Until the mid-twentieth century, with the exception of a few female monarchs, political history was made by men while social history was created by women Men dictated the shape of the world in which we lived while women fabricated the style in which we inhabited it. Such was the case of the woman who was arguably the most influential monarch of the last two centuries, Victoria of England. It was her ministers and generals who formed the British Empire of the nineteenth century, but it was Victoria's rules of conduct and constricting morality that dictated the way in which the entire English-speaking world deported itself for almost a century after her death. So persuasive was her message that it is still mistaken for Christianity by a large segment of the religious right in the United States.
Paradoxically, it was in the Victorian era that women experienced the greatest forward thrust toward their own liberation in the Western world's history. They may not have gotten the vote, but the vote was intrinsically of little worth in the nineteenth century. Only a numerically insignificant minority of men had it and, of that group, a still smaller number had the power to institute change. What women did receive was an unprecedented control of their own property. It was imperfect, but it was no longer a given that what belonged to a husband was his and what belonged to his wife was equally his. As Victoria's reign lengthened, ladies were finding divorce an increasingly acceptable alternative to misery.
Women were going to universities and entering fields from which they previously had been barred. Their numbers in law, medicine, and commerce were slight compared to present times. But the difference between none and a few is far greater than that between a few and many. The improvement in their literacy was illustrated not only by the sudden plethora of women novelists but also, more significantly, by the number of books written specifically for women readers.
Living in an age already named for a woman might have added a psychological component to what began in the middle of Victoria's reign. Women began to wonder about their civil rights, to question their traditional roles in society, and, once having questioned, to rebel against them. Some did it stridently, literally chaining themselves to the pillars of society in an attempt to bring them down. Theirs were the names rattling through history, the mothers immaculately giving birth to a women's movement.
There were other women who also rebelled, but it was a much quieter, more subtle revolution, one more in keeping with their traditional roles. They worked within the strictures of the middle and upper classes to which their families belonged and radically modified their traditional roles in it. In so doing, they also made permanent changes in what was deemed socially acceptable behavior for all members of their sex. Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury, Anne Tracy Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, and Anne Harriman Vanderbilt were among them. They did not find prominent places in the posthumous histories of their times but were much better known and more influential during them than many who did. Their likenesses and opinions were on the front pages of the nation's newspapers. In an era when print was the only medium of communication, they were profiled, quoted, and photographed, often writing articles explaining themselves in the leading periodicals of the day.
They belonged to that generation of women who were born and became adults during the reign of Victoria. The deepest sentiments of Victorianism were, if anything, stronger in the United States than in England and helped to shape their values: intellectual, sexual, and psychological.
Elsie de Wolfe and Elisabeth Marbury had grown up and spent their adult lives in or on the periphery of New York society, which was arguably the most Victorian in the world. They decided to live together, but not as an act of rebellion against the prevailing social system. They had grown up and were comfortable in it. They simply desired acceptance, to extend its confines to include them as they were.
Sexual freedom was something with which, as Victorians, they were not overly concerned. No diaries or intimate letters have survived, and at what level of intimacy Bessy and Elsie lived can only be surmised. Had they begun their relationship a decade earlier, it would have been classified as a "Boston marriage' an arrangement in which two women shared a domicile, expenses, and every intimacy of marriage short of sexual intercourse. As they and their intimacy survived Victoria and lasted long into the new patriarchy of the twentieth century, it was surmised they were "gay," a term applied to sexually active female homosexuals long before it was to their male counterparts, who were then considered chronically if not clinically "sad".
In the Boston marriage, social historians of all political persuasions seemed to feel more at ease negating the possibility of sexual fulfillment. It would probably be closer to the mark to evaluate the terms of the Boston marriage as no different from those of any other Victorian marriage. In both same-sex and heterosexual relationships, middle- and upper-class women of the period frequently found difficulties dealing with their own sexual needs and responses. They had been trained to have difficulties, and many were proud of those difficulties. They considered their sexual inhibition one of the things that set "ladies" apart from women of the lower classes. Of course, in their own minds, it was decorum rather than inhibition.
