Boys Playing GIrls Playing Boys (Playing Girls)

In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611. (As a potential claimant to the throne, James I was interested in keeping her under his thumb.) She dressed for her unsuccessful venture wearing “a pair of great French-fashioned hose over her petticotes, putting on a man’s doublet, a man-lyke perruque with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloake, russet bootes with red tops, and a rapier by her side.”

But most women discovered to be cross-dressing were assumed to have much less elevated motives, and as this chapter discusses, the law automatically assumed that a cross-dressed woman had loose morals and was probably involved in sex work. The women who appear in legal records for this are generally of low status. [Note: the causality may be questioned here; women of higher status probably were able to avoid legal charges more easily. See below.]

The reasons for this may be two-fold. Women engaged in illicit sexual relations—whether freelance prostitution or adulterous assignations—may have used gender disguise, as a woman going about at night alone might have been more suspicious. But in turn, gender transgression was viewed as a sexual  crime, and little distinction was made between all manner of sex crimes: prostitution, fornication, adultery, or simply being an “unruly” woman.

Sexual behavior came under greater official scrutiny and control beginning around the mid-16th century. Prostitution, rather than simply being regulated as previously, was forbidden within the bounds of London, moving the established brothels outside those bounds. The persecution (and prosecution) of sex work was relatively continuous (with varying intensity) from then on.

It isn’t at all clear that prostitutes, as a group, habitually cross-dressed, but it does appear that cross-dressed women were automatically suspected of being prostitutes, or at least of being engaged in illicit sex. But while several of the arrest and trial records included here do support the conclusion that the women were cross-dressing in order to engage in illicit sex of various types, in many other cases there seems to be no direct evidence of such and the connection was simply assumed by the authorities. Note also that the “illicit sex” could range anywhere between having been forced into prostitution, to street-walking, to making a secret assignation with a fiancé, to a wife joining her husband in military attire presumably to accompany him on campaign.

Unlike the records studied by Dekker and van de Pol for the Low Coutries, the London examples don’t seem to include any cases attributed to economic motives (better pay for men—in fact, in some cases the women claimed to have cross-dressed specifically to avoid the need to engage in sex work) or cases of gender-crossing to enable a romantic relationship with a woman. The Dutch records do not assume any particular connection between cross-dressing and prostitution, and when legal charges were brought, it was for concerns like fraud, theft, or unruly behavior.

Nor do the English court cases reference cross-dressing as part of carnival. [Note: Some of the polemical literature of the time does refer to this, so it may be that those cases were not treated as criminal, as opposed to being treated as moral offenses.] Nor has the author identified English cross-dressing records outside of London, though whether they were ignored, not detected, or did not occur is not determined.

As noted above, the cross-dressing women accused of sexual crimes were primarily of low social class. Middle and upper class women who wore selected male-coded garments, such as doublets or feathered hats, might be criticized as part of the early 17th century “gender panic” but were not trying to pass as men and were not systematically prosecuted for it. Instead they were the target of polemical literature such as the pamphlet Hic Mulier that railed against gender ambiguity in dress. While this literature also associated the wearing of masculine garments with sexual looseness (accusing such women of flaunting their sexuality and usurping male privileges) it was not in a prosecutable form.

The cross-dressing women warriors popular in literature, such as Bradamante, were not to be taken as role models for real women, nor were the romantic heroines of Shakespeare’s stage. It’s unlikely that the women who inspired Hic Mulier were being inspired by literature in any case, but were a manifestation of a greater participation by women in the public economy and greater social freedoms, which were connected via fashion to male-coded garments. This, in turn, was viewed as an intentional challenge to traditional gender roles and the criticism of the fashions reflected a growing anxiety about women’s place in society.

Theatrical cross-dressed characters reflected neither the assumption of illicit sex nor the accusation of gender rebellion. They were depicted as cross-dressing for pragmatic purposes to prevent recognition or as a strategy in support of conventional marriage. Within the plays, the cross-dressing is neither criticized nor punished and is typically taken for granted as something a woman might do in extreme circumstances. Only in a couple of rare instances does a play include a cross-dressed woman depicted as a sex worker. Nor is it common for  cross-dressed characters to be directly critiquing gender roles, with The Roaring Girl being a rare exception. While the fictionalized character of Moll Cutpurse in that play is depicted in a positive light, other examples as in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, are satirized for their gender transgression.

Note: The book includes an appendix with a chronological list of 16th and early 17th century plays with cross-dressed heroines.