Nineteenth Century Girls in Love

[osprey_archer]

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.



These crushes are kind of cute and potentially a good influence, as we see in the Daskam quote: Theo’s mother attributes Theo’s improved care for her appearance and her French to her crush.

In the Molly Brown college series, the love of a good woman has a much more powerful influence: Molly’s one-time nemesis Judith is healed of her lying, cheating, flirting ways by learning to love another girl. “Judith loved Madeleine. For the first time in her life she felt the stirrings of a really deep affection for another girl. It had quickened her parched soul like the waters of a freshet flowing through a thirsty land. Madeleine had first gained the respect of the proud, discontented girl by always being good-naturedly firm, and now she had gained her love.” At the end of the series, when most of the other characters are paired up with heterosexual love interests, Judith and Madeleine intend to start a school together.

(This is the only literary instance I’m aware of where two girls basically end up together, and it’s really only possible because they’re secondary characters. The pressure to give heroines a marital ending was incredibly strong: see, for instance, Louisa May Alcott marrying Jo off to Professor Bhaer to spite the legions of readers who wrote in begging to see her wed to Laurie.

Real life has laxer rules than fiction. Many 19th century did live with each other long term - it was common enough that there was a term for it, a “Boston marriage” - including many extremely prominent women, like president of Bryn Mawr M. Carey Thomas or actress Elsie de Wolfe.)

Back to “girl crush as good influence inspiring more feminine behavior”: Georgina’s crush inspires her “to live each hour in a way that is good for my character, so as to make myself as worthy as possible of her friendship. For instance, I dust the hind legs of the piano and the backs of the picture frames as conscientiously as the parts that show.”

This quote also suggests the general feeling that these crushes are often a little hilarious - see also Marilla laughing herself silly in Anne of Green Gables when Anne works herself into a state at the mere thought that Diana will one day be married. But you see this with heterosexual crushes, too: Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen (1916) builds an entire book on the inherent hilarity of his hero’s crush on a girl who loves to baby-talk her dog. The general belief seems to have been that young love is simultaneously adorable and very, very silly.

Later in the period, however, the attitude toward girl crushes starts to shift. Daskam, writing in 1900, captures the beginning of this change when she comments that there are people “who disapprove strongly of this attitude of Theodora's happy year.” These disapproving people don’t think girl crushes are an adorable good influence: they think that these crushes are “morbid.”

But in 1900, their disapproval hadn’t gained much social force. (Even in 1918, Georgina clearly hasn’t heard so much of a whiff of it.) Daskam laughs it off with a few jocular comments, and adds, “I have always been sorry for these unfortunate people: their chances for reconstructing Human Nature seem to me so relatively slight.” How can you understand human nature if you consider it “morbid” when girls do something as normal and natural as get crushes on each other?

Then, as a capper, Daskam adds that Theo’s mother approved of the crush, and considered it a beneficial influence on Theo. The forces of Motherhood and Tradition and good old-fashioned values are on the side of girl crushes.

Of course, not all girl crushes are as beneficial as Theo’s crush on Ursula. Not every girl is worthy of this kind of adulation. Georgina nearly despairs when she realizes her beloved is actually a coquette: "I wished I could have died before I found out that she wasn't all I believed her to be," Georgina cries, and weeps herself into a sick headache. (Johnston seems to have been generally anti-crush. Her characters’ male crushes also consistently disappoint them.)

Johnston’s most popular heroine, Lloyd of the Little Colonel books, is similarly disappointed in her crush Ida when she realizes that Ida is basically using her to facilitate a forbidden romance... with a boy. This fault is foreshadowed in Ida’s room, which is plastered in pictures of boys: “Handsome ones, homely ones, in groups, in pairs, framed and unframed, strung together with ribbons, or stuck in behind Japanese fans.”

In short, these girls are unworthy crushes because they are too heterosexual. A heroine can get crushes on boys - Lloyd has at least two intense infatuations before she settles her heart on a childhood friend, and Anne Shirley has that disastrous infatuation with Roy Gardner - but she’s not indiscriminately interested in boys qua boys, and doesn’t flirt.

In 19th century literature, the main figure for female sexual deviance is the prostitute, the fallen woman, or the coquette. (It may be going too far to call the coquette deviant, but her behavior is certainly considered Not On.) It’s only later in the 20th century that the fallen women is supplemented (not supplanted) by the lesbian in this respect.

Clemence Dane’s 1917 Regiment of Women seems to be an early example. But that book is exactly contemporaneous with L. M. Montgomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams, in which Anne gets a crush on fabulously beautiful Leslie Moore, whom she first sees on her own wedding night, which shows how slowly and patchily this cultural shift took hold. (In the 1920s, these developments catch up with Montgomery and she begins to worry about these themes in her own work, which may account in part for Emily and Ilse’s cooler friendship in the Emily of New Moon trilogy?)



