#boston marriages

[lgbt-tiktoks]

Boston marriage....? Anyone? No? Okay :(

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

This is a video about Bisexual Lesbians but mostly it's a video about Lesbian History and the decline of physical queer spaces and what you can do to stop queer spaces from disappearing. I commit a minor hate crime at the end so keep watching if you wanna see that.

[quotesfromall]

Healing from childhood sexual abuse is, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh says about life, like peeling an onion. I peel off a layer or two, cry for while and go on.

Leslie Raymer, Boston Marriages

[365daysoflesbians]

MARCH 12: Dr. Ethel Collins Dunham (1883-1969)

Pioneering pediatrician Ethel Collins Dunham was born on this day in 1883. She and her partner, Martha May Eliot, revolutionized the way American hospitals cared for newborns and were among the first women appointed to Yale’s medical school faculty in 1920-21.  

Ethel helped produce an instructional booklet for The Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau in 1938. Titled Infant Care, the booklet educated new mothers on how to care for premature, ill, or injured babies.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Ethel was the daughter of a wealthy executive and was highly educated. She studied physics in high school and enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1901. It was there where she met the love of her life, Martha. After graduating, both women enrolled in medical school. 

In a time when many women were still confined to the home, Ethel became the first woman to enter many high-profile roles in the medical field. She was the first ever female intern in Johns Hopkins’ pediatric department, the first woman house officer at New Haven Hospital, and also the very first female professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Partners in all aspects of their lives, whenever Ethel became the “first” to enter an institution, it wasn’t long before Martha became the second. 

Ethel’s life partner, Dr. Martha May Eliot (1891-1978)

The two worked together throughout their lives, teaching, researching and even co-chairing The Children’s Bureau in the 1930s. One of their most profound contributions was publishing national guidelines for the hospital care of newborns and premature babies. Together, they raised America’s standard of childcare one hospital at a time and improved the lives of countless women by bringing health care education into the homes of new mothers.

The couple in a 1915 snapshot, courtesy Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Ethel and Martha were fairly open about their relationship, living among lesbian intellectuals in a New Haven community of “Boston marriages.” Martha often discussed her relationship with Ethel in letters back home, once writing to her mother that she was excited “to find out what the future will bring forth not only for me but for Ethel too.” Ethel and Martha’s letters to each other were loving and openly affectionate. Whenever work called for a temporary separation, they agonized over the distance: “Dearest, it was hard to say goodbye and I shall miss you terribly,” “I miss you my darling.”  

In 1956, Ethel became the first woman to be awarded the American Pediatric Society’s highest honor, the John Howland Award. In 1967, Martha May Eliot, would, once again, become the second.

[lgbt-tiktoks]

Caption: [When you look back at history, where are all the gay people? Well oftentimes they were hiding in plain sight. Take for example a Boston marriage. So a Boston marriage was this phenomenon in New England in the late 1800s and early 1900s where two wealthy women would cohabitate.

Society as a whole at the time was still pretty anti gay but whatever reason a Boston marriage, they just thought that these women just had a better connection to women than men. They just liked hanging out! All the time! Everyday! And living together, forever! Also marriages were so common with academics they began calling them Wellesley marriages after the college.

That woman right there was in a Wellesley marriage and she wrote America the Beautiful! You know, “amber waves of grain”, “Purple mountains magesty”?. Which just goes to shows that Boston marriages were as American as apple pie! LGBTQ history in America goes all the way back to the Mayflower. Yes there were gay pilgrims and I’ll talk about them more in another video.]

[notar1ana]

Expressing my feelings through tumblr posts

[1esbrarian]

Boston Marriages and the Language of Lesbian Relationships - Lesbian Herstory

Where is the line between Boston Marriages and lesbian relationships? How can lesbians create a language that serves and represents us?

[provenance]

Watching Francis Lee’s Ammonite which...is okay.

I mean God’s Own County is farming tasks + yearning + sex.

This is fossils + yearning + sex

Spoiler-y thoughts below obvi

I don’t think the movie is bad- it’s just not that interesting. It is also very similar to A Portrait Of A Lady On Fire.

I love period clothing! I love gay and lesbian characters! I realize to expect a happy ending in these movies considering the time period is probably not realistic. Though the later 19th century had many Boston Marriages - which is what I think the Charlotte (Saoirse) character was suggesting to Mary (Kate) at the end of the movie. 

But the movie ended with them just standing in a museum together so.....yeah? Not happy, not sad, just ambiguously yearning by some fossils.

I mean if you’re interested in these sort of details: SAOIRSE SITS NAKED ON KATE’S FACE FOR A GOOD MINUTE OR SO.