Hannah Willinger

Here Come the Brides: Same-Sex Marriage in U.S. History

by Hannah Willinger

Walking down the streets of the Castro, San Francisco around the 1970s, one would expect to find gay bars and clubs, sex shops, and bathhouses. The neighborhood has historically been a haven of vibrant gay culture. While the out-and-proud atmosphere of the Castro remains today, the introduction of more family friendly elements like book stores and flower shops that line its current streets may signal a trend toward traditionalism over time (1). The Castro’s apparent toning-down from adults-only to more domestic can represent a larger phenomenon in the LGBT community: responding to exclusion by “trying to demonstrate normality” or by “rejecting dominant norms and adopting a position of pride in being outside.” (Shane Phelan) (2). According to Michael Bronski “this major distinction— ­ between claiming an outsider status and demanding acceptance as part of the ‘normal’ majority—[is] the defining division of the LGBT movement.” (3). So how does this division play a role in one of the defining issues of the LGBT movement: marriage? The general shift from radical activism to institutional reform on the topic of gay marriage is a critical development in its history, but it is not a linear change, nor was it the only phenomenon at work. In U.S. history since the late 18th/early 19th century, the concept of marriage has been reframed from a practice in husband’s dominion over wife to companionate and love-based, therefore making it more egalitarian and less entrenched in strict gender roles; concurrently, the binary and compulsoriness of sexuality has grown over time, making sexual orientation an increasingly distinct and defining aspect of identity. The reframing of traditional legal marriage and the growth of LGBT visibility have allowed for the conceptualization, politicization, and finally mainstreaming of “gay marriage” over time.

To understand the history of same-sex marriage, first we must define marriage. This paper will focus on lesbian marriages in particular to emphasize how women’s changing roles in U.S. history have shaped the institution of marriage. In the time of the household mode of production during and before the 18th century, marriage was a survival strategy as it increased a family’s workforce and resources. Coverture stated that a woman’s rights and identity were absorbed into her husband’s and head-and-master laws gave husbands complete legal, financial, and contractual control over their wives. In the 19th century, women’s submissive roles and men’s dominating roles were attributed to natural biological differences. Before the 20th century, sexual control and moderation was stressed, but as companionate marriage originated in the 20th century, romance and sentimentalism were adopted into marriage, especially post World War II. The legal results of the 1970s feminist revolution, like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and laws against marital rape, repackaged marriage as egalitarian and love-based, rather than oppressive to women. Marriage between a man and a woman went from a public institution to a private relationship to a human right (4). Because sex (for pleasure, rather than solely for procreation) and love were historically absent from marriage or merely peripheral to marriage for much of history, sexuality and attraction did not historically dictate marital decisions as they do today. Growing visibility of LGBT identities over time coupled with the aforementioned evolution of marriage allowed for discussions of gay marriage to emerge in more recent U.S. history.

Many fairly recent scholars and historians of LGBT history and the history of marriage have argued that trends in U.S. history did not suggest the impending legalization of same-sex marriage. For example, historian Stephanie Coontz concluded her history of marriage with,  “In the short run, the United States is unlikely to join Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada in legalizing same-sex marriage.” It is not surprising that scholars such as Coontz made these claims, given the legal circumstances during their context: “By the end of 2004, forty-three states had passed statutes limiting marriage to a man and a woman, and eleven had enshrined this definition in their constitutions.” (5), However, the changing attitudes on same-sex marriage in U.S. history have not followed a line of linear progression, meaning that same-sex marriage was not simply gradually increasingly tolerated over time; this paper will demonstrate how the status of same-sex marriage has fluctuated over time based on other social conditions. The changing definition of marriage and the growing importance of sexuality over U.S. history impacted both social attitudes and legal policy surrounding same-sex marriage. 

