Introduction
You live in a society that often obscures the long history of same-sex partnerships before the modern era. You might assume that openly recognized marriages between women were impossible in nineteenth-century America. Rachel Hope Cleves uncovers the remarkable lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who lived together as a married couple in Vermont for over four decades.
Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake forged a recognized same-sex marriage in nineteenth-century New England by combining economic independence, religious piety, and social conformity.
You will discover how two women built an independent household, navigated early American gender norms, and earned the respect of their religious community. The book traces their journeys by examining these core questions:
- How did post-Revolutionary economic changes allow women to support themselves?
- What role did romantic friendships play in nineteenth-century society?
- How did a rural Vermont community accept a female married couple?
1. Early Lives and Hardships
Both women overcame profound personal and economic destabilizations in the post-Revolutionary era before meeting in Vermont.
You find that Charity Bryant's early life was marked by the tragic death of her mother from consumption and the devastating losses of the Revolutionary War. Charity's mother Silence died of consumption in June 1777 shortly after Charity's birth, leaving the infant sickly and orphaned. The family also suffered the loss of Charity's oldest brother Oliver during military service in the Revolutionary War. Charity's oldest brother Oliver enlisted in the Massachusetts militia and died around the time of the Battle of Long Island in August 1776.
Orphanhood and Frontier Survival
A hired caretaker named Grace Hayward saved infant Charity from death and provided maternal affection during her fragile early years. Because Charity's mother was dying of consumption and could not nurse her, Dr. Philip Bryant hired Grace Hayward as a caretaker. Grace nurtured the sickly baby and protected her from unwholesome winds, earning Charity's lifelong devotion. Grace Hayward nursed Charity through a wasting sickness in infancy, and though later dismissed by an unsympathetic stepmother, she remained close as Aunt Grace.
Post-Revolutionary economic depression and high taxation plunged Sylvia Drake's family into bankruptcy and homelessness. In the mid-1780s, Massachusetts farmers faced an economic depression and high taxes demanded in specie to fund war-debt speculators. Thomas Drake II lost his land, forcing the family to dissolve and send older children away to work. Sylvia Drake was born on October 31, 1784, just as her family's financial situation deteriorated, leading to the eventual break-up of the household.
Sylvia's brother Asaph escaped indentured servitude by running away to the Vermont frontier, paving the way for the family's reunification. Dissatisfied with the apprenticeship system, Asaph Drake ran away at age seventeen and traveled to Weybridge, Vermont, where he built a grist mill, acquired land, and became a town proprietor. He then summoned his widowed mother and sister Sylvia to join him. Asaph apprenticed to a Bridgewater blacksmith, ran away in the middle of the night with two other apprentices, and arrived in Weybridge in January 1793.
2. Culture of Sensibility and Teaching
Post-Revolutionary youth culture and district schoolteaching provided young women with new emotional intensity and independent wages.
The American Revolution destabilized traditional parental authority and social structures, creating profound uncertainties for the rising generation. The break from empire birthed a new American culture that freed youth to craft original visions of manhood and womanhood. These new freedoms carried high risks of phenomenal success or crushing failure.
The intense emotional style promoted by the culture of sensibility made young people vulnerable to extreme psychological distress and depression. Freighting friendships and courtships with overwhelming emotions opened individuals to jealousy, rage, and devastating public humiliation. Contemporaries feared this lowness of spirit could drive sensitive characters to suicide.
Following a bitter dispute with his friend Gideon over rumors regarding a courtship, Daniel Bryant suffered severe emotional distress and died suddenly in 1787 at age twenty-four under suspicious circumstances.
Charity Bryant's sharp wit, resistance to domestic labor, and drive for learning led to severe personality conflicts with her stepmother and eventual expulsion from home. Household maintenance demanded endless physical labor, but Charity preferred reading and writing. Her refusal to conform or take on domestic burdens drew her father's harsh rejection when she turned twenty.
After a bitter family conflict following her twentieth birthday in 1797, Philip Bryant demanded that Charity leave the family home, casting her out without protection.
The Rise of Women Teachers
District school teaching emerged as a vital waged occupation that allowed young unmarried women to earn money, escape domestic tyranny, and live apart from their families. Towns hired women teachers because they could be paid far less than men to satisfy state schooling mandates. While wages were meager, teaching offered a respectable middle-class alternative to domestic service and urban labor.
Starting in the winter of 1797-98, Charity taught in various Massachusetts districts, boarding around with families, which granted her rare freedom and time to write. By 1830, more than half of district-school teachers in Massachusetts were women, with one in five women teaching at some point in her life.
Handwritten letters and poetry served as high art and the primary medium for young women to express deep emotional intimacy and intellectual capability. Because published women authors faced social stigma, women exchanged handwritten poems, copied compositions into commonplace books, and crafted elaborate acrostics and rebuses to signal trust and emotional connection.
