hi and welcome back to history 370 women in america from the colonial era through the civil war in this segment we will be continuing to talk about women's lives within women's sphere but whereas last time we focused on women's lives within the confines of the female academy in this section we'll move on to female friendship these are however connected topics because while female academies were intended as a way to socialize women to inhabit their proper sphere in their homes and in society as part of the scheme of female education women were also introduced into a largely female world because the justification for female academies was to prepare women for women's sphere this was one of the reasons that female academies were well female academies that they became entirely female spaces dominated by female students and female faculty in this context women often formed extremely close friendships that were sort of their initiation into what the historian carol smith rosenberg calls the female world of love and ritual according to carol smith rosenberg this uh sense of a female world flourished in 19th century america in female spaces such as boarding schools and female academies and also in female rituals such as for example childbirth the female world of love and ritual encouraged cooperative and affectionate relationships among women 19th century americans would really not have understood the whole concept of the mean girl for them the ideal relationships among women were about mutual affection and cooperation they would not have understood competitive or negative relationships between women in female spaces and during female rituals this fostered a strong sense of community among women this is very closely related to the idea of woman's sphere according to the ideology of separate spheres men and women had entirely different personalities they had entirely different characteristics by the same token then all women were presumed to share similar characteristics and similar traits this is the reason that they were particularly suited for a future within women's sphere because of this assumption that all women shared certain traits and all women shared a common destiny then there was a strong sense of community among women in antebellum america and this ultimately resulted in a strong sense of group identity based on gender in antebellum america people referred to this as sisterhood and close friends frequently referred to one another as sisters even when they had no actual relationship to one another another way to understand this is in terms of what contemporary scholars call gender consciousness in other words women were conscious of themselves as being gendered as being women and they understood themselves thus to have something in common with all other women as well as having a sort of obligation to all other women all other members of that community of women well the community of women wasn't just an airy fairy kind of idea that existed out there in the world of prescriptive literature it was also a real thing woman really did form strong communities and one of the places that they did this was in female academies so these again largely residential institutions or boarding schools actively promoted close friendships among their students in line with the ideology of women's sphere female academies emphasized that women all shared the same qualities and would eventually assume the same responsibilities and thus teachers and other authorities at schools encouraged their charges to create close ties with their schoolmates in preparation for their common future for instance lydia huntley who was a school teacher in hartford connecticut in the 1810s advised her students consider yourselves as a little band of sisters united for a time in one family students themselves took this kind of advice to heart sally ripley a student at the dorchester female academy in 1803 and 1804 recalled her very first week of class she wrote a number of the young ladies form themselves into a society to be called the band of sisters we are all to live in perfect harmony and friendship and no young lady belonging to the society is to speak unkindly to a sister so here again you can see that this language of sisterhood was quite widespread and the assumption was that sisterhood involved relationships of perfect harmony and certainly could not include any unkind remarks being away from home often for the first time of course also encouraged young women to form close friendships with their schoolmates the physical layout of residential schools encouraged these relationships most female academies were residential institutions that in which students lived in dormitories but beyond that the dormitories themselves would be divided up into a series of alcoves students would be assigned in pairs or sometimes in threes and fours to a shared alcove in many cases students were also assigned to share a double bed so this layout clearly encouraged intimacy that went well beyond the daily classes in the formal curriculum to encompass every aspect of day-to-day life reflecting this schoolgirl rituals emphasize the importance of female friendships so women's letters home describing their time at school as well as their memoirs looking back on their time at school really highlight the importance of these kinds of school girl rituals which definitely fit into carol smith rosenberg's idea of a female world of love and ritual students study together as you might expect but more importantly they chose sort of study buddies who would become their most close companion for the duration of the term or even for the duration of the year a really important school girl ritual was to choose a roommate and school girls agonized over this very important decision in their letters home because they understood that their roommate was not simply going to be somebody that they shared a room with but somebody who was going to become their closest companion and many schoolgirls also engaged in romantic rituals such as exchanging flowers so many school girls in the spring talked about going out into the woods to gather flowers and then presenting bouquets of handpicked flowers to their favorite fellow