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Full citation:

Stehr, Emily (compiler). 2018. Tragic (but Interesting & Very Short) History of Sodomite, Lesbians, & Sapphics. Self-published. ISBN 978172000756

I’m doing this publication out of order because it doesn’t take very long to say, “Don’t touch this book with a ten foot pole,” and I want to get that out of the way and never look at it again.

It isn’t that the content of the book is particularly harmful, it’s that its very existence is an act of bad scholarship. Why did I buy it? Because I was on the website for University Press Books (which was a great browsing-bookstore back when they had a physical presence, right across the street from U.C. Berkeley) ordering an entirely different book. And recalling that UPB was a place where I’d happened by chance across all manner of books useful to the Project, I plugged the search word “lesbian” into their web site and skimmed through the listed items. This title was intriguing, the price was quite reasonable, and so I ordered it.

So what did I get? It’s best to introduce this by quoting the author’s forward: “Dear Reader, this “book” is ridiculously short. During my search on google scholar, I was amazed at the lack of documentation about same-sex relationships in history. I think this is an important story to be told. It is my hope that someone in the future will add to this document as other historical sources become available.”

I have no idea what she was searching for in Google Scholar, or why she seems to think that the items she turned up are the entirety of what is known of queer history in the 18th and 19th centuries, or how she managed to be working on anything relating to this topic without having a basic grounding in historic methods, but even in making a heap of all she found, this compilation is misleading, misattributed, and utterly lacking in useful context. The one virtue of the work is that it is short. (It lacks pagination and I can’t be bothered to actually count, but I think about 20 pages?) It consists of verbatim quotations from 16 publications, evidently identified through some sort of keyword search. The extracts are given a source, an author, and a date, but in many cases that information is misleading.

For example, one extract is cited as ”1839 Jean Froissart”. The 1839 date comes from an edition translated and edited by Thomas Johnes from the French original of the 14th century.

A similar displacement of attribution occurs for the excerpt cited as “Robert Kelham; Britton: Containing the Antient Pleas of the Crown, 1762.” Kelham was a legal historian and antiquarian of the 18th century. This is his translation of an early 16th century compilation of English law, which itself was based on a 13th century work. But Stehr’s presentation of the excerpt gives no context to suggest that it is anything other than an 18th century legal opinion. (And…look: it only took me five minutes with Google and Wikipedia to trace this back. It’s not like it was hard.)

A couple of excerpts seem to be included solely on the basis of quoting someone yelling “Sodomite!” as an insult, which is meaningless without understanding the social context in which it was hurled. Another couple seem to be included solely due to references to the poet Sappho as a “Lesbian,” but in contexts where her sexuality is not a focus.

In sum (and it would have been best to stop earlier), this book contributes less than nothing to the knowledge or understanding of sexuality in history. And if I were University Press Books, I’d be embarrassed to have it in my catalog.

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When Female Husbands Became Obsolete

Monday, August 23, 2021 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

After what seems like entirely too long a period of covering a single book, we come to the end. Female Husbands: A Trans History has some interesting strengths and weaknesses as a historic study. The greatest strength (and my favorite aspect, given that I like the puzzle-solving parts of historic research) is Manion's willingness to dig through obscure public records to fill in the details of these people's lives. The original publicity around the story of James Howe/Mary East and their wife never mentioned the wife's name. (Which is entirely in keeping with historic misogyny and the erasure of women's identities and--from one angle--could be seen as validation of Howe's masculinity. Since Howe was considered worthy of having a name of their own to be identified by.) But Manion succeeded in finding Howe's marriage record, which provided the name Mary Snapes. In various other cases, Manion has dug deeply to connect the dots and answer the question of "what happened to these people after the spotlight of notoriety moved on?"

But I think the most obvious weakness of the book is the attempt to organize it by chronological themes, when no such chronology existed in the biographical data. Individual biogrpahies are shoehorned into the chapter theme and sometimes tied to it by the most tenuous of connections. I could see how a book that was simply a catalog of biographies might be less readable. But the result of this approach--as well as the occasional digressions on social issues and movements of the times--makes the organization feel a bit patchy and haphazard.

Returning to strengths, I am always grateful to a book that gives me the tools to think about gender/sexuality in new and different ways, and Manion has added a significant tool to my box. In discussing "transing gender" as an action, rather than a state, it becomes easier to view female masculinity (to use Halberstam's phrase) not only as a continuum, but as a continual rather than a continuuous process. That is, transing gender is something one can do a little or a lot, periodically or all the time, permanently or temporarily. This approach makes it easier (for me, at least) to let go a little of the notion that cis and trans are distinct binary states. When considering people in history, it isn't simply that "we can never know for certain" (in that annoyingly prevalent phrasing), but that their placement on a cis-trans continuum depends not only on their motivations, experiences, and performance, but on where one chooses to draw the dividing line.