Charity maintained decades-long epistolary relationships with fellow teachers like Mary Hovey, Maria Clark, and Lydia Richards. These women praised her superior writing skills and poetic talent.
3. Romantic Friendships and Stigma
Intimate female friendships offered deep emotional bonds but also exposed non-conforming women to intense community gossip and suspicion.
Post-Revolutionary schoolteaching served as a refuge for unmarried women seeking intellectual freedom, respectable independent income, and primary romantic relationships with female peers. Because teachers boarded round, districts sought unmarried women. This vanguard generation used teaching to escape the constraints of traditional marriage and motherhood, forming a loose network of bookish young women who shared overnight visits, embraced physically, and built an affective world of language and ideas.
Charity Bryant left home for her first teaching job in Dartmouth following a family breach and quickly embarked on passionate friendships with fellow teachers like Eliza, Maria, Lydia, and Nancy.
Epistolary Eroticism and Gossip
Romantic friendships between women in this era were heavily mediated by letters and poetry that conveyed intense physical desire and erotic attraction. Friends frequently wrote about their longing to sleep together, embrace, and feel physical sensations upon touching. Poetry and correspondence acted as conduits of mutual desire, with writers praising physical charms such as budding breasts and expressing agitation of the bosom.
Charity wrote an acrostic poem for Lydia Richards praising her physical charms, using the L in Lydia to stand for "Lovely in person" and comparing her breasts to budding flowers. In November 1799, Lydia Richards wrote to Charity expressing her longing to sleep with her instead of sleeping alone.
Same-sex romantic friendships were generally viewed by eighteenth-century society as instrumental, rather than oppositional, to heterosexual courtship and marriage. Sentimental novels used same-sex correspondence to advance marriage plots. In everyday life, parents and youth looked to intimate friendships as connections to introduce siblings, pass letters, and evaluate potential spouses, since virtuous friends helped arrange good marriages.
Charity and her friends read sentimental novels like Ermina, or the Fair Recluse, which utilized intimate same-sex letters within their marriage plots.
Community gossip and vicious rumors targeted Charity not for heterosexual flirtations, but because of her masculine demeanor, single status, and intense female intimacies. Public reputations for women depended on modesty and chastity. Charity dressed without adornment, avoided superficial chatter, and conveyed a certain masculinity in her countenance and body motions. Eighteenth-century culture deeply suspected mannish women and lifelong spinsters, associating female masculinity with lesbianism. Only 2 or 3 percent of colonial-era women remained unmarried for life, contrasted with post-Revolutionary increases, while antebellum singlehood rates eventually surpassed the 10 percent threshold.
Lydia Richards commented more than once on Charity's physical and behavioral resemblance to her brother Peter, noting similarities in both countenance and motions.
4. Rejection of Marriage and Secret Loves
Charity proclaimed a firm marriage embargo against men while cultivating passionate, secretive romantic attachments with other women.
At age 23, Charity boldly announced in a letter to her sister-in-law Sally that she would never marry, prioritizing her internal felicity over public opinion. Confined to bed for two months due to illness and mourning the loss of her reputation, Charity rejected the pro-marital culture of the early republic where marriage and motherhood were viewed as women's natural life path and civic duty. Charity wrote to Sally stating that rumors of her impending marriage were false and that it was her settled opinion such a thing would never take place.
Many women in the early republic chose to remain single not due to misfortune or personal defects, but out of a deliberate desire to avoid the woes of traditional marriage. Reasons for remaining single included:
- fear of childbirth;
- a desire for individual autonomy denied to wives;
- disapproval of traditional female subordination;
- a desire to retain control over inherited property under coverture laws;
- religious consecration;
- an aversion to men.
Charity maintained a lifelong support for other people's marriages while feeling a personal revolt and consistent aversion toward romantic relationships with men. Charity wrote poems praising marriage as a communion of souls for friends and family, but preserved no letters from male suitors. When friends mentioned courtship or linked her name to men like Mr. Ormston, Charity reacted with fury and firmly demanded the subject never be mentioned again.
Dual Correspondence Systems
Charity developed a deeply passionate, physically intimate, and secretive relationship with Mercy Ford that lasted in an attenuated form throughout their lives. Mercy Ford, born in 1778 in Pembroke, bonded with Charity through mutual nursing care during illnesses and shared a correspondence that included explicit erotic language and a desire for nights spent alone together in bed. Mercy locked Charity's letters inside a small box to protect them from her suspicious mother and sister Thankful, warning Charity in a letter to speak of love softly because her mother was reading her mail.