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.

Comments

[sovay]

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.

That line reminds me of at least two lyric fragments by Sappho.

[osprey_archer]

The more things change... the more they don't change, sometimes.

[legionseagle]

WM Praed (1802-1839) seems to go the same way with A Letter of Advice

Miss Lane, at her Temple of Fashion,
Taught us both how to sing and to speak,
And we loved one another with passion,
Before we had been there a week:
You gave me a ring for a token;
I wear it wherever I go;
I gave you a chain -- is it broken?
My own Araminta, say 'No!' "

....

When I heard I was going abroad , love
I thought I was going to die;
We walked arm in arm to the road, love
We looked arm in arm to the sky;
And I said, 'When a foreign postilion
Has hurried me off to the Po,
Forget not Medora Trevilian:
My own Araminta, say "No!"

[osprey_archer]

What is even the POINT of going to boarding school if you don't fall madly in love with one of the other girls and exchange tokens of undying affection?

[asakiyume]

I wonder if girls loving girls in this way, sans sex, reinforced the image of women--good ones, that is--as pure and untainted. Of course society wants them to have hearts capable of loving and caring... but it baulks at the notion of them getting sexual experience. A crush on a boy could be equally innocent, but maybe the general failure to recognize the possibility of female sexual intimacy made crushes on girls seem extra safe/pure, and therefore a good thing to stick in stories. This would go along with what you were saying about the prostitute and the fallen woman being the main evil ends for women.

That's interesting about crushes being regarded as silly. It's funny how society gets an idea in its collective head ("young people's crushes are silly"; "siblings dislike each other") and then runs with it. I mean there are always instances in which the generalization is true, but definitely not in the truth-universally-acknowledged sense.

[osprey_archer]

I've been pondering this and I want to say yes, tentatively, but with the reservation that what people in the nineteenth century consider "sans sex" doesn't exactly map onto what we consider "sans sex." Almost anyone in 21st century America would consider it sexual for two girls lying in bed together passionately kissing each other's faces and declaring their love for each other, whereas a 19th century person would see it as... really affectionate friendship, or something like that. (In the first half of the nineteenth century, young men could express their friendship this way too. My impression is that the curtain came down on that earlier and faster than it did for intense girlhood friendships, but I may be wrong.)

There's a 20th/21st century tendency to see physical affection, and really intense emotion even if not physically expressed, as necessarily sexual. In the 19th century that's much less prevalent, and you end up with situations that seem OBVIOUSLY sexual to a modern person - the face-kissing! face kissing with literal avowals of love! - and seemed just as obviously pure sweet beautiful David-and-Jonathan friendship to the participants at the time.

[minutia_r]

Thank you, this is really interesting!

[osprey_archer]

I have gathered so many quotes over the years that I just had to share!

[ellenmillion]

This is rather adorable, and now I want to write a historical with many gushing letters, darn it. (In my copious free time...)

[osprey_archer]

In between each chapter there is a gushing letter home to Mama, who is supportive but also occasionally wishes that she would receive a letter about something other than Darling Rosalind.

[littlerhymes]

This is so fascinating. Give your girl heroine a girl crush - so pure! So wholesome! The positive influence of trying to be worthy of your beloved, with her golden hair and jewel toned eyes!

“Judith loved Madeleine. For the first time in her life she felt the stirrings of a really deep affection for another girl. It had quickened her parched soul like the waters of a freshet flowing through a thirsty land. Madeleine had first gained the respect of the proud, discontented girl by always being good-naturedly firm, and now she had gained her love.”

Good for them, I said, weeping. Two ladies in love with their school together! Watching tenderly as their girl students crushed on their other girl students! (within the appropriate time period)

[osprey_archer]

Nothing says heroine material like a nice powerful girl crush! Just look at Anne Shirley.

I like to imagine that Judith and Madeleine never quite notice the forces rising against girl crushes and well into the middle decades of the 20th century continue to gaze on benignly as their students crush on each other.

[missroserose]

Speaking as a woman who's always been prone to crushes on her friends, I find the fact that such affection isn't necessarily regarded as sexual/a hindrance to a firmly heterosexual marriage interesting. I would say that tracks with my experience somewhat; I've occasionally had friends who were uncomfortable with the intensity of my feelings towards them, but just as often have had friends who appreciated the attention. Some of those relationships became sexual, most didn't; a number of them have ended with the other girl getting married, and generally I've been ridiculously happy for them, largely because they've all had excellent taste in finding a partner who's a good match. (If we're going by the trope you've written about here, clearly they were elevated by my faith in their worthiness! ...but I imagine it's more of a chicken-and-egg question, in that the type of woman I tend to crush on already has a strong drive to Be Better.)