Romantic friendships between women often arose naturally out of the social conditions that dictated that women spent much of their time with other women. Cleves writes that “romantic friendships did not often pro­voke a community’s concerns about illicit sexuality, in part because sexual feelings were not strictly coupled with romantic feelings the way they would be later in the nineteenth century.” (6) Women were increasingly viewed as sexless, delicate, and chaste during the turn of the 19th century, so onlookers could likely not envision intimacy between two women.  Regardless, the committed companionship shared by Charity and Sylvia functioned as a marriage – Charity Bryant even marked the anniversary of the day they became “help-meets [mates] and companions” (7) – and was widely regarded as one, as a neighbor of theirs was recorded saying it was “as if Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other.” (8) With the acceptance of their community and the financial and practical means to together, these women faced no formal social barriers, and the only barrier preventing them from officially living as a married couple was the law.

It may come as a surprise that women in the 19th century could live together as partners in such a visible way, when the idea of a lesbian couple attempting this by the 1950s would be subject to marginalization. But by the 20th century, the growing dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality dictated that same-sex attraction was an identity-defining sin. U.S. society in the 1940s and ‘50s was structured around rewarding the traditional heterosexual nuclear family: the Revenue Act of 1948 reduced married couples’ tax burden by splitting their income and taxed married working couples greater than households with a single breadwinner (9); suburban mortgages were more easily acquired by white heterosexual couples; and gay individuals were at risk of losing their jobs for their sexuality (10). The greater emphasis on sexuality made the Boston Marriages of the previous century impossible to live out. In response to the stifling heterosexualization of society in the postwar period, lesbians or women that felt same-sex attraction carried out same-sex affairs while married to men, or took a radical stand against heteronormative culture and completely disassociated with it, essentially a choice between two extremes or opposite ends of the spectrum. To explain how lesbian desires manifested as extramarital affairs for many women in the postwar period, historian Lauren Jae Gutterman states that “In the 1950s and 1960s, many married women… believed that “lesbian” was something one could be by degrees,” (11). Same-sex desires were “tendencies” or “inclinations,” to these women, rather than an all-encompassing classification warranting the establishment of new martial conventions or identity. These women may have engaged with lesbian culture via their affairs, or further by writing to The Ladder, the magazine of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, but still remained married women and mothers. For some, marriage was a protection against marginalization, but for many “they did not make a conscious decision to marry because they had always taken for granted the fact that they would” because of marriage’s implicit, assumed stance in society as means to financial stability, to fulfill familial expectations and because of the sense of normalcy marriage was associated with (12). Popular psychology that reigned in the postwar period defined marriage as normal, and homosexuality as “pathological,” and psychoanalysts at the time argued “that it was easier for the lesbian to be ‘cured’ if she only accepted marriage and motherhood.” (13) Thus, the prevalence and social necessity of the nuclear family and traditional marriage in this period dictated a sort of all-or-nothing approach to expressing lesbian attraction: balancing it within the domestic, heteronormative sphere, or rejecting marriage completely. The lesbian interaction with marriage at this time was that one could be a lesbian and also a housewife in a heterosexual marriage. 

Lesbians who were not married to men may have been radicals for rejecting such a deeply entrenched and implicit societal norm, but did not disengage with heterosexual marriage with the intention to pursue a marriage with a woman. Rather, it was a rejection of oppressive gender roles that confined women, as expressed in the article “Here to Stay” from Vice Versa, an early lesbian periodical. The piece celebrates the movement away from “when woman’s domain was restricted to the fireside” and when “marriage and a family was her only prospect.” Vice Versa depicts marriage and the household as antithetical to independence and the values of modern women. “Night clubs” and “drive ins” were the spots where lesbian culture could flourish – not within the home (14). Independence was emphasized as the radical alternative to heteronormative marriage, rather than couples engaging in the same customs but with an honest portrayal of same sex attraction. Gay marriage was not an option considered at this time, for either radical nonconformists like those behind Vice Versa or traditional normative housewives. Because of the strong association between marriage and women’s submission to gender roles and household duties, those who advocated for feminism and equality did not consider same-sex marriage as a means to reform. The desirable alternative to marriage was not lesbian marriage, but was the absence of marriage. It would take another revamping of marriage for it to appeal to American women to reform from within rather than reject from outside.

