Wicked Dual

16 Lesbian Power Couples from eighteen thirties to the nineteen forties

Rebecca Perot and Minister Rebecca Cox Jackson

Eighteen thirties to eighteen seventy one

Rebecca Cox Jackson was raised in an African

Methodist Episcopal family but, following a spiritual vision that put the voice of the divine within her, she broke off from the patriarchal church to start her own thing. Her success as a preacher led to her divorce, which led to her traveling around Pennsylvania and New England sharing her gifts, eventually falling for the community she found within a woman-led group of Shakers. She became a Shaker minister and met Rebecca Perot, with whom she joined a sect of the Waterviet Shakers. Eventually the two women, whose quote, unquote mystical visions, had feminist and homoerotic undertones and often featured the other in divine contexts. Eventually, they started their own family of black Shakers in Philadelphia, combining black female praying band traditions with Shaker theology. When Jackson died in 1871, Perot renamed herself, Mother Rebecca Jackson Junior, and took over the Philadelphia family.

Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam

1848 to 1893

Sallie and Caroline met at Oberlin

College, and the noted, anti-slavery team became agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society immediately after graduation.

They traveled on the abolitionist lecture circuit, often along with the legendary Sojourner Truth.

After the Civil War, Sallie stayed up North giving talks, raising money to educate freed slaves in the South, and Putnam went to Virginia to teach freed slaves, eventually starting The Holley School, which became America’s first settlement house. Sallie then joined Caroline in Lottsburg, where they integrated themselves with the community, operated their school year-round and unlike some future suffragettes, were dedicated to enabling, preserving and protecting the right of Black men to vote even when white women could not yet do so. Sallie died in 1893 and Caroline in 1917, at which point the school was deeded to an all-Black board of trustees and continued operating for decades.

Harriet E Giles and Sophia B Packard

1855 to 1891

Giles met Packard in in the mid-1850s when Giles was a student at the New Salem Academy in New Salem, Massachusetts, and Packard was the preceptor. They hit it off right away, and shortly thereafter took off to Atlanta to start a school for Black women who had been newly released from slavery. Packard was the first president of the school, then known as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and now known as Spelman College, when it opened its doors in 1888. Giles took over after Packard’s death in 1891. The two women are now buried next to each other in Silver Lake Cemetery.

Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams

1877 to 1892

Ellen Gates Starr met Jane Addams at the Rockford Female Seminary in 1877, and it was through their relationship that Addams got the confidence to embark on the Hull House Proiect in

Chicago.

The Hull House was part of a movement to provide social and educational opportunities for working class women, mostly recent immigrants; offering classes in literature and history, hosting public concerts, providing child care and putting on free lectures. The two women taught classes, served as on-call midwives, sheltered victims of domestic violence, and advocated for legislative reforms that are now seen as the first models for social welfare. Ellen was more religious than Jane, which may have played a role in their eventual breakup.

Jane subsequently moved on to Mary Rozet Smith, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago industrialist, who was very helpful to Addams’ various missions.

Edith Anna Somerville and Violet Florence Martin

1887 to 1915

Edith, an Irish novelist and her cousin slash girlfriend, Violet, co-wrote fourteen stories and novels under the name, Martin Ross. Their most popular titles were The Real Charlotte and The Experiences of Irish R.M.

After Violet’s death, Edith was inconsolable, and decided to keep writing as Martin Ross, convinced the two were communicating through spiritualist séances.

Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire

1894 to 1954

These two American artists met at the Cincinnati Art Academy in the eighteen nineties and stayed together for 60 years, living for patches in France and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Maud was known for her book illustrations and color etchings, Ethel for her painting, color woodblock prints and drawings. They collaborated on projects like illustrating the legendary Child’s Garden of Verses. The couple were regulars at Gertrude Stein’s salon in France and the subject of her word portrait Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.

The New York Times wrote that they loved to behave outrageously.

