HIS 184 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Homosociality, Separate Spheres, Heterosexuality
Document Summary
Middle class and elite white women would form intense emotional friendships with women that historians called it the female world of love and rituals . The relationships were adolescent girls that would extend the full duration of their lives. Sarah butler and jennie field met in boarding school in the 1850s, which is a homosocial environment since it was all females. Sarah butler in the 1850s kept a bouquet of flowers and had a portrait of jennie and assumed sometimes male and female names. They eventually got married and went out to the world and no longer lived in the same vicinity. Same sex sexuality was punished aggressively but there was a distinctive space for them. There"s an emergence of laws of consenting sodomy. In urban communities we see partnerships of men.