To protect their intimate feelings from prying eyes, Charity and Mercy maintained two separate correspondences consisting of public-sharing letters and private-pleasure letters. Evidence of this dual system appears in incongruent numbering systems on Mercy's letters and explicit warnings in surviving notes about dangerous particulars that could not be exposed to the world. Mercy wrote to Charity explaining that she dared not send a second private letter because it held all their intimate details and would by no means do for the world.
As Charity and Mercy remained unmarried into their late twenties and continually sought time alone together, their parents grew deeply suspicious and ultimately forced a separation. By 1804 and 1805, maternal surveillance and neighborhood suspicion intensified. Philip and Hannah Bryant eventually blacklisted Mercy and refused to allow her further visits to their house, driving Mercy to despair and prompting Charity to leave North Bridgewater.
5. Moving North and Uniting
Fleeing family scrutiny and broken romances in Massachusetts, Charity relocated to Vermont and established a permanent domestic partnership with Sylvia Drake.
After six years of separation, Charity returned to the Hampshire Hills in August 1806. This reunion led to an immediate intensification of her romantic bond with Lydia Richards. Lydia and Charity shared a bed at night, pressing bare flesh together in bosom embraces that carried clear sexual meanings in the antebellum era. Lydia's rate of letter-writing increased drastically, though she acknowledged the danger of committing her deep feelings to paper in an impolitical manner.
When Peter Bryant's messenger brought news of Charity's return in August 1806, Lydia's heart beat so hard she initially misspelled palpitating and had to correct it.
Lydia and Charity used poetry, novels, and coded literary allusions, such as the archaic word vale, to communicate forbidden romantic and sexual desires past prying eyes. Inspired by Anna Seward's poems about the Ladies of Llangollen and Isaac Watts's hymns, Lydia employed words like vale to represent female anatomy or orgasmic experiences. They shared books and wrote acrostics as a common private language.
Lydia copied out an acrostic titled Spring in January 1807 that described gentle breezes passing over lower groves and rivulets murmuring through the peaceful vale during a climactic moment.
Faced with parental discovery, community suspicion, and Charity's ultimate departure for Vermont, Lydia formally ended their romance in 1808 using a coded farewell letter drawn from Isaac Watts's hymns. Lydia used wrappers and requested her letter be burned, employing Watts's texts on carnal joys to signal that their sexual relationship had concluded. Despite the breakup, they maintained a lifelong friendship and both remained single on principle.
In 1808, Lydia quoted Watts's Parting with Carnal Joys and The Mourning-Piece to announce that she would imitate Dianthe and remain single rather than endure the pains of marriage or broken love.
Establishing the Household
Fleeing the social contempt directed at single women in Massachusetts and the tensions within her relatives' households, Charity relocated to Weybridge, Vermont, in February 1807. Accepting an invitation from her distant cousins Asaph and Polly Hayward, Charity traveled 150 miles north by sleigh to escape family scrutiny and community gossip.
In February 1807, Charity mounted Dr. Shaw's sleigh in sub-zero temperatures to make the 150-mile drive north to Vermont, where the thermometer recorded negative twenty-eight degrees.
After a brief separation in June 1807 that prompted impassioned letter-writing, Charity rented her own room in Weybridge and hired Sylvia as her tailoring assistant, uniting them for life. Charity used biblical passages from Paul's epistles to reassure Sylvia about the spiritual validity of their love. By establishing an independent household through tailoring work, Charity created a socially acceptable framework for their domestic partnership.
On July 3, 1807, Sylvia left her mother's house in Bristol and traveled the ten miles with her nephew Joseph to move in with Charity, beginning forty-four years together without another separation.
6. Common-Law Marriage and Dwelling
Charity framed her 1807 union with Sylvia as a common-law marriage by drawing on historical legal traditions of mutual consent and Protestant concepts of a help-meet.
Charity wrote in an 1844 memoir that Sylvia consented to be her help-meet and companion. In early America, common-law marriages could be legitimated by mutual consent and cohabitation alone without religious or civil authority. This legal reality allowed the women to bypass the traditional definition of marriage as strictly between a man and a woman.
Charity initially wrote in labor in her memoir to describe their beginning, but struck it out to show their union was founded on love and companionship rather than mere economic necessity.
Lacking civil marriage rights, Charity used Christian spiritual vocabulary and poetry to legitimize her bond with Sylvia as a divine covenant. She composed acrostics and poems invoking heavenly protection and portraying Christ as a bridegroom, employing phrases like the tie that binds to invest their union with Christian authority.
In March 1808, Charity wrote the poem On the Prospect of Separation, agonizing over the thought of being torn from Sylvia's bosom and finding rest only on her friendly breast.
In 1808, Charity and Sylvia took a trip to Massachusetts that functioned as a bridal tour, successfully securing approval from Charity's sister Anna and managing painful partings with former lovers like Lydia. By visiting family in Pelham and North Bridgewater together, the women presented themselves as a fixed couple. Anna Kingman endorsed the relationship, which smoothed the path for family acceptance, though it forced Lydia Richards to finally relinquish her romantic hopes for Charity.
