HISTORY OF COMPANIONSHIP
Making Friends and Finding Love in 1880-1899
From Ballroom Contributor Cam Reid
26 September 2023
Join us as we explore the history of companionship and discover how people made friends, fell in love, and found one another throughout the last century.
How do people find partners?
At the waning end of the 19th century, American economics and culture entered a period known to many historians as “the Gilded Age”1. Corporations started to consolidate power and as a result, America went through a period of significant political and social change. For example, this period in time marks the start of companionate marriage as a dominant social trend of western society2. Meaning, people in middle class and high society worlds were commonly marrying for love rather than marrying into arrangements that are politically, economically, and even geographically convenient. Because of this, social events were more important than ever3. This was also a time of rapid urban development wherein more and more people started to live in cities versus rural areas, but in towns of all sizes, community-wide social events were a really important way for single people to meet each other4. So, minor holidays became more important and festivals and picnics of all sizes became especially common. What’s more is this time period saw ideas like love at first sight and soulmates really take off in literature, as romance became an object of everyday inspiration.
How do people communicate?
As you can imagine, telecommunication was a lot slower back then than it is now. Letters sent via post were the most common way for people to communicate across long distances. Trains, as well as steamboats in certain parts of the U.S., had been around for a while by this point, so they are also a way that people commonly got around socially to travel and make visits. However, wealth inequality was pretty high at this time and was steadily growing so there was notably unequal access to these modes of communication5.
In order to meet potential matches from far away during this time, people would buy ad space in newspapers and write a listing asking for a spouse6. These matrimonial advertisements could be printed in one’s local paper, but were more often used by people in rural areas to advertise themselves to readers in big cities. So, if you lived in upstate New York in 1889, you might pay to take out an ad in a NYC newspaper and meet potentially way more people than you would on your own7. These advertisements were usually pretty short, and they didn’t really have much in the way of photos. People would simply say that they’re looking for a husband or wife, and maybe say their age and how much money they have, and a brief blurb about their situation. Here’s an example from the San Francisco examiner in 1893:
What are friendships like?
This time period is sometimes considered by historians to be part of the “Age of Fraternalism”, and that name mostly comes from the fact that Fraternal societies like the Freemasons today were more popular at this time than they ever had been before. Some of those societies, of course, still exist today but this is when they started to become widespread. Also, this was a time where heterosexuality was a pretty rigid societal structure and friendships were mostly kept between people of the same gender grouping, so women were only friends with women and men were only friends with men. You wouldn’t have many friends from another gender, it would basically just be your spouse that you knew outside of your family8. However, these same-gender friendships were known to be particularly passionate and affectionate, some people maintaining intimate relationships with their friends through their entire lives. A lot of U.S. presidents and famous writers from this time period are known to have exchanged intimate letters and enjoyed intimate friendships with people of the same gender.
Iconic duos
For this blog, I looked into some famous friendships of the era. For example, there’s Doc Holloday and Wyatt Earp who are famous in Wild West folklore. They’re real people, but their stories have been many times throughout fiction and media as notorious outlaws who met while gambling and soon became accomplices in many crimes9. Also, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, the fictional detectives created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are two of the most famous fictional friends of all time. They made their debut into widespread culture around this time, and have been popular characters in England and the U.S. ever since10. Another example is Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, who were both famous suffragettes from around this time who were also good friends11.
For famous relationships, President Grover Cleveland married Frances Cleveland in 1886 and she became an important social figure at the time in American high society12. The French impressionist painter Claude Monet married Alice Hoschedé in 189213, and Milton S. Hershey of Hershey company fame married his wife Catherine Sweeney in 189814.
If you would like to learn more about this topic, check out these sources, and the others listed in the footnotes:
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