615 East 900 South in Salt Lake City, Utah
This facebook post by Connell O’Donovan talks about The Queer Women of Harvey Milk Boulevard (900 South):
QUEER HISTORY MONTH
The Queer Women of Harvey Milk Boulevard (900 South), Part 2
Edith Chapman (1885-1967)
615 East 900 South
A professor of elementary education at the University, Edith inherited the family home at 615 East 900 South in 1923, after her mother’s death. Of Victorian Eclectic style, this humble house was built about 1895 and the Chapmans were the second owners.
In 1924, Edith met and fell in love with Mildred Berryman, the pioneering sexologist who had grown up just down the street. (See tomorrow’s post for more on Mildred.) Edith was one of Mildred’s subjects in her 1920s psychological study of Lesbian women, and Mildred reported that Edith’s “entire makeup mental and physical are positively feminine.” Mildred also reported that Edith had been engaged to marry a man, but her family prohibited the marriage, and afterwards, Edith “never cultivated masculine attention” again. Edith and Maude’s relationship did not last because Mildred claimed Edith “wanted a lover and child in one individual and made the object of her affections wretched with heavy attention, jealous rages and amorous demands.” While their relationship only lasted a brief time, Mildred lived with Edith for four years in the small Lesbian boarding house on 900 South that Edith owned. The boarders’ housekeeper was Carline Monson, a favorite great aunt of LDS president Thomas S. Monson who never married. Mildred moved out of the Lesbian boarding house in 1929 and by 1931, Edith had grown tired of her limited romantic options in Salt Lake. Edith and Mildred’s circle of women were known to make “pilgrimages” to San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1920s, and Edith Chapman fell in love with the social climate there. She signed over ownership of her home to housekeeper Carline Monson in 1931 and moved to Berkeley, California, where she continued teaching until her death. By 1939, Edith was living with her lover Alma H. Baker. After their breakup in 1951, Edith became lovers with Dorothy “Dollie” Wobbs and lived with her for the rest of her life. When Edith died in Oakland in 1967, her obituary referred to herself as “the loving friend of Miss Dorothy J. Wobbs.” Edith is buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Salt Lake, next to her parents and brother.
The women known to have lived in the Chapman boarding house:
• Carline Monson
• Mildred Berryman
• Dorothy Graham
• Ethel C. Stewart
• Mae Anderson