Lydia Richards received the news during the Pelham visit in May 1808, ending her monthly letters of romantic longing and eventually pivoting to a friendship based on the acceptance of Sylvia as Charity's life companion.
To publicly solidify their marital commitment, Charity asked her brother Peter to purchase a wedding ring for her in Boston. Rings had long symbolized matrimony. Despite her tight financial circumstances as a working woman, Charity had her brother buy a single ring valued at four dollars to cement the permanent bond between her and Sylvia.
Peter held onto the four-dollar ring in Boston until the women came for a visit because it was too valuable to send through the mail.
On January 1, 1809, Charity and Sylvia moved into their own twelve-by-twelve-foot structure in Weybridge, establishing physical permanence and a shared household. Property ownership was traditionally reserved for men, making it exceedingly difficult for women to live independently. By leasing a quarter-acre plot from female landowner Sarah Hagar, Charity and Sylvia bypassed male dependence and established a home that served as both a living space and a tailor shop.
Sarah Hagar leased the land to the couple, protecting her property from her financially unstable husband while helping Charity and Sylvia avoid the rumors of sexual impropriety that might have arisen from renting on a man's property.
Sharing a single bed in a tiny house exposed Charity and Sylvia to suspicions of lesbianism, which they countered by building reputations for piety, industry, and good works. While bed-sharing was common on the frontier, moralists warned of its sexual dangers. Charity and Sylvia had to rely on community respect, piety, and rejecting outside romantic interlopers to preserve their household.
When schoolteacher Mary Hovey grew overly enamored with Charity and sent a romantic paper heart token in August 1809, Charity firmly rejected the gift to protect her primary commitment to Sylvia.
7. Gender Roles and Economic Partnership
Charity acted as the female husband leading the household, while both women maintained equal economic standing and community respect.
Charity adopted the socially recognized archetype of the female husband, positioning herself as the head of the household. Although she wore women's clothing and did not pass as a biological male, her enterprising temperament, dominating personality, and management of business accounts led neighbors and census recorders to view her as the male head.
William Cullen Bryant likened Charity to a husband and Sylvia to a fond wife, and Hiram Hurlburt noted that Miss Bryant was the man. In the 1820 Vermont census, Charity was first recorded as head of household.
Sylvia maintained an equal economic claim to their shared property and tailoring business despite Charity acting as the public financial representative. While Charity handled external debts and signed business papers in alignment with traditional coverture logic, Sylvia preserved her independent feme sole rights and kept meticulous domestic and food-exchange records.
Sylvia wrote an informal will ensuring that Charity would enjoy her share of their jointly built house and property during her natural life. In December 1818, Sylvia's brother Asaph Drake lent the women 50 dollars. A typical account settlement with Jehiel Wright showed 3.83 dollars due to Miss Briant.
Charity and Sylvia secured community toleration not by hiding their relationship, but by making it as public-minded and socially conventional as possible. By fulfilling traditional gender roles and participating actively in church life, the women enlisted the support of their neighbors, who preserved the open secret of their union through collective silence.
Both women viewed their physical intimacy as a serious spiritual transgression, often using religious terminology associated with sexual sins, sodomy, and uncleanness to berate themselves. In 1811, Charity experienced a profound spiritual awakening after a prayer meeting and reflected on Isaac Watts's hymn about wild affections. Sylvia frequently berated herself in her diary for sins of the first magnitude and unclean lips, noting after 31 years of marriage that sin mars earthly bliss.
10 Key Ideas
- Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake forged a recognized same-sex marriage in nineteenth-century New England by combining economic independence, religious piety, and social conformity.
- Both women overcame profound personal and economic destabilizations in the post-Revolutionary era before meeting in Vermont.
- Post-Revolutionary youth culture and district schoolteaching provided young women with new emotional intensity and independent wages.
- Intimate female friendships offered deep emotional bonds but also exposed non-conforming women to intense community gossip and suspicion.
- Charity proclaimed a firm marriage embargo against men while cultivating passionate, secretive romantic attachments with other women.
- Fleeing family scrutiny and broken romances in Massachusetts, Charity relocated to Vermont and established a permanent domestic partnership with Sylvia Drake.
- Charity framed her 1807 union with Sylvia as a common-law marriage by drawing on historical legal traditions of mutual consent and Protestant concepts of a help-meet.
- Charity acted as the female husband leading the household, while both women maintained equal economic standing and community respect.
- Sylvia and Charity built a self-reliant economy through tailoring, property leasing, and meticulous business records that secured their survival and independence.
- The couple's lifelong dedication and communal integration culminated in a shared headstone in Weybridge that cemented their status as a married pair for eternity.