often disapproving, sexist, and sometimes hostile society. Until the 1920s, these arrangements were widely regarded as natural and respectable. After the 1920s, women in such relationships were increasingly suspected of being in lesbian sexual relationships, so fewer single women chose to live together. Wellesley marriage Boston marriages were so common at Wellesley College in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the term Wellesley marriage became a popular description. Typically, the relationship involved two academic women. This was common from about 1870 until 1920. Until the later part of the 20th century, women were expected to resign from their academic posts upon marriage, so any woman who wanted to keep her academic career had to make housing arrangements other than a home with a husband and children, such as sharing a home with another like-minded single female professor. Additionally, as Lillian Faderman points out, college educated women commonly found more independence, support, and like-mindedness by partnering with other women. Further, these alternative relationships freed women from the burdens of child-rearing, tending to husbands, and other domestic duties, thus allowing professional women like college faculty to focus on their research. There are many examples of Wellesley marriages in the historical record. Faderman documented that in the late 19th century, of the 53 women faculty at Wellesley, only one woman was conventionally married to a man; most of the others lived with a female companion. One of the most famous pairs were Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Ellis Coman. 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. See also Marriage in the United States Queerplatonic relationship – non-romantic intimate partnerships Romantic friendship – a close, non-sexual friendship Roommate Same-sex marriage in Massachusetts Womance References Bibliography Katherine B. Davis, Factors in the sex life of twenty-two hundred women (NY: Harper Brothers, 1929) Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Columbia University Press, 1991) Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (NY: Morrow, 1981) Carol Brooks Gardner, "Boston marriages", in Jodi O'Brien, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, vol. 1 (SAGE Publications, 2009), pp. 87–88, available online (mistakenly says Henry James used the term) Rita K. Gollin,