Charlotte Cushman, the brilliant and renowned 19th-century lesbian actress.“As a woman wh

Charlotte Cushman, the brilliant and renowned 19th-century lesbian actress.

“As a woman who loved other women, Charlotte’s erotic relationships were certainly not conventional, but neither were they the sum total of her existence. And so I cannot read Charlotte Cushman as a lesbian merely in terms of her lovers but, rather, in relation to her sense of self, of possibility, of ambition. Her story is as irreducibly tied up in her autonomy as it is in her attraction and identification with other women.“ – Lisa Merrill, in When Romeo Was a Woman(1999).

“Miss Cushman possessed in a remarkable degree the power of attaching women to her. They loved her with utter devotion, and she repaid them with the wealth of her great warm heart.” – From her obituary in the Boston Advertiser (1876), as quoted by Lisa Merrill.

Top photo:Charlotte Cushman (Gutekunst, 1874).

Center Left:Charlotte and her lover, the writer Matilda Hays(1858).

Center Right:Charlotte and her longtime lover (and later biographer), the sculptor Emma Stebbins(1859).

Bottom Left:Charlotte and her lover, Emma Crow(undated).

Bottom Right: An engraving of Charlotte in the role of Romeo, opposite her sister, Susan Cushman, as Juliet (1858). Charlotte deliberately sought her sister for the role so as to provide social cover for the potentially scandalous blatant ardor she intended to portray onstage.