There was no way of ascertaining whether the passion Bessy and Elsie shared was genital. None of their contemporaries ever reported any confessions by either of them. When they first set up housekeeping together, they were known as "the bachelorettes' not in any pejorative sense suggesting homosexuality, indeed, as the antithesis of that. It absolved them of the accusation of sexual intimacy. They were like two old bachelors sharing digs who might be a bit "old-maidish" but were never "pansies"---a "pansy" was something other---just as Bessy and Elsie were something other than tribadies. The former might smoke---but never cigars or a pipe---and the latter was a frilly little filly---no neckties for her!
They would live together through another generation for whom they would become a sapphic legend, thereby exchanging one set of tired banalities for another. It was reasoned by their juniors that the two old girls could not have lived in loving intimacy for so many years without "doing it". They had to be dykes---any other modus vivendi would have been too complex to contemplate.
What was their sexual truth? Of what importance was it to them at the time: of what significance is it to us now? Elisabeth and Elsie loved each other and, for more than thirty years, had a rare camaraderie in which they commingled on every level that was significant to them. The same could be said for only the rarest of unions in which sexual intercourse played the dominant role.
The twentieth century brought changing sexual and social attitudes. The working woman was no longer an oddity, and the successful professional female was looked upon with respect that almost, but not quite, equaled residual male resentment of her. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing had already written Psychopathia Sexualis and Henry Havelock Ellis had begun to publish his seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. A profusion of previously unimaginable information about same- and opposite-sex possibilities began to appear in popular magazines. There was speculation about what couples of all sexes did. At the same time, the once-unassailable phalanx of formidable females who had ruled New York society began to be weakened by divorce.
Were it only that they shared a life, there would have been little to record about Bessy and Elsie beyond that unexceptional fact. What was extraordinary was that they had to invent a life before they could share it. Actually, several lives. Bessy Marbury was the first woman writers' agent. In addition to opening the profession to women, her revolutionary concept of her function gave writers greater control over their own work while infinitely increasing the amount of money they could expect to earn from it. Among those who benefited from her representation were George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Victorien Sardou, Edmund Rostand, W Somerset Maugham, Clyde Fitch, Edith Wharton, Alexandre Dumas fils, Theodore Dreiser, Rachel Crothers, and Eugene O'Neill.
Perhaps her most significant contribution to theatrical history was, as P G Wodehouse maintained, the invention of the modern American musical comedy. She produced the musicals that made Jerome Kern the best-known composer of his generation and discovered Cole Porter as well as producing his first musical.
Although never a suffragette, she came from a long line of involved Democrats and, once women won the vote, became one of the earliest female political power players in the Democratic party. Her early support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted his career and made her one of his trusted advisers.
A majority of their contemporaries believed Bessy's greatest invention was Elsie. She recognized the latter could not merely be her "wife:' that she had to make something of her life. Using her new theatrical power, and despite Elsie's lack of real talent, Bessy turned her dear partner into a well-known Broadway actress. When this did not lead to stardom, Elsie became restless. Bessy opened another door for her that led to Elsie's career as an interior decorator and the lasting fame that was as meaningful as her great success, for she was among the first to put a value on celebrity for its own sake.
Elsie played at being a suffragette once it became a fashionable cause among her socialite friends, but her one undeniable contribution to the liberation of women was giving them a profession in which they would become leaders. She may not have been the first interior decorator, but she was the first female in the profession and made it one in which women could follow her and still remain what society termed "ladies."
Elsie was not the only woman whose life was changed by an intimacy with Bessy Marbury. The latter may not have inspired sexual passion in the former, but there can be little doubt she did in Anne Morgan, whose life changed radically because of it. Anne was the youngest child of J P Morgan and more acceptable to some members of New York society than her often overbearing father. Many eligible men vied for the hand of this tall, handsome daughter of one of the world's richest and most powerful men but none appealed to her. Her boundless energy was displaced in athletics and acting as her father's hostess on his annual trips to Europe.
