Boston marriage

[1] The fact of relatively formalized romantic friendships or life partnerships between women predates the term Boston marriage and there is a long record of it in England and other European countries.

In the late 1700s, for example, Anglo-Irish upper-class women Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were identified as a couple and nicknamed the Ladies of Llangollen.

Elizabeth Mavor suggests that the institution of romantic friendships between women reached a zenith in 18th-century England.

[2] In the U.S., a prominent example is that of novelist Sarah Orne Jewett and her companion Annie Adams Fields, widow of the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, during the late 1800s.

[4] Lillian Faderman provided one of the most comprehensive studies of Boston marriages in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981).

Bates was a professor of poetry and the author of the words to "America the Beautiful", while Coman was an economic historian who is credited with writing the first industrial history of the US.