http://www.salon.com/2014/06/29/lesbian_marriage_in_early_america/Vermont became the first state to vote for same-sex marriage in 2009, almost exactly 202 years after Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake moved into a rented room together in the village of Weybridge. At 30, Charity was Sylvia’s senior by seven years, and she had had a rocky early adulthood. Her intense relationships with a series of young women had provoked nasty gossip in several New England towns, forcing her to move around the region, bouncing from household to household as a guest of friends and relatives. Yet once Charity and Sylvia set up housekeeping — and a tailoring business — together, they would not be separated for a single night over the next 44 years. When they were much older, the poet William Cullen Bryant, Charity’s nephew, wrote a celebrated account of their partnership, describing their bond as “no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage,” and another local memoirist of the period noted that he had always heard “it mentioned that Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other."
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
July 19, 2014
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