19th Century Romantic Friendship Essay

From the 19th century through the early 20th century, romantic friendships flourished in America. These relationships, found between both men and women and most commonly within the middle class, provided support invaluable to those involved and were distinctively more intimate than comparable, not explicitly romantic relationships in preceding and following eras. Romantic friendships developed a unique, intimate nature in the wake of the 19th century’s societal conventions and declined as a result of the fears associated with women’s independence and the emerging concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality, providing important clues into the nature of 19th and early 20th century American society and thought. Largely influenced by the separate
Though sexologists’ initial concepts of homosexuality did not match perfectly with the nature of romantic friendships, these concepts proved to be similar enough that those who felt threatened by the nature of romantic friendships could frame homosexuality in such a way that they could cast suspicion over the validity, normality, and morality of romantic friendships. Many romantic friends objected to this conceptualization even if they were sexually active within their relationships, such as when Emma Goldman disparaged lesbians in 1928 on the basis of their “antagonism to the male” despite her previous sexual relations with her romantic friend, Almeda Sperry. Still, to outsiders, the emotional intimacy and, within women’s romantic friendships specifically, independence of romantic friendships increasingly came to signify homosexuality; as the psychiatrist William Lee Howard wrote in his 1901 novel, The Perverts, “The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence…and that disgusting anti-social being, the female sexual pervert, are simply different degrees of the same class—degenerates,” (Faderman 47). No matter romantic friends’ objections, this view came to dominate society and make the process of maintaining a romantic friendship increasingly difficult and, therefore, less common. In 1928, Wanda Fraiken Neff noted this increased suspicion in her novel We Sing Diana, where “Intimacy between two girls” in her 1920 Vassar college setting is described as being “watched with keen distrustful eyes” (Faderman 35), which she highlights as being different from the attitude of less than a decade before. Romantic friends could even become suspicious of their own desires; even