Anyone ever heard of the term "Boston Marriage"? Means "lesbian"

[Rabrrrrrr]

Just got it as the Word a Day word. Here it is:

Boston marriage (BOS-tuhn MAR-ij, BAW-stuhn -) noun

A long-term, intimate friendship between two women, often sharing a household.

(After Boston - and other areas in the Northeast US - where such arrangements occurred during the 19th century. Perhaps popularized by Henry James' 1886 novel The Bostonians that portrayed such relationships.)

"Boston marriage of Miss Woolley and Miss Marks, for example, was intensely passionate, as their letters show." Elspeth Cameron; Heart to Heart; Chatelaine (Toronto, Canada); Oct 1997.

"Frances, for her part, saved her own endearments for her lifelong friend, Mildred Minturn, with whom she had a kind of Boston marriage at Bryn Mawr." The Craftsman And the Nihilist; The New Republic (Washington, DC); Jul 4, 1994.

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Pronunciation:
http://wordsmith.org/words/boston_marriage.wav
http://wordsmith.org/words/boston_marriage.ram

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Rabrrrrrr has been subscribing to Word a Day for 10 years! Holy shit!! That's about 3700 words. :-)

[Dookus]

1. Yup

I've heard that one since I was a youngster.

[SoCalDem]

2. Whether it had a name or not..everyone in the US has known them

Did anyone ever demand birth certificates of the two elderly "sisters" or "cousins" who shared a house down the street? Or from the "retired confirmed bachelors" down the block?

These were just people of the neighborhood.. They babysat the little kids, shared holidays..ran errands for the neighborhood friends..

It's only recently , when the wild-eyed freaks started stirring up troouble, that these folks have come under fire..

IT'S NOBODY'S BUSINESS..IT NEVER WAS..

[Senior citizen]

3. I heard the term used for female couples who lived

together and were each other's support system, but didn't necessarily have a sexual relationship. More like two females who didn't have husbands who, in the days before equal opportunity laws, needed each other simply in order to survive. In those days males were paid more because they supposedly had families to support, and females were paid less because they supposedly had, or should have had, husbands to support them. While we still don't have pay equity, things are much better today. But impoverished widows, and females who did not wish to, or for some reason couldn't marry, would have found it extremely difficult to survive alone, so while some Boston marriages may have involved lesbians, I heard the term used to refer to non-lesbian females who lived together as a matter of simple survival.