Seven Degrees of Berenice Abbott
There is a long history of women in committed same-sex romantic relationships establishing homes along the Maine coast. Social progressive and workers’ rights advocate Jane Adams and Mary Rozet Smith bought a house together near Bar Harbor in 1904. Elizabeth Ogilve and Dorothy Simpson in Cushing; Edith Hamilton and Doris Fielding Reid in Sea Wall; and Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick in Northeast Harbor.
Lillian Faderman describes the history of female relationships in her important work Odd Girls and Twillight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth-Century. With the increased polarization of male and female social spheres in the 19th century, romantic affections were increasingly directed at ones own sex. One needs only explore the archives of Mount Holyoke College and other women’s colleges to see ample evidence of the romantic side of these relationships.
The development of women’s colleges following the establishment of Mount Holyoke in 1837, followed by Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr, gave rise to a new alternative for women known as the “educated spinster”. Heterosexual marriage was viewed by society as incompatible to women seeking academic careers and progressive activism. Instead many of these women sought long-term relationships with “kindred spirits.” Faderman notes that unlike their uneducated counterparts, more than half of the graduates of women’s colleges chose not to marry.
Following the advent of the twentieth-century, the notion of romantic friendship saw a decline. It would be years before the European interest in articulating a taxonomy of sexual “deviance” would take hold in American popular culture. During this time, women who found their romantic attraction to other women were in an interstitial moment following the decline in “friendship” but prior to rise of established lesbian communities.
By the close of the 1920s, lesbian bars—and through extension communities of women-loving-women—developed in America’s major cities. In New York these were centered in Harlem and Greenwich Village. This was the environment Ruth Moore settled in when she made the move to New York City in 1927 first settling at Minetta Lane and later moving to a block off Washington Square Park at 123 Waverly Place an apartment she shared with another aspiring writer Julia Faye.
As I related in more detail in my earlier post, Ruth Moore met Eleanor Mayo in 1940. The two would remain together until Mayo’s death in 1981. Moore’s first literary success came in 1929 with the publication of the poem “Voyage” in the Saturday Review of Literature. Her first novel, The Weir, was published in 1943 followed by Spoonhandle in 1946. The proceeds from selling the film rights to Spoonhandle allowed the couple to return to Maine in 1947. She later would recall the trepidation of building their new home while the flames of the Great Bar Harbor fire could be seen over the hills that split the island.
Once settled in Maine, Moore and Mayo socialized and maintained deep friendships with a collection of female couples living along the central Maine coast. Artist and writer Chenoweth Hall and her partner, fellow novelist, Miriam Colwell lived a little further downeast in Prospect Harbor. Hall maintained her connections to the art scene in New York and was a close friend of Marsden Hartley who had relocated to Maine in 1937. Journalist and liberal activist LaRue Spiker and friend Louise Gilbert settled in nearby Southwest Harbor in the late 1950s.
Noted photographer Berenice Abbott had settled in Monson, Maine. Abbott started her photographic career in Paris. Following her arrival in 1921, she became close to documentary photographer Eugène Atget eventually inherited his negatives upon his death not soon after. While in Paris, she took numerous portraits of the writers, artists and other notables of the Paris bohemian scene including James Joyce, Janet Flanner, and Djuna Barnes. Following her return to America, she became best known for her portraits of a changing New York City shot between the wars.
On the advice of her physician, Abbott began to spend significant time in the clean fresh air of Maine beginning in the late 1930s. She lived with her companion art critic Elizabeth McCausland for 30 years until the latter’s death in 1965. In 1956 she bought a property in Monson, Maine. Following McCausland’s death, Abbott settled full-time in the tiny town of Monson where she remained until her death in 1991. She lived with her companion Susan Brown Blatchford from 1985 through the end of Abbott’s life.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Abbott self-identified as a lesbian. Her biographer Julia Van Haaften observes in Berenice Abbott: A Life In Photography that in Maine Abbott was able to rediscover the care-free open lesbian life that she had enjoyed in 1920s Paris squashed by her return to the US.
“I haven’t seen so much fun since the roaring 20s,” Abbott wrote a friend, “only this is more roaring and primitive…. there has been some mighty friggin dancing going on. I’m not sure what friggin means but the word around here is legion…. The Charleston did not compare with this goof — Anyway, it is vital and if I weren’t so darned old, I’d get up here more…. But only in Maine could this be.”
Quoted in Berenice Abbott: A Life In Photography, page 421.
These women formed a social network of female companionate marriages sprinkled across Maine. They took turns hosting gatherings at each others houses. Moore and Mayo often welcomed their friends to their Bass Harbor home. My mother remembers being invited to one such party on a return visit from Mount Holyoke. In attendance were LaRue Spiker, local podiatrist Charlotte “Cy” Rhoades, and her partner Mary. She recalls, Cy performed her “famous” scarf dance to the mirth of the other guests.
These creative women provided support for each other’s artistic endeavors. Hall, a close friend going back to their time in New York, provided the text for Abbott’s collection of images of their chosen home state A Portrait of Maine. My mother has a rock sculpted in the form of a cat by Hall and given to Moore and Mayo.
With the exception of Abbott, how these women described themselves may have been lost to history. Though regrettable, this is of little import ultimately as the bonds they formed and the art they left is testament to the ruggedly unapologetic community they created for themselves.
Among the Moore and Mayo paintings is a rare figural painting and the only one that could be called portraiture. Given its style, it was most likely painted by Mayo. Compare to the below archival image of women at a “gay girls” bar of the WWII era.
In addition to her five published novels and being elected first female selectman in Maine, Mayo was a very accomplished photographer in her own right. Many of her images of Maine are reminiscent of Abbott’s portraits of rural life. One can only imagine the conversations these women had with each other!
Credits
Hank O’Neal portrait used under CC BY-SA 3.0 license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Abbott#/media/File:Berenice_Abbott_by_Hank_ONeal_NYC_1979.jpg
Photograph of Due Berenice Abbott used under This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Original image on wikimedia.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman, Columbia University Press, 1991.
Berenice Abbott: A Life In Photography, Julia Van Haaften, W. W. Nortan, 2018.
Leave a Reply