Nineteenth Century Girls in Love

Theo was wearing her roses to-night, and as she scratched off a little note to thank her she had seemed to see herself, another little dark-eyed girl, sending anonymous roses to Ursula Wyckoff. Dear me! would anybody ever again combine such graces of mind and body as that ornament of Ninety-purple? She had gone on wheel-rides with Theo, and once she had asked her over to wait on the juniors at a spread—Theo had sat up and got her light reported in order to write home about it.

There are those, I understand, who disapprove strongly of this attitude of Theodora's happy year: dogmatic young women who have not learned much about life and soured, middle-aged women who have forgotten. I am told that they would consider Theodora's adoration morbid and use long words about her—long words about a freshman! I have always been sorry for these unfortunate people: their chances for reconstructing Human Nature seem to me so relatively slight.

When Theo had gone home that summer with hands almost as well cared for as Ursula's, sleek, gathered-in locks, and a gratifying hold on the irregular verbs (Ursula spoke beautiful French), her mother had whimsically inquired if Miss Wyckoff could not be induced to remain in Northampton indefinitely and continue her unscheduled courses! But perhaps she was a morbid mother.

-Josephine Dodge Daskam, Smith College Stories, 1900

This quote, long though it is, encapsulates many of the themes I want to discuss in this post about Girl Crushes in 19th and Early 20th Century America.

In the first paragraph, you have Theo’s happy memories of her crush on her older classmate Ursula. There’s no sense of shame or secrecy. Indeed, Theo is so confident that her crush is socially acceptable that she sits up late writing to her mother about it, and as we see a few paragraphs later, her mother emphatically approves.

This is common heroine behavior in American girls’ novels between 1860 and 1920. (It may stretch earlier; I’m just not very familiar with the antebellum literary scene.) In 1867, in Gypsy’s Year at the Golden Crescent, the heroine writes gushingly to her mother about her new friend at boarding school: “She and I are never going to marry, because we could never love our husbands as much as we do each other. Besides, I’d a good deal rather have her than a husband, and besides, I wouldn’t be married anyway. I think it’s horrid.”

In 1918, you have Georgina in Annie Fellows Johnston’s Georgina’s Service Stars, who rhapsodizes that the girl she just met, Esther, is “a blonde with the most exquisite hair, the color of amber of honey, with little gold crinkles in it. And her eyes - well, they make you think of clear blue sapphires. I loved her from the moment Judith introduced us. Loved her smile, the way it lights up her face, and her voice, soft and slow...”

These are both heroines of established series by immensely popular authors. (Anne Shirley in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables also has similar crushes, although of course Montgomery is Canadian. Was this a general Anglosphere thing? Perhaps I should read more English and Australian books to investigate... )

The authors clearly felt no concern that having the heroine crush on another girl would alienate readers or concern their parents - and 19th-century middle class parents could be very finicky about the books their children read. Instead, the authorial attitude seems to be that this is ordinary behavior that many girls will relate to.

( This post got very long because I have so much supporting evidence… )

TL;DR, if you are writing f/f set in America between, say, 1850 and 1920 (probably earlier than 1850 actually; Caroll Smith-Rosenberg suggests that this pattern holds back to the 1780s if not before) and your heroine believes that her crush on her darling friend is shameful! and must be kept secret! this is wildly anachronistic. You may have trouble getting readers to believe it, but it would be far more historically accurate to have her write gushing letters home to her mother announcing that she could never love a husband as much as her beautiful new friend with the gorgeous crinkly golden hair and the blue eyes like sapphires.