Boston marriage

The fact of relatively formalized romantic friendships or life partnerships between women predates the term Boston marriage and there is a long record of it in England and other European countries. The term became associated with Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), a novel involving a long-term co-habiting relationship between two unmarried women, "new women", although James himself never used the term. James's sister Alice lived in such a relationship with Katherine Loring and was among his sources for the novel. Some examples of women in Boston marriages were well known. In the late 1700s, for example, Anglo-Irish upper-class women Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were identified as a couple and nicknamed the Ladies of Llangollen. Elizabeth Mavor suggests that the institution of romantic friendships between women reached a zenith in 18th-century England. Lillian Faderman provided one of the most comprehensive studies of Boston marriages in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981). 20th-century film reviewers used the term to describe the Jewett-Fields relationship depicted in the 1998 documentary film Out of the Past. David Mamet's play Boston Marriage premiered in 2000 and helped popularize the term. ==Sociology==

Some women in Boston marriages did so because they felt they had a better connection to women than to men. Some of these women lived together out of necessity; such women were generally financially independent due to family inheritance or career earnings. Women who chose to have a career (doctor, scientist, professor) created a new group of women, known as new women, who were not financially dependent upon men. Educated women with careers who wanted to live with other women were allowed a measure of social acceptance and freedom to arrange their own lives. They were usually feminists with shared values, involved in social and cultural causes. Such women were generally self-sufficient in their own lives, but gravitated to each other for support in an often disapproving, sexist, and sometimes hostile society. After the 1920s, women in such relationships were increasingly suspected of being in lesbian sexual relationships, so fewer single women chose to live together. == Wellesley marriage ==

and Katharine Lee Bates lived together in a Wellesley marriage for 25 years. Boston marriages were so common at Wellesley College in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the term Wellesley marriage became a popular description. ==See also==

• Katherine B. Davis, Factors in the sex life of twenty-two hundred women (NY: Harper Brothers, 1929) • Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Columbia University Press, 1991) • Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (NY: Morrow, 1981) • Carol Brooks Gardner, "Boston marriages", in Jodi O'Brien, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, vol. 1 (SAGE Publications, 2009), pp. 87–88, available online (mistakenly says Henry James used the term) • Rita K. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011) • Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study of Romantic Friendship (London: Penguin, 1971) • Esther D. Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony, eds., Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) • Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford University Press, 1986) ==Further reading==