Mabel Reed and Mary Ellicott Arnold

1894 to 1963

Mabel and Mary were together for around 69 years, having met as children in New Jersey, and went on to be prominent urban organizers, philanthropists and social activists. After five years of middling success farming a 50-acre plot, they put in time at the City and Suburban Homes Company, which provided housing solutions for the working poor. They were then positioned as field matrons at the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, where they defied pressure to enforce white cultural values upon the Natives who lived there, and wrote the book In the Land of the Grasshopper Song. Later organizing projects included cooperative cafeterias and apartments in New York, credit unions for lobster fisherman and cooperative housing projects for coal miners, as well as many other housing projects throughout the Northeast. They became widely regarded social activists and organizers, known for their drive to include women in their husband’s housing decisions and unconcerned by critics of their unconventional behavior, wearing divided skirts, riding horses through the backwoods, living in non-white areas, and thwarting conventional Victorian female ideals.

Fannie Johnston and Mattie Edwards Hewitt

1901 to 1917

These two photographers met at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Johnston was a pioneer in her field as one of the most successful female photographers in America, snagging gigs like shooting Edith Wharton’s Paris-adiacent villa, Booker T Washington’s face and Alice Roosevelt’s wedding. Hewitt was then working as an assistant to her husband, also a photographer, who she officially divorced in 1909. Thus, after eight years of an intense long-distance love affair with Fannie, Mattie moved with Fannie in New York, eventually opening an architectural photography studio together.

Mattie’s admiration of Fannie’s work was instrumental in what drew them together. They were commissioned to photograph buildings like the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the Hotel Manhattan. Then in 1917 they had a huge blowout fight and broke up forever.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas

1907 to 1946

One of the most revered lesbian couples of all time, Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, playwright and poet with an unconventional style and a Modernist art collector. She met Alice B Toklas, who would serve as her confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic and general organizer, the day Toklas arrived in Paris. Stein fell hard and fast for Toklas, and by 1910 they were hosting a salon in their home on 27 rue de Fleurus that is now known as one of the most influential gathering spots in the history of arts, literature and queerdom.

Guests included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemmingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Henri Matisse, Ethel Mars, Maud Hunt-Squire, Eleonara Sears, Eva Le Galienne and Francis Cyril Rose. Toklas hosted the wives and the girlfriends and Stein handled the men. The duo hit the big time with the mass market publication of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas in 1933, which led to an extended United States lecture tour. Toklas and Stein were together until Stein’s death in 1946.

Frances Witherspoon and Tracy D Mygatt

1908 to 1973

Frances and Tracy both graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1908, and then committed themselves entirely to the causes that mattered to them: world peace, pacifism, women’s rights and civil rights. But pacifism was always their number one passion. During World War , they advocated for conscientious objectors: Tracy helped organize the Anti-Enlistment League and Frances founded America’s first-ever organization to support the rights of objectors as well as those persecuted for free speech, the Bureau of Legal Advice. The BLA is considered the forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was founded shortly thereafter, and which worked in tandem with the BLA towards common causes. They joined the Socialist Party in New York upon moving there in 1913, and helped organize shelters and food distribution programs in churches for the homeless. They were inseparable for 65 years, even dying within weeks of each other.

Ethel Collins Dunham and Martha Mav Eliot

1910 to 1969

Martha was a headstrong and stubborn young woman from the jump, refusing to marry and insisting on a life of travel and learning. She met Ethel, who felt uninspired by the socialite lifestyle she had been living, at Bryn Mawr, and the two decided to attend medical school together, become doctors, and live together.

And they did.

