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

[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.