"Under the Guise of Friendship"

Sentimental Intimacies and the Specter of “Unnatural” Sexuality at Nineteenth-Century Female Academies

Abstract

This article examines nineteenth-century conduct and medical literature that was focused on early United States schoolgirls and their female relationships. It argues that nineteenth-century educators, medical writers, and parents were intensely worried about female academy students developing romantic and sexual same-sex intimacies while at school. Adults expressed concern that schoolgirls' same-sex relationships might turn too romantic, that they might include inappropriate touching and feeling, and that entire schools could be corrupted by illicit sexuality. In their discourse, educational and medical reformers characterized young women’s romantic and erotic intimacies as dangerous threats to heterosexual marriage and heteronormative womanhood. By analyzing nineteenth-century popular discourse on students’ same-sex intimacies, this study provides a window into nineteenth-century beliefs and teachings about same-sex intimacy more broadly, as well as problematizes existing scholarship on nineteenth-century female friendship, in particular, putting the sex back into relationships that historians have labelled “romantic friendships,” and showing how same-sex intimacy was pathologized prior to the turn of the twentieth century.