Reply #3: I heard the term used for female couples who lived

[Senior citizen]

together and were each other's support system, but didn't necessarily have a sexual relationship. More like two females who didn't have husbands who, in the days before equal opportunity laws, needed each other simply in order to survive. In those days males were paid more because they supposedly had families to support, and females were paid less because they supposedly had, or should have had, husbands to support them. While we still don't have pay equity, things are much better today. But impoverished widows, and females who did not wish to, or for some reason couldn't marry, would have found it extremely difficult to survive alone, so while some Boston marriages may have involved lesbians, I heard the term used to refer to non-lesbian females who lived together as a matter of simple survival.