Boston Marriage, Free Love, and Fictive Kin: Historical Alternatives to Mainstream Marriage

Estelle B. Freedman

In light of the Massachusetts state court decision allowing gay marriages, the OAH added a session on "The Peculiar Institution of Marriage" at the annual meeting in Boston last March. My assignment was to provide examples of same-sex unions in the past, but I expanded the charge to ask more broadly about alternatives to marriage and to provide historical perspectives on the contemporary social movement for marriage equality.

Subversive Practices: "Marriage-Like" and Marriage Resistant
Before the current wave of same-sex unions, Americans formed a range of extra legal partnerships that included common domicile, financial interdependence, sexual relations, and/or parenting, sometimes by crossing genders. For example, some Native American men who felt or dreamed that their true identity was female could wear women’s clothes, work at women’s tasks, and marry men. Although not culturally institutionalized, gender crossing occurred among settlers, as well. Thus a "Mrs. Nash" who married several soldiers in the nineteenth-century West turned out, at death, to be male. At the time, newspapers frequently ran stories about women who passed as men, often to earn wages, some of whom married women. In upstate New York, Lucy Ann Lobdell became Reverend Joseph Lobdell and lived for a decade with his wife, Maria Perry. In the twentieth century, midwestern jazz musician Billy Tipton, born a woman, married several times and raised children who did not know that their father was a woman until his death (1).

Men or women who retained their gender identity also established marriage-like relationships in the era before homosexual identity. They exchanged rings or set up common domicile, such as Boston Marriages, so named because so many educated women paired off in that city at the turn of the twentieth century. These women often owned property jointly, planned their travels together, shared family celebrations, and usually slept in the same bed. Cultural assumptions of asexuality tended to protect them from scandal. Male lifelong companions, such as Harvard professor F.O. Matthiessen and his lover, Russell Cheney, however, could not escape the increasing stigma associated with homosexuality. When gay and lesbian subcultures formed in large cities in the twentieth century, the opportunities for same-sex unions expanded, along with explicitly sexual identities. Among lesbians, "butch-femme" couples often paired off, and at least some "married." In Harlem during the 1920s, African American lesbians staged large weddings, complete with bridesmaids and even marriage licenses--when a gay man applied at city hall as the surrogate for a lesbian "groom" (2).

Not all heterosexual couples, however, formally married. During the nineteenth century, informal marriage was common in the southern back country, while African American slaves could not legally marry. For some urban working-class couples, common-law marriage sufficed (3). In addition, utopians and free love advocates, such as Frances Wright, rejected state-sanctioned marriage on principle. "Free love" referred not to sex with multiple partners but to the belief that love, rather than marriage, should be the precondition for sexual relations. In his 1852 tract, Love vs. Marriage, Marx Edgeworth Lazarus argued that just as the state thwarted the individual, so did the "legalized prostitution" of marriage oppress women and suppress love. Highly unpopular, free lovers were arrested for expressing their beliefs. When Lillian Harmon "married" Edwin Walker without blessing of church or state, both were imprisoned (4).

While they pioneered what would later become the practice of cohabitation, the free lovers shared many values with their contemporaries. They formed long-term committed relationships, and most of them condemned homosexual relations as unnatural. By the early twentieth century, anarchist and free lover Emma Goldman reversed the latter judgement by endorsing love in any form, but still rejecting church or state regulation.

From Individual Resistance to Social Movements
Despite isolated efforts to circumvent marital laws, the institution remained a privileged site for heterosexual unions. The recent mass mobilizations to extend those privileges to same-sex couples rests upon a century of change in both marriage and homosexual life. For one, marriage has shed much of its patriarchal trappings of wifely obedience in favor of a companionate model. In addition, same-sex partnerships, once relegated to a shadowy cultural margin, have proliferated openly in the face of gender, sexual, and reproductive revolutions.

Three measures illustrate the changing meaning of marriage. First, reproduction is no longer a primary function throughout the life of a marriage. Not only has average marital fertility fallen from almost eight births in 1800 to around two births in 2000 but parents now live longer after children are grown and many more couples choose to remain childless, even with the availability of technologically assisted reproduction. Second, as marriage has become a route to personal happiness, and with women’s greater economic leverage, both partners feel freer to exit. Longer lives, fewer children, and the goal of happiness have all fueled the divorce rates; as many marriages end as survive. Rather than forming lifelong unions, most heterosexual couples now practice a form of serial monogamy. Third, the state’s role in privileging marriage has expanded because federal benefits (social security, inheritance, immigration, taxes) flow through this institution (5).

Equally important, lesbian and gay life has both diversified and moved into public view. Since the 1970s, the era of the closet has increasingly given way to visible communities. The sexualization of women in modern America, which removed the mask that once protected romantic friends, also enabled the formation of lesbian partnerships. For men who could once pursue only anonymous, furtive sex, an openly gay culture led not only to the open celebration of pleasure but also to the search for life partners. For both women and men, webs of fictive kin relations help sustain gay identity and community, including former partners who become family and coparents who raise their nonbiological children with friends and lovers.

The explosion of lesbian and gay social worlds, however, is not sufficient to explain the recent quest for marriage. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most lesbian and gay activists were more likely to criticize the institution for its patriarchal heritage than for its exclusivity. During the 1980s, both the AIDS crisis and the expansion of gay parenting made legal marriage a more pressing issue. In the wake of the epidemic, political lines diverged over the critique of anonymous sex, with some calls for more committed marriage-like relationships. More importantly, life partners who served as caretakers encountered unacceptable limits on hospital visitation or authority to determine medical procedures; some could not inherit property to which they had contributed.

