Review: Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves

by CarrieS

Grade: A-
Title: Charity and Sylvia
Author: Cleves
Publication Info: Oxford University Press 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-933542-8
Genre: Nonfiction

Charity and Sylvia: A Same Sex Marriage in Early America is a non-fiction book that chronicles the lives of two women who were born during the American Revolution and who formed a relationship that was recognized as a marriage by their community. The author, Rachel Hope Cleves, talks about how and why they were able to do this, and what their lives were like. It’s informative and although it’s a bit more academic than most of what I read, it’s entertaining as well.

Charity was a woman who was always opinionated and as independent as possible. She had many “passionate friendships” with women, some of which seem to have included physical passion. Although she constantly endeavored to appear respectable, she was hounded from one town to another by gossip.

When Charity met Sylvia, they were able to build a life as a couple. They did this partly by being able to establish their own home, partly because by that time they had both declared to their families that they would never marry so their relationship was not a threat to their prospects of marrying men, and mostly because they made themselves indispensible to their families and to the community through charitable works, contributing to church life, and employing a number of girls in their sewing business. The community used a “don’t ask/don’t tell” approach to the women’s sexuality to acknowledge that they lived as a married couple in spirit without having to confront the fact that they also lived together as a married couple in sexual terms. Charity and Sylvia lived together for forty-four years, until Charity’s death from heart failure.

The focus of the book is on how Charity and Sylvia’s relationship came about and how they made their relationship work. In the process, the author talks about the importance of recognizing that same-sex relationships, including ones that were sanctioned by the community (within limits) have existed since the country’s founding. She also talks about how rural communities were sometimes safer for same sex couples than urban ones, a shift from the general sense that people have today. In a sense, Charity and Sylvia lived their whole lives in the closet, and in another sense they were very much out. While no one would ever have dared to discuss what they did at home, everyone knew that there was only one bed. “Charity and Sylvia gained the toleration of their relatives and community not by hiding away but by being public minded”, says Cleves, pointing out that their service to the community basically made them too valuable to exclude.

Some of the most enjoyable moments in the book have to do with women’s lives in general. School teaching gave women a chance to form friendships outside the circles of their families. Correspondence was an acknowledged and valued art. Charity was known as an excellent poet – she was especially good at writing acrostics. I adored the part in the book about poetry and I think I need to find a way to make sending poems a part of my life:

The price of paper led many letter-writers to cram as many words as possible onto each sheet, often turning sheets ninety degrees and penning a second page crosswise over the first. But in a poem given as a gift the words were permitted to luxuriate in space. A poem’s visual appeal mattered, and letters were illustrated with great swoops and swirls to make each line beautiful…Most of all, poems had value as gifts because they signaled emotional intimacy and trust between the giver and the getter. Poems symbolized a connection that ran deeper than superficial pleasantries.

This book is not purely academic in the sense that it avoids jargon and it keeps its focus on the human experience. But I do feel that it’s a bit more academic in tone than the books I usually review. It’s enjoyable reading but not light reading. There’s a lot of repetition since first of all Sylvia and Charity had repetitious lives and second of all the author has to make the same case over and over again (usually the case the author is making is that these women had sexual relationships with other women as opposed to platonic but passionate friendships). It avoids the technique I hate above all others (speculating about someone’s inner thoughts without evidence, i.e., “She must have been nervous/happy/excited”). The book involves speculation, but the author is careful to back up her speculations with evidence and admit that the evidence is not conclusive.

To me the most powerful message of the book is that same-sex relationships are not only not new, they weren’t even particularly unusual, and they weren't always doomed. There’s a sense that if you are writing about gay characters historically, you have to make their stories tragic, because their lives were tragic. In fact, Charity and Sylvia had plenty of tragedy in their lives, and the author doesn’t try to downplay this. They experienced a lot of illness and a lot of loss, as was common in that era of high mortality. They also experienced pain directly related to their sexuality. Charity was hounded out of several towns and Sylvia in particular seems to have regarded her sexuality as sinful all throughout her life. However, on the whole, this is the story of a happy and surprisingly (though certainly not completely) open marriage.

In the preface, Cleves talks at length about the history of unofficial marriages in America:

Same-sex marriage is not as new as Americans on both sides of today’s debate tend to assume; it is neither the radical break with timeless tradition that conservatives fear nor the unprecedented innovation of a singularly tolerant age that liberals praise. It fits within a long history of marriage diversity in North America that included practices such as polygamy, self-divorce, free love, and interracial unions….

The most remarkable element of Charity’s and Sylvia’s life together, in the final assessment, may be how unremarkable it was.

This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Kobo

Categories: General Bitching, Reviews, Non-Romance Reviews, Reviews by Author, Authors, A-C, Reviews by Grade, Grade A