"Boston marriage" is a term that entered the American vocabulary in the late nineteenth century to describe an arrangement in which two women lived together in a committed domestic partnership, without husbands, usually economically self-supporting through professional work or inherited income. The term is often attributed to Henry James, whose 1886 novel The Bostonians depicted such a relationship — though James used it satirically, and the culture that produced Boston marriages was, for most of its existence, not satirical about them at all.
The phenomenon was concentrated in a particular social stratum and a particular historical moment. The women who formed Boston marriages were typically educated, professional, middle- to upper-middle-class, and part of the social world that was beginning to produce the first generation of American women to attend college in significant numbers. Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the other women's colleges that opened in the 1870s and 1880s created communities where women's intellectual and emotional lives centered on other women, and where the idea of a life organized around a female partner was not exotic but familiar.
The most cited examples are also among the most distinguished American women of the period. Katharine Lee Bates — author of "America the Beautiful" — lived for twenty-five years with Katharine Coman, a fellow Wellesley professor, until Coman's death in 1915. M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr College, lived successively with two women partners over the course of her adult life. Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke for thirty-six years, lived with Jeanette Marks for fifty years. These were not hidden relationships. They were known to colleagues, reported in newspapers, and treated as arrangements worthy of note rather than condemnation.
What enabled Boston marriages was, in part, economic change. The expansion of professional opportunities for educated women — teaching, college administration, settlement work, social reform — made it possible, for the first time in American history, for a substantial number of women to support themselves without marrying. If economic dependence on a husband was one of the main structural pressures driving women into marriage, removing that pressure opened alternatives. Boston marriage was one of them.
The interpretive question — were these relationships sexual? — has preoccupied historians in ways that probably reflect more about the present than the past. The women involved left records that are sometimes ambiguous, sometimes intimate, sometimes explicitly physical, sometimes entirely silent on the question. The silence is not evidence either way. What is clear is that these women experienced their partnerships as the central organizing relationships of their adult lives, that they grieved each other's deaths, that they made domestic life together, and that this was, for many of them, entirely consistent with the public roles they played as educators, reformers, and intellectuals.
The Boston marriage declined as a socially recognized form in the first decades of the twentieth century — partly because the sexological literature made such partnerships suspicious, partly because the political changes of the women's movement shifted some attention to relationships with men, partly because "lesbian" as an identity category changed how women understood and described their own relationships. But the underlying pattern — women organizing primary domestic and emotional life around other women — did not disappear. It changed its name, its cultural meaning, and its relationship to stigma.