Among the myriad social movements sweeping the United States in the 1960s-70s included battles for women’s rights and LGBT rights. Radicals were ready to abolish marriage while reformers wanted to introduce egalitarianism and equal companionship to legally-protected monogamy. In tandem with the transformation of heterosexual marriage, gay marriage gained recognition and discussion but was not yet fought for as a human right. In a 1963 issue of the lesbian magazine The Ladder, Jody Shotwell reported on the commitment ceremony, or non-legally recognized wedding, of a lesbian couple in a manner not particularly critical or urgent, describing it as a “performance (pardon, ceremony)” (15). While the subject couple seem to genuinely want to engage with marital tradition, Shotwell does not seem to find any meaning in this attempted application of heteronormativity to a lesbian couple. Going a step further than Shotwell, some LGBT activists ouright rejected the concept of gay marriage in in its early years of growing legitmacy. Martha Shelley, a key organizer of radical LGBTQ rights groups like the Gay Liberation Front and later Lavender Menace/Radicalesbians, referred to same-sex marriage as “a form of Unlce-Tomism” in The Ladder, asking “why should we all pretend to cherish the same values?” “Nowhere… have I seen a marriage that even approached the ideal of permanent love and respect, or even permitted a tolerable degree of mutual freedom. And there’s no real security in it,” Shelley argued (16). As scholars Stacey and Davenport asserted, “Most gay liberationists of the 1960s and 1970s had no interest in imitating or assimilating into heterosexual norms. Those who first broke down the tightly secured door of the closet… never imagined they might be clearing the way for a new culture of domesticity.” (17). Many members of the LGBT community took offense to the idea of gay marriage because they interperted it as assimilation or giving in to a civilizing, moralizing institution that they had historically been marginalized by.

However, concurrent feminist activists that were affecting concrete change to the institution of marriage would make it more accepting and appealing than it had been, thanks to legal transformations that created more equal conditions for marriage. No fault divorces were legalized in California in 1970, with almost every state enacting them in some form by 1983; laws against marital rape were first introduced in 1975; and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 allowed women access to credit (18). These laws helped form a new, more appealing image of marriage based on love and companionship, rather than unequal gender roles and subservience; and with LGBT rights becoming increasingly visible and vital to the community, the timing was opportune for the discussion and dissemination of more tolerant discussions and fresh perspectives on same-sex marriage in U.S. culture.

Notes

1. “San Francisco: The Castro,” SF Gate, accessed April 2, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20080923102242/http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/castro/ 

2. Walter M. Frank, Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 166. 

3. Frank, Law and the Gay Rights Story, 166

4. Professor Blower lecture

5. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2006) 360.

6. Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=1661330. 

7. Cleves, Charity and Sylvia, 101

8. Cleves, Charity and Sylvia, 103

9. Edward N. Polisher, “The Revenue Act of 1948,” Dickinson Law Review 52, issue 4. 

10. Professor Blower lecture

11. Lauren Jae Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) 34.

12. Cleves, Her Neighbor’s Wife, 63. 

13. Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) 230.

14. “Here to Stay,” Vice Versa, Sept. 1947, 5-6. 

15. Jody Shotwell, “Gay Wedding,” The Ladder, Feb. 1963, 4-5. 

16. Martha Shelley, “On Marriage,” The Ladder, October-November 1968, 44. 

17. Frank, Law and the Gay Rights Story, 163.

18. Professor Blower lecture

19. Frank, Law and the Gay Rights Story, 161

20. John D’Emilio, “Marriage?” The Word is Out, August 1996, 1. 

21. GLAAD and the Freedom to Marry Task Force, Freedom to marry: key questions and answers (New York: GLAAD). 

22. Coontz, Marriage, a History, 360.

23. Justin McCarthy, “Two in Three Americans Support Same-Sex Marriage,” Gallup, last modified May 23, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/234866/two-three-americans-support-sex-marriage.aspx

24. McCarthy, “Two in Three Americans Support Same-Sex Marriage.”

25. “H.R.8404 - Respect for Marriage Act,” 117th Congress, accessed April 2, 2023, https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8404 

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