Rachel Cleves “What, Another Female Husband? The Pre-History of Same-Sex Marriage in America”
Now that the Gay Rights Movement has led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in nine states and the District of Columbia, it is time to re-examine the history of this practice and recover past precedents.
This talk examines diverse evidence of the existence of same-sex marriages in North America from the 16th century through the twentieth century. Unfortunately memory of this history of marital variability has been erased, owing in part to the tendency of contemporary descriptions to describe such unions as “impossible.” The rhetoric of impossibility allowed communities to accommodate couples who transgressed the rule that marriage should be cross-sexed, without redefining the category of marriage.
Rachel Hope Cleves is Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2013), which examines the lives of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage in Vermont, from 1807 to 1851. Originally from New York City, Cleves is a happy transplant to B.C.’s beautiful capital city.
Posted in: