Frances Willard (suffragist) - Sexuality

Sexuality

"The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so little should be said about them surprises me, for they are everywhere ... In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of 'two hearts in counsel,' both of which are feminine."
--Frances Willard, The Autobiography of an American Woman: Glimpses of Fifty Years, 1889

To most modern historians, Willard is overtly identified as a lesbian, while contemporary and slightly later accounts merely described her relationships, and her pattern of long-term domestic cohabitation with women, and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions. Willard herself only ever formed long-term passionate relationships with women, and she stated as much in her autobiography.

While it is difficult to define Willard's 19th century life in terms of the culture and norms of later centuries, and while her relationships with women were possibly or probably sexually chaste, in modern discourse arguments about what relationships are and are not properly called "lesbian" are not dependent on whether or not the relationship included sexual activity.