Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen

By Bonnie Yochelson

In 1987, I accepted a job as Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. I had worked in print rooms for several years and earned a PhD in modern art history. Now I had full responsibility for a remarkable collection that needed a lot of work, which is to say, I had a job I hoped to devote my career to. It soon became clear, however, that for me, the situation was unsustainable. I was 35 and had just had my first child; four years later I had a second. My entire salary went to childcare, and I was run ragged without time or energy for my home and family.

After 5 years, I quit and began working on a project basis (i.e., less than minimum wage), relying on my husband for income and health insurance. Having made peace with the lack of pay and institutional support, I accomplished a lot. I’ve organized numerous museum exhibitions and wrote or co-wrote six books on important New York photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jacob Riis. The pace of my work, though, has always been non-linear, indeed, haphazard. Juggling funding proposals and deadlines, I often took on small projects that postponed larger ones. My book on Alice Austen—the seventh and the last— was no exception. In 2013, I signed a letter of agreement and did not begin research until 2017. The book was just published in June 2025. 

Born to a well-to-do Staten Island family, Alice Austen was an amateur photographer who used the camera to entertain her family and friends. Her collection of more than 7,000 negatives and prints would probably have perished if not for the great misfortune that befell her in 1945, when she was 79 years old.

On the day that she and her partner Gertrude Tate were evicted from their home, the Staten Island Historical Society (now part of Historic Richmond Town) rescued the photographs and a trove of family memorabilia. In 1951, the year before Austen died, a feature story in LIFE Magazine introduced her to a national audience. Twenty-five years later in 1976, a book was written by Ann Novotny, who also presided over The Friends of the Alice Austen House, an intrepid group of Austen supporters who saved the family’s Victorian cottage from the wrecker’s ball. In 1985, the Alice Austen House Museum was founded, and today it is an LGBTQ Historic Site. 

In the 1990s, two distinct groups of Austen enthusiasts emerged. Photographic historians heralded her “New York Street Types,” which depicted working people on the streets of Manhattan; and gender historians celebrated her satirical photographs in which she and her friends mocked Victorian conventions of femininity by dressing in men’s clothing, posing as prostitutes, feigning drunkenness, or sharing a bed. I belonged to the former group. Austen’s “street types” of the 1890s had been compared to photographs by Stieglitz and Riis.

My approach to research and writing evolved from my curatorial practice: by studying photographic archives—I developed fresh narratives about photographers already known to the general public but in need of up-to-date scholarly attention. Alice Austen, who hadn’t been carefully researched for nearly 50 years, fit this model perfectly. 

What inspired me to take on Austen was a visit with Maxine Friedman, Chief Curator of Historic Richmond Town (HRT), who in the early 2000s, embarked on an ambitious access and preservation project of her photographs. Maxine supervised the cataloguing and scanning of the collection, and largely as a labor of love, she researched the people and events depicted in the photographs.

Once I contracted with HRT, I took home a laptop which gave me access to the images and Maxine’s research. Equally valuable was the research support I received from the HRT staff. Carli DeFillo deciphered and transcribed 500 letters to Austen from friends and family. Both Maxine and her predecessor, Charles L. Sachs, who had worked with the Austen Collection for years and were masters of online records, were eager to correct errors in Novotny’s narrative that had become “facts.” Most dramatic was the discovery that Austen’s father, who presumably had returned to his native England shortly after Alice’s birth, lived in Brooklyn with his parents and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. 

My central goal was to construct a chronology of Austen’s life and photographic practice, which Novotny had not tried to do. What emerged was a conundrum. Austen took her now beloved satirical photographs in1890-91, years before the word “lesbian” was used and years before evidence of her romantic interest in women. On the contrary, Austen was a social butterfly, attending dinners and dances and attracting the attention of suitors. What, then, did the photographs mean to her and her friends in 1891? To solve this puzzle, I immersed myself in gender studies and gender politics, getting much more deeply into the psychology of a photographer than I had ever felt the need to do before. 

To adequately reveal the solution to this puzzle would require another essay. But let me conclude by thanking the peer reviewers in American, gender and photo history, who pushed me to inquire beyond the documentary evidence. My earlier books were museum products and did not require peer review. This book, by contrast, required peer review twice, by The Gotham Center for New York City History, which granted me a writing fellowship, and by Fordham University Press. I am forever grateful to the scholars whose help I very much needed as I strayed well beyond the bounds of my expertise. 

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Formerly Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, Bonnie Yochelson is an independent art historian and curator. She has organized exhibitions and published books on Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott, among others. She taught in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts, New York City, for 30 years. Yochelson was awarded a Robert D.L. Gardiner Writing Fellowship by The Gotham Center, CUNY Graduate Center for TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED. She received the full cooperation of Alice Austen House and Historic Richmond Town, which lent generous financial and staff support to the project. To learn more about Bonnie Yochelson, visit: https://www.bonnieyochelson.com.

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED

Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more

Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

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Category: On Writing