In the same era, gay parenting expanded. Since the 1960s, individual lesbians and gay men appeared in courts to retain custody or visitation rights to children born in prior heterosexual marriages. Increasingly, however, artificial insemination, surrogacy, and adoption have made parenting within same-sex relationships a matter of choice. The resultant "gay-by boom" since the 1980s has added another level of convergence between same and opposite-sex families. And like the personal response to AIDS, parenting has revealed the need for greater legal protections, including second partner adoption (6).

Marriage and homosexuality, once viewed as diametrically opposed, have increasingly converged in recent American history. Marriage is no longer the sole venue for caring, sexual, and reproductive partnerships, nor is it a lifelong or primarily reproductive institution for most Americans. Many heterosexuals still form permanent unions and raise children, but so do lesbians and gay men; the latter, however, do so without protections granted their heterosexual counterparts. Thus since the 1970s, same-sex couples have appeared in state courts to obtain marital rights. Religious commitment ceremonies, "gay weddings," domestic partnerships, and, in recent years, civil unions and legally defiant marriage licences all respond to demands for public recognition and legal protection (7).

So, too, the gay movement has had to respond. Though reluctant to support gay marriage cases through the 1980s, groups such as Lambda Legal Defense have joined the quest for recognition. New organizations focus solely on the right to marry, buoyed by the decriminalization of sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and the legalization of same-sex partnerships in parts of Europe and Canada. Even those who do not wish to marry have been forced to take a stand in solidarity with those who do, particularly in the face of legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the proposed constitutional amendment to limit marriage to a man and a woman (8).

In the rush to expand or contract access to marriage, what has happened to the radical critique launched by free lovers and anarchists and once echoed by radical feminists, gay liberationists, and queer activists? Given conservative opposition to same-sex marriage, it has become politically awkward to oppose the right to marry. Yet some critics, such as historian Lisa Duggan, point out that state-sanctioned marriage can be used to reinforce gender dependence and class hierarchies, as in the case of welfare reform; in contrast to seeking marriage, they ask, why not establish benefits for all forms of caring relations (9)? Members of the far left and the far right find some common ground in civil unions, albeit for slightly different political reasons. Radical critics recommend civil unions for all, separating the religious institution of marriage from state regulation. Conservatives who desire to preserve the symbolic sanctity of the term "marriage--and some of its benefits--for heterosexuals have begun to cede ground to once-radical civil unions, even as they seek to outlaw marriage federally.

If and when the first court-mandated same-sex marriages take place, popular opinion, which continues to oppose legalized same-sex unions, could either polarize or adapt, depending in large part how politicians exploit the issue. Historians do best explaining the past, not predicting the future. But it is tempting to extrapolate from the admittedly uneven comparison with race. Like the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Massachusetts court ruled to redress inequality at a time when most Americans oppose the change. Just as civil rights leaders once hesitated to press for interracial marriage, many lesbians and gay men have mixed feelings about both marriage as a political priority and the costs of conservative backlash (10). Nonetheless, these prior rulings did encourage gradual shifts in public opinion. And as in the civil rights movement, the sight of thousands of protesters&emdash;such as the same-sex couples lined up around San Francisco’s City Hall seeking the benefits of marriage&emdash;could affect national sentiment. In the end, far more than any precedents from the past, it will be couples like these who will determine the next chapter in the history of marriage.

Estelle B. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University.

Endnotes
1. Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976); Diane Wood Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

2. Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 73; The History Project, Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

3. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

4. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, "Sexual Politics," Chapter 7 in Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Hal Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, Kansas: Regents Press, 1977).

5. For the OAH panel presentation on marital history, see Hendrik Hartog, "What Gay Marriage Teaches About the History of Marriage," History Network News, April 5, 2004, <http://www.hnn.us/articles/4400.html>; On childlessness, see Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

6. On gay parenting, see Daniel Rivers, "'The Best Interests of the Child': Lesbian and Gay Custody Cases and Parental Rights Activists Organizations, 1967-78," Paper presented at the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., January 10, 2004. Ellen Herman (personal correspondence) points out that judicial victories by lesbian and gay parents, such as second parent adoption, have paved the way for the gay marriage movement as much as they stand to benefit from it.

7. On early cases see David L. Chambers, "Couples: Marriage, Civil Union, and Domestic Partnership," in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, ed. John D’Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 281-304.

8. On conflicting views, see Gust A. Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia, "A Critical Appraisal of Assimilationist and Radical Ideologies Underlying Same-Sex Marriage in LGBT Communities in the United States," Journal of Homosexuality 45: 2 (2003): 45-64. The movement to allow lesbians and gay men to serve openly in the military similarly presents a dilemma for those who support full citizenship but question the institution targeted for integration.

9. Lisa Duggan, "Holy Matrimony!," The Nation, February 26, 2004; see also Alexander Cockburn, "Gay Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom’s Path," The Nation, April 5, 2004, 9.

10. On interracial marriage, see Peggy Pascoe, "Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage is Familiar to This Historian of Miscegenation," History Network News, April 19, 2004, <http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html>; On civil rights leaders and interracial marriage, see Renee Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Post War America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).