One such crush was on an artist friend of some two or three years when I first moved to Chicago. That one didn't end happily, for carelessness on my part as much as lack of communication on hers; still, she posted this on her artist Instagram towards the end of our relationship, and I treasure it.

[osprey_archer]

I think there's a very 20th/21st century assumption that great intensity of feeling (unless the people involved are related) MUST equal sexual attraction, which is an assumption that maps somewhat poorly on actual human emotional experience. Sometimes it does! Sometimes it doesn't at all! Sometimes it does a bit, but not so much that you aren't genuinely delighted when that person falls in love and marries someone wonderful.

And sometimes intensity/attraction moderates over time. Anne at thirteen weeps at the mere possibility of her bff Diana getting married (she also sobs about how much she hates Diana's purely hypothetical husband), but when it actually happens years later, Anne is happy for her.

[missroserose]

I strongly suspect that that last may well be tempered by how much the crusher in question likes/respects the crushee's choice, tbh. Social narratives to the contrary, we eventually learn the hard lesson that we can't be everything to the people we love; presumably anyone who genuinely cared passionately for their friends' well-being would be happy for them, assuming they'd found a person who cared for the crushee as well as they would. (Or maybe not! Feelings are complicated.)

[skygiants]

I'd wonder if this shows up more in books written by women than by men, but even Dickens does it to some degree -- Our Mutual Friend features a con artist attempting to marry a naive young woman off to a fortune-hunter for a cut, who changes her ways because she falls for the mark!

[osprey_archer]

I don't know! My reading tends to skew heavily to female authors, so I don't think I have enough male examples to give a balanced assessment.

I do think maybe it's more common in children's books than books aimed at an adult audience, maybe because the demands of the Victorian marriage plot are less pressing? But even in adult books, you have Shirley and Caroline in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley... although I think Shirley & Caroline's discussion about affection vs. passion, which places their friendship firmly in the affection camp (although as an "affection that no passion can ultimately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more than compete in force and truth"), this is one of the few 19th century possible pairings where there's actual textual evidence that it is definitely just platonic.

Of course, there's Lucy & Ginevra in Villette, but "She's so irritating in every way but GOD she is so pretty" is a very different dynamic.

[lucymonster]

This is so interesting, and I'm really glad you shared it! I don't have quotes to back myself up here, but even with more modern children's fiction (I was a voracious reader of The Saddle Club and The Baby-Sitters Club) the narratives of intense, adoring female friendship contributed to some early confusion on my part about just how much attraction you could experience towards other girls while still counting as straight. In my case the answer turned out to be 'Irrelevant, I'm as queer as a nine-bob note anyway', but it's strange how many of those innocent childhood friendship storybooks sound really quite romantic and even sexual by today's standards.

[osprey_archer]

Claudia and the New Girl was probably my very first encounter with a girl crush in fiction and I read along, enthralled, as Claudia nearly abandoned all her friends to spend all her time with Ashley, whom she describes in rapturous physical detail every time they interact (Ashley is beautiful! and fragile! and has THREE silver earrings in each ear). Just!!!!!!!! Everything about that.

IIRC Ann M. Martin is a lesbian, so I expect she knew what she was doing. It's kind of wild how much people just won't notice if you don't explicitly label it. Two girls gaze in each other's eyes while one of them rhapsodizes that the other is SO BEAUTIFUL and she'll just DIE when her friend gets married and people are like "friendship gazing! like girls do!"

I have some thoughts about how many people conflate queer in the sense of same-sex attraction and queer in the sense of being considered socially deviant, as if the first has to imply the second - I think it's because the two were so strongly linked in the 20th century and to a certain extent today - so much so that they just can't see same-sex attraction if it isn't linked to a sense of shame or defiance. If the characters are blissfully bopping along enjoying their girl-crush, it just doesn't register as queer.

[bookhobbit]

Sorry for the random comment, but got linked by someone because I was musing on the overtly approved appearance of girl crushes in Dorothy L. Sayer's and Agatha Christie's works. Both the novels in question (Unnatural Death and Nemesis) frame the girl crush as a natural thing for a schoolgirl that only becomes morbid when it replaces heterosexuality in adulthood (though there's a Boston marriage portrayed as relatively healthy in Unnatural Death alongside one portrayed as unhealthy/unnatural). So it was AWESOME to see this discussed in further literary context! Thank you for posting!

[osprey_archer]

It's so interesting, because it's so different from what most people seem to approach history expecting, which is homophobia all the way down, evidently. But actually there are LOTS of literary examples of intense girl crushes that the authors think are beneficial and cute - or, if the crush is bad, it's not because the crush object is a girl but because the crush object is unworthy or a bad influence.

It's a literary tradition that hangs on for a long time: you can see it in Enid Blyton's Malory Towers in the 1940s, even in the Baby-sitters Club books in the 1990s.