In Mary's personal letters....

[RJNorton]

(08-04-2014 12:37 AM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  But just because there were no more children doesn't necessarily mean there was no more intimacy.

Jean Baker writes, "Some say an emotional barrier dropped between husband and wife during these years, but of this there is little evidence. They were close enough so that one of her intimates returned to Springfield with the gossip that forty-four year old Mary Lincoln was pregnant. This proved unfounded, but it is incorrect to assume, as some have, that the Lincolns' physical intimacy ended on their arrival at the White House. It is equally specious to make Mary Lincoln's childlessness after Tad's birth in 1853 (when she was thirty-five and he was forty-four) into a case for sexual abstinence. Indeed sex was probably one of the bonds that made the marriage of two uneven personalities a success. Mary Lincoln's friend Elizabeth Blair Lee once explained to her husband, Admiral Samuel Lee, "Mary has her husband's deepest love. This is a matter upon which one woman cannot deceive another."