Bessy changed all that. She awakened a dormant social conscience that turned her into one of the country's most influential advocates for the rights of often-abused and always underpaid working women. She used the Morgan name, a symbol of the excesses of capitalism, to help its disenfranchised victims. While remaining true to her father's Republican party politics, she underwrote women who played powerful roles in the establishment of some of the most radically left-wing unions in the country.
During her life, Morgan was passionately involved with several women. The most intimate of these relationships was with Anne Harriman Vanderbilt. The latter came from a family that used its charm, good looks, and financial success to make a place for itself in New York society. A dutiful Victorian daughter who, through successive widowhoods, married better and better, she became increasingly wealthy and powerful but knew little happiness until late in her life. A woman of her position was expected to play the role of Lady Bountiful, but her philanthropies were of a higher order than those of the majority of women in her privileged world of Vanderbilts and Astors. She was responsible for the first program to combat drug addiction. The apartment development she built for indigent tuberculars was considered a model of inexpensive housing that would let the same light into the homes of the poor with which Elsie de Wolfe was flooding the mansions of the rich.
During World War I, the Annes, Morgan and Vanderbilt, were leaders of that army of courageous American women who served in France long before any American men were in the conflict. Theirs was not primarily a political statement but a humanitarian one. Often risking their own lives, they were there to nurse the wounded and to help the innocent civilians, many of whom lost what little they had during the battles. They remained to alleviate the pain and loneliness suffered by the American boys when their country entered the war. Although the US government did nothing to recognize their service, the French bestowed their highest honors on them.
In 1920, after the death of her husband, Anne Vanderbilt had no desire to live in his ostentatious Fifth Avenue mansion. Bessy was also looking for a new home, and Anne Morgan finally decided to move out of the Morgan mansion. All three opted for an unfashionable, somewhat disreputable neighborhood on the edge of the East River. Elsie was not only to decorate their houses but also to help them to select an architect, Mott B Schmidt. The result was the only cluster of homes in New York built largely by and for women. Bearing no relationship to the overblown grandeur of the mansions of their husbands and fathers, Sutton Square can still lay claim to being the loveliest and most graceful square block in the entire city. It was the perfect illustration of what Elsie had written a decade earlier.
I . . . wish to trace briefly the development of the modern house, the woman's house, to show you that all that is intimate and charming in the home as we know it has come through the unmeasured influence of women. Man conceived the great house with its parade rooms, its grand appartements but woman found eternal parade tiresome and planned for herself little retreats, rooms small enough for comfort and intimacy. In short, man made the house: woman went him one better and made . . . a home
With the exception of Susan B Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, these four women knew almost every American woman of significance during the hundred years that spanned their lives. Their story encompasses the lives of many of these women. Among the latter, only Alva Belmont could be considered one of the revolutionaries of the women's movement, but they were all participants in or witnesses to the most significant changes of their times in the attitudes of both sexes.
Neither rabble-rousers nor conformists, they were the pragmatists who helped to adapt revolutionary principles in ways that made them palatable to the public. In the course of achieving this formidable goal, they ventured into areas seldom explored by women and, in the process, redefined themselves. They were not unlike the current women leaders who had taken the doctrines of the firebrands of the Seventies liberationists and made them feasible in an increasingly complicated world.
They had dash, wit, intelligence, and industry. Without actually discovering anything new, they had the courage to transform much that was stagnant. There is a case to be made for ingenuity and a gift for orderly change also being tools of a revolution.
In the many books written since her death, Elisabeth Marbury has been given the sobriquet Bessie. However, in her letters to her family, she signed herself Bessy, and that is what she will be called in this book. The confusion may have started early on, when she was so occupied with getting people to spell her first name, Elisabeth rather than Elizabeth, that she did not want to further confuse the issue by correcting Bessie to Bessy. By the time she could, she was simply too famous to make the change.
Anne Vanderbilt likewise preferred Anne, although her first wedding announcement and many early legal documents called her Anna while one of her husbands addressed her as Ann. In accordance with her own wishes, she will be Anne in this book.
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