Community and Kinship at Smith College in the Early Twentieth Century
Can we view these women as lesbians?
While they might have not used the label lesbian for themselves and there is no mention of sexuality within these archival documents, we can still understand these women’s relationships as loving partnerships between women. Their private lives illustrate rich friendships and romantic relationships which were central to their lives at Smith and abroad.
These women’s relationships were only documented through administrative records from Smith. Smith kept files on their professors personal and academic lives. These files and administrative correspondence are the only surviving documentations of these women’s lives. While the collections do not include love letters or diaries there is still references to community and companionship within them.
Reading Administrative Documents for Lesbian Desire
Letter from Florence Alden Gragg to William Allen Neilson, April 15, 1928. Florence Alden Gragg, Office of the President William Allan Neilson files, Box 374, Folder 9, Smith College Archives, CA-MS-00013, Smith College Special Collections.
Letter from Amy Louise Barbour to William Allen Neilson, April 17, 1928. Barbour, Amy Louise ’91, 1921-37, Office of President William Allan Neilson Files, Box 364, Folder 2, Smith College Archives.
This faculty memorandum is reporting on the same Sabbatical requests from Florence Gragg and Amy Barbour’s letters above. This time they are referred to as a pair.
Notice the parenthesis, which mention their mutual adopted children. It is unclear how prevalent adoption was amongst unmarried women in the early twentieth century the women who did adopt “often raised their adopted children with female partners or within a community of women.”1
On this trip they also visited their past students, Marion Guptill (class of 1926) and Alison Frantz (class of 1924), who were studying at the American School for Classical Study in Athens, Greece.
Smith College Professors Visit Home of Vergil and Livy, January 13, 1930. Amy Louise Barbour, Faculty and staff biographical files, Box 666, Smith College Archives.
Amy Louise Barbour, Faculty and staff biographical files,
Box 666, Smith College Archives.
Florence Alden Gragg, Faculty and staff biographical files,
box 830, Smith College Archives.
- Berebitsky, Julie. ‘“Mother-Women” OR “Man-Hater”?’ In Like Our Very Own : Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950. University Press of Kansas, (2000); 105. ↩︎