The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 6
Women’s Friendships and Lesbianism
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many middleclass
women had relationships with each other which included
passionate declarations of love, nights spent in bed together
sharing kisses and intimacies, and lifelong devotion, without
exciting the least adverse comment. Feminist historians have
explained that the letters and diaries of middle-class women in
America in the first half of the nineteenth century frequently
contain references to a passionate same-sex friendship. 1 Lillian
Faderman’s book Surpassing the Love of Men details
innumerable such friendships between women which met with
such social approval that a woman could cheerfully write to
the male fiancé of the woman she loved, saying that she felt
exactly like a husband towards her and was going to be very
jealous. 2 Women so involved with one another might, if they
got married, refuse to be parted from their loved one, so that
the husband would have to honeymoon with two women instead
of one. Such friendships were seen by men as useful because
they trained women in the ways of love in preparation for
marriage.
These women wrote about their feelings to each other in
ways which would nowadays seem quite inappropriate to samesex
friendship. Faderman describes the friendship between Jane
Welsh Carlyle and the novelist and spinster Geraldine Jewsbury.
Jewsbury sought to sustain her friend through her difficult
marriage to the foul-tempered philosopher Thomas Carlyle. In
their correspondence they expressed their passionate emotional
attachment. The following extracts from Jewsbury’s letters show
how she felt:
O Carissima Mia…you are never out of either my head or
my heart. After you left on Tuesday I felt so horribly
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