framed with a lock of hair and labeled with the names of the two women. There follows an overview of their lives (which are then covered in much more detail in the chapters). Both women had determined not to marry. Both came from large families, though of different character. They met in 1807 and set up a household together where the continued as an acknowledged couple for 44 years.
This article challenges the strict version of “social construction” of sexuality by reviewing the evidence that 18th century Americans had an extensive vocabulary for identifiable and categorizable variations in sexual behavior and gender presentation. At the same time, the author does not claim a multi-century continuity of certain gender/sexuality concepts, rather than certain concepts have recurred at different times. [Note: compare Valerie Traub’s “cycles of salience.”]
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