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good as she, but he might not be good enough for her.”
    The best relationship a woman had was often with her girlfriends.
    Sketches from the mid-and late nineteenth century show two women huddled together at the center of a dark velvet davenport, holding hands. During the Civil War era, they were dressed in crinolines so wide that the women look like matching parachutes—ready to jump, together. Later, in photographs, they’re shown strolling, bustles out and arms linked. A magazine illustration common throughout the Victorian age shows one writing a letter to the other, who is pictured inside a daydream cartoon balloon, the edges frilly, like a valentine, the beloved’s imagined face angelic.
    Special friends usually met at boarding school, and typically their parents encouraged the duet. In the ideal parental scenario, two young girls would be “smashed”—think of best friends going steady—and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience. Once they’d mastered these skills they would be able, theoretically at least, to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.
    At the time there were far fewer taboos on touching between same-sex friends and it was common for affectionate girls to kiss each other, to sleep in the same bed, and to engage in what we’d consider foreplay—and possibly more. The term “lesbian”—the very idea—did not in its current sense yetexist. Until it was redefined, circa 1919, to discredit “new spinsters,” that is, independent, professional singles, the word conjured a series of images from antiquity, usually transvestites, for example, a medieval Frenchwoman clad in armor and perched on a horse. Many girls’ school professors, prime examples of the singly blessed, lived with special friends—smashes that had turned into lifelong partnerships. To their students, what could have seemed more natural than women in pairs?
    The intense devotion of many a smash is revealed in girls’ most secretive correspondence. One girl wrote of “the thrill of our pet dovey times” and a “burning sensation, both when I am with you—as you will know—and when I am alone and imagining back.” Studies made in 1900 of twenty thousand “Boston marriages”—two women who lived as sisters or lovers—and of numerous smashes revealed episodes of mutual masturbation. Other couples give no hint of overt sexual activity—or what we’d consider overt sexual activity—but were, rather, said to be playful and affectionate.
    Whatever the precise nature of the bond, smashed girls likely remained friends for life, whether or not one of them married. “My every nerve springs forward at attention when I hear the post arrive!!” wrote a married friend to another who was far off and unwed. In long letters illustrated with ink drawings—self-portraits, fancy matching gowns, two women out strolling—they reaffirmed their feelings for each other and helped each other negotiate the requirements of married life. One engaged New Englander revealed to her dearest friend in 1782 a shocking decision: she would never change her name. “I think it a good [name] and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage. I am sure to confront a tribunal.”
    Threatened by these connections, some men called them immature, proof that women underneath were really children who could not put away girlish toys and dolls and sit properly alongside their mates. As far back as 1847, a visitor to the United States, one Domingo Sarmiento, concurred: “Americans have developed customs which have no parallel on this earth—the unmarried woman flies about with her friends as if it were a butterfly.”
    The more unusual man found beauty in these friendships, sometimescollecting and reading aloud women’s letters to one another. For this odd connoisseur, female love letters were refined works of sentimental expression,