classmate at the school in this context many women form intense often exclusive and sometimes lifelong relationships with one another a full 50 years five zero years after she had attended school catherine wharton ran into an old school friend she wrote in her diary afterwards she was a great pet of mine at school and i thought as i watched her how often i had held her in my arms and how dear she had once been to me similarly another former student eliza schlatter told her former schoolmate sophie dupont i wish i could be with you present in the body as well as the mind and heart and snuggle into you and we would have a long talk like old times in pine street these kinds of intense same-sex relationships have been described as homosocial relationships or as romantic friendships by historians the reason that historians refer to these relationships as homosocial or romantic is because they were clearly very intimate important relationships but it's less clear what type of relationships they were in terms of sexuality prior to the very end of the 19th century americans really did not have a concept of homosexuality as an identity although americans were aware of and indeed criminalized male homosexual activity they understood that as well an activity not as a preference or as an identity in general antebellum americans were in favor of same-sex relationships precisely because they believed that men and women were fundamentally different creatures who belonged in separate spheres it seemed only natural and indeed desirable that women would form relationships with women and men would form relationships with men given that women and men were presumed to be extremely different it seemed obvious that of course women would look to other women for understanding and intimacy and men would look to other men for the same henry david thoreau wrote an essay titled friendship in which he argued that true love was more possible between two of the same sex than between the sexes so in general antebellum americans were in favor of same-sex relationships but female friendship was especially revered there were several reasons that female friendship was especially idealized in antebellum america but among those was the belief in women's passionlessness so antebellum americans by and large believed that women had no sexual passion antebellum americans commonly separated love and sex whereas love was pure and holy and admirable sex was beastly and corrupt and distasteful a relationship then that included love but not sex was the purest and most admirable type of relationship and most americans believed that women's same-sex relationships were by definition pure relationships according to the theory of female passionlessness women engaged in sexual activity only for the purpose of procreation or to please their husbands so when neither motive was present right the theory goes a woman would not engage in sexual activity because women were assumed only to respond to male advances unless a man was present to act as the initiator of sexual contact there was a presumption of passionlessness female friendship was thus considered especially pure and admirable because it was not considered sexual even if it included kissing hugging snuggling and other types of physical affection that were commonly described in women's letters and diaries another reason that antebellum americans were not threatened by intense friendships including romantic friendships between women was that they did not threaten femininity as defined by 19th century america rather women's relationships actually reinforced woman's sphere the idea being that if women were naturally sentimental and selfless and affectionate and chaste then two women together would be even more sentimental and affectionate and selfless and chaste right so that women's desirable traits would be magnified as they spent more and more time with one another margaret fuller the intellectual and poet explained that a woman may be in love with a woman but she went on to explain that that love was both different from and superior to love between women and men it is purely intellectual and spiritual she asserted unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts by which she meant sex and undisturbed by any need of consulting temporal interests by which she meant for example the necessity of marrying for money thus female friendships viewed as purely spiritual and not tainted by either lust or selfishness reinforced antebellum americans views of women as especially pious and pure and thus unfit for the world beyond woman's sphere finally in antebellum america female friendships rarely interfered with women's role in women's sphere so although women had these very intense relationships with one another that did not mean that they then never married right so most women instead continued to write to win one another long after leaving school but they also got married they maintained their female friendships and those friendships remained a sort of occasional alternative to married life or a side to married life but they did not really replace married life so female friendships thus did not really pose a danger to women taking up their roles as wives and mothers because realistically speaking very few women were able to maintain themselves on their own instead most antebellum women went on to get married and then after marriage they continued to maintain intense relationships with their female friends they would exchange visits for weeks and sometimes even months at a time during which visits the woman's husband routinely was sort of ejected from the marriage bed to allow the women to sleep together but that was temporary the long shot was that as long as women regarded cultural prescriptions regarding women's sphere and they fulfilled their obligations in terms of their roles as wives and mothers they can engage in these romantic relationships without raising any criticism or encountering any social stigma all right that's all we have on women's relationships with one another although next time we'll talk about some of the emerging alternatives for women to remain single if not for life at least for an extended period of time