Queer Places:
Grace Cemetery, Castile, NY 14427
Julia
Boyer Reinstein (November 3, 1906 – July 18, 1998) was a teacher and historian
who grew up in western New York and began her career teaching in Deadwood,
South Dakota. After more than a decade of teaching, she became a founder of
the Erie County Historical Federation and the first historian of Cheektowaga,
New York. Committed to preserving the history of the area and educating
citizens about their heritage, she and her husband were instrumental in
donating properties for the establishment of a nature preserve, several
libraries and to higher education. She was a subject of an anthropological
study evaluating gender fluidity and the nature of being public about one's
sexuality in the 1990s.
Julia Agnes Boyer was born on November 3, 1906 in Castile, New York
to Julia (née Smith)
and Lee Boyer.
Boyer's father, was an engineer who worked with Western Union Telegraph
Company and then on various power and light projects throughout the Great
Plains including Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri and in Indian Territory,
before becoming the general manager of the Consolidated Power and Light
Company in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
When Boyer was six weeks old, her mother left New York to join her father who
was working on an engineering job in Wolseley, Saskatchewan. Her parents
divorced when she was about a 1½-years old, and her mother took her back to
Castile, where she found work as a school teacher.
Her mother's family, were prominent in rural western New York, where her
grandfather, Frederick H. Smith worked as a cattleman, lawyer and banker.
Her great-aunt and -uncle, Julia A. (née Pickett) and Fred Norris, who helped
raise Boyer, were the owners of the newspaper in Warsaw, New York.
In 1915, her mother remarried Charles Mason,
the owner of a general store in Silver Springs. Boyer remained in Warsaw,
living with the Norrises, and visited her mother and step-rather on weekends.
Her father was not allowed to make contact with Boyer, per the terms of her
parents' divorce, until she turned eighteen. In 1924 Boyer enrolled at Elmira
College and began exploring her lesbian feelings. In 1926, her father made
contact with her and they met. He was accepting of her lesbianism and the two
began an intense relationship to get reacquainted.
When she graduated in 1928 with a bachelor's degree and a teaching
certificate, Boyer moved to Deadwood, South Dakota to live with her father and
step-mother, Sarah Isabel (née Rouch).
Arriving in Deadwood, Boyer began accompanying her father on business
trips. She developed numerous flirtations with other women and while with her
family and intimate circle, she was open about her sexual attraction, she
remained very discreet, as was dictated by the times.
Her father, who often flew in his private plane to inspect the power plants he
managed throughout Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota,
supported her affairs, and even helped arrange them, as long as she maintained
discretion and did not report his own extramarital affairs.
With the advent of the Great Depression, Boyer took a job in one of the
mining camps near Deadwood and worked there for two years. When she decided to
continue her education in Chicago, her father did not want her to leave and
used his influence to help her obtain employment in the Deadwood school
system.
In 1930, she met another teacher and fell in love and for the first time
contemplated what a committed lesbian relationship was. They developed a
circle of other lesbian couples,
and though they did not hide their relationships, they did not discuss them.
When Boyer's father died unexpectedly in 1933, she left Deadwood
and returned to her mother's family in New York.
She obtained a teaching position in the conservative town of Castile bringing
Dorothy with her. During the week, she rented rooms in town, but on weekends
she and Dorothy shared a suite her mother and step-father had created for them
in their home. During their summer breaks, the couple rented an apartment in
New York City, to facilitate their taking master's courses at Columbia
University.
In the early 1940s, Boyer and Dorothy broke up and Julia accepted
employment in Buffalo. The circumstances, much different than those she
experienced with the comfortable protection of her family, did not allow her
to find female companions.
Soon after she attained her master's degree in education from Columbia,
Boyer married Dr. Victor Reinstein on 28 September 1942 in Baltimore,
Maryland,
and thereafter used the name Julia Boyer Reinstein, both to avoid being
associated with Nazis and to acknowledge that she never truly gave up her
lesbian orientation.
After teaching in New York state for a decade, Boyer Reinstein worked for a
year and a half at the University of Buffalo in the history department.
In 1953, she became the first historian of Cheektowaga and was one of the
founders of the Erie County Historical Federation, serving as its president.
When the Federation was founded there were only seven affiliates, which
reached twenty-eight societies during her tenure.[26]
Boyer Reinstein was active in multiple endeavors, serving as vice chair of
the Cheektowaga Public Library board and as a member of the Erie County
Historical Preservation Committee.
She was a sought after speaker, and in addition to publishing map books and
stories on county history,[29][30]
she and her husband became benefactors for the area. They donated the property
for the Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve
and built the Anna M. Reinstein Library in Cheektowaga.
After her husband's death in 1984, Boyer Reinstein resumed her life as a
lesbian.
In 1990, Boyer Reinstein began a series of donations to her alma mater to
enable Elmira College to establish the Department of Women's Studies. An
annual symposium in her honor is held by the college to promote scholarship on
women.
The couple also donated funds to establish the Julia Boyer Reinstein Library
in Cheektowaga and the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society's Julia
Boyer Reinstein Center in Buffalo.
Boyer Reinstein died on July 18, 1998 and her memorial was held on 22 July
in Cheektowaga, New York.
Reinstein was the subject of an anthropological study of LGBT life, done by
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy written as supplemental research to her Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993) to evaluate the difference between
middle-class and upper-class lesbian lives.
The study, was important for the understanding of what it meant to be "out"
as a lesbian, women's sexual energy in the period, and the acceptance of her
sexuality by her parents. Because of her families' prominence in their
communities, and the taboos of talking about intimacy publicly, lesbians in
her social class were protected and allowed to live their lives as long as
they remained in traditional appearance as dutiful daughters and respected
social niceties.
Sexuality was seen as a private concern and rumors were gracefully ignored to
preserve one's standing in the community.
By examining Boyer Reinstein's life, the complexities of a closeted existence
emerged, showing that for women in upper classes, being in the closet was not
oppressive, but rather, allowed them the freedom to express themselves as long
as their expression was in the private, rather than public sphere.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Boyer_Reinstein
- Rupp, Leila J.. Sapphistries (Intersections) (p.200). NYU Press.
Edizione del Kindle.