They got their medical degrees from Johns Hopkins, where they were active in the local suffrage movement, but were then separated by subsequent work placements. Eventually they were reunited at the brand-new department of Pediatrics at the Yale hospital in New Haven. Martha undertook a study of rickets amongst low-income children, which launched her career in community pediatrics and then got her a gig as director of the Child Hygiene Department of the Children’s Bureau, around the same time that Ethel became one of the first female professors at Yale’s School of Medicine. Their ambitions, extensive research accomplishments and subsequent appointments – including President Truman naming Martha chief of the Children’s Bureau and Ethel becoming the first female member of the American Pediatric Society, often meant spending a lot of time apart, but as Faderman wrote in To Believe in Women, quote, they seem to have believed that their relationship gave them sustenance for the challenges and that their work and their life together were inextricably connected. unquote

Ethel Williams and Ethel Waters

Nineteen tens to nineteen twenties

The Two Ethels, met at the Alhambra Theater in Harlem, Ethel Waters was a popular blues singer and Ethel Williams was a dancer. They fell in love and summarily merged. Waters got Williams a job working at the cabaret where she worked, they lived together in Harlem and Waters took Williams with her on her first nationwide tour, where Williams would dance to warm up the crowd before Waters’ performances. In the touring revue Oh, Joy. they even did a skit about being partners, that winked at queer audience members while refusing mainstream identification. Waters’ managers at Black Swan Records manufactured gossip about Waters, once pushing a piece about how her recording contract stipulated that she couldn’t get married to explain her not having a male partner.

Eventually, Ethel Williams left Waters and her job to marry a dancer named Clarence Dotson.

Florence Yoch and Lucile Council

1921 to 1964

Considered two of the finest garden designers and landscape architects in California, Lucile started out as Florence’s apprentice at her firm and then became her life partner. They designed estates, parks, movie sets and botanical gardens. Notable works include The Getty House gardens, the film sets for the exterior of Tara in Gone With the Wind and the estate of Howard Huntington. Their collected works are documented in the book Landscaping the American dream, the gardens and film sets of Florence Yoch, 1890 to 1972.

Dorothy Arzner and Marion Morgan

1927 to 1971

Arzner was the only successful female film director of Hollywood’s golden age, and she met her beloved Marion on the set of Fashions for Women. Marion Morgan was a vaudeville dancer and choreographer who led her own performance troupe. They began working together on films in 1930 and commissioned architect W.C. Tanner to build them a Hollywood Hills estate, Florence Yoch designed the gardens. They lived there for 40 years, until Morgan’s death in 1971.

Mabel Hampton and Lilian Foster

1932 to 1978

Mabel Hampton, born in 1902, had a tumultuous childhood that took her from North Carolina to New York City to New Jersey and eventually to a job dancing in Coney Island just as the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. She performed with stars like Moms Mabley and Gladys Bently and lived openly as a lesbian, eventually giving up dancing and becoming a domestic worker, for the family of the now-famous Joan Nestle.

She met Lillian Foster in 1932, and they were inseparable until Lilian’s death, living together on one hundred and sixty ninth street in the Bronx and calling each other husband and wife. They were active in the Gay Rights movement, ran their own laundering business, and worked together to collect and organize a wealth of documents, newspaper clippings, photographs and books, including programs from the opera performances she and Foster loved attending, that would help form the Lesbian Herstory Archives, of which Joan Nestle named Mabel a founding member.

Mabel’s oral history was preserved by Joan in the archives.

Ruth Ellis and Ceceline Babe Franklin

1936 to 1971

Ruth C Ellis met Ceciline Babe Franklin in 1936, and then they moved to Detroit and launched Ellis and Franklin Printing, which made Ellis the first woman in the city to own her own printing business. Franklin worked as a chef. They bought a house in 1946 which became known as the Gay Spot, a gathering place for the local black gay and lesbian community. It was a welcome refuge for black folks who weren’t given access to the white bar scene. Gay people didn’t have anyplace else to go, Ellis said in Family, A Portrait of Gay and Lesbian America. Everybody would bring a bottle. We used to dance a lot. We had a piano in the basement and we’d sing and play. We’d dance and drink and play cards.

They gave lodging to gay black men newly arrived from the south, and helped young folks through college. Since 1999, The Ruth Ellis Center in Detroit has been a place of refuge for homeless LGBTQ youth, so her incredible legacy lives on.