Female Husbands is a book that speaks equally strongly to several aspects of queer and gender history. For anyone who wants more aspects of the topic within the setting of western Anglophone society (which is a definite limitation of scope), I highly recommend it.

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LHMP #331i Manion 2020 Female Husbands Chapter 8: The End of a Category

Full citation:

Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3

Chapter 8: The End of a Category & Conclusion

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

After what seems like entirely too long a period of covering a single book, we come to the end. Female Husbands: A Trans History has some interesting strengths and weaknesses as a historic study. The greatest strength (and my favorite aspect, given that I like the puzzle-solving parts of historic research) is Manion's willingness to dig through obscure public records to fill in the details of these people's lives. The original publicity around the story of James Howe/Mary East and their wife never mentioned the wife's name. (Which is entirely in keeping with historic misogyny and the erasure of women's identities and--from one angle--could be seen as validation of Howe's masculinity. Since Howe was considered worthy of having a name of their own to be identified by.) But Manion succeeded in finding Howe's marriage record, which provided the name Mary Snapes. In various other cases, Manion has dug deeply to connect the dots and answer the question of "what happened to these people after the spotlight of notoriety moved on?"

Female Husbands is a book that speaks equally strongly to several aspects of queer and gender history. For anyone who wants more aspects of the topic within the setting of western Anglophone society (which is a definite limitation of scope), I highly recommend it.

# # #

Manion identifies the end of the 19th century as a period when the meanings of gender and the various ways in which women pushed back against the restrictions of gender expanded enough that the category of female husband became less coherent. Transing gender had been an individual solution to the various social restrictions of gender roles, but feminism and other societal shifts were now offering systemic solutions to some of the same problems. Same-sex relationships between people presenting as female became more visible and included a range of gender expressions. Persons assigned female who adopted various degrees of masculine dress offered rational arguments for acceptability. Feminism laid claim to the right of women to enter male-dominated fields and spheres without needing to present as male to do so. At the same time, the hostility of men toward women’s invasion of their prerogatives and spaces also increased the hostility turned towards those who transed gender. Reactions that previously had centered around social gender roles now focused more strongly on sexual possibilities.

Several case studies are offered of people who were put into the category of “female husband” by public and press reaction. But in some cases the ways in which they failed to fit that archetype point out the growing incoherence of the category. Public discourse around Frank Dubois, who had a fairly standard female-husband story, points out some of the shifts in anxiety about those who transed gender. Dubois' story provoked a fair amount of discussion, both serious and satirical, that if women had an option of marrying women, then men might become irrelevant. But another aspect of the discussion focused on the performative nature of gender, in that many of the proofs that Dubois offered for their male status had to do with stereotypical male behaviors and gender performance, rather than physical characteristics.

There is a brief discussion of John Coulter, whom Manion identifies as the “last British female husband,” but the story offers no particularly new angles on the topic.

Samuel Pollard’s story reads much like some previous ones in that shortly after they married, their wife complained that her husband was actually a woman. As the matter tried to sort itself out in the court (having difficulty in finding the appropriate statute be considered) Pollard’s wife had a reconciliation and in the end the matter was dropped. The marriage was later dissolved, but Pollard continued to live as a man in the community despite their gender assignment being known to others due to the earlier controversy.

The next two cases show how the female husband paradigm was applied even in cases where it failed to fit the facts. Annie Hindle was an actress who performed male roles on stage, and wore male clothing to their wedding with Annie Ryan. However there was never any serious attempt to disguise their assigned gender. The minister who married them did not raise any questions of gender although it is likely that he was aware that there were questions to be raised. Hindle and their wife remained together until Ryan died. There was a flurry of publicity around the concept of “the widow of a woman”, but in general it was sympathetic and positive with regard to the couple. Hindle appears to have worn male clothing at least on a sometime basis after retiring from the stage, but did not attempt to pass as a man except in the very specific context of the marriage ceremony. But by applying the female husband model, Hindle’s marriage created a conceptual bridge to the idea of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.

Leroy Williams was a disabled veteran of the Civil War and in late middle-age married the widow Matilda Smith. Smith soon became unhappy with the marriage, citing various types of misrepresentation regarding income and housing that Williams had made during the courtship. But Smith also claimed that Williams had misrepresented their sex, saying “he was no man but a woman.” This would be a familiar story in the discussion of female husbands except that--based on all available evidence, including that of census records from Williams’ childhood--Williams does appear to have been assigned male. William successfully argued that their experiences in the army would have made an underlying female sex obvious, and no medical examination was made in the context of the marriage challenge. So why would Smith raise this accusation in the context of requesting a marriage annulment? Evidently the concept of female husbands was current enough in the culture to be a believable charge, even when easily falsified.

Manion explores the role of scandal sheets and crime-focused newspapers in recording and spreading stories of female husbands and similar gender transgression. But increasingly there were female identified people who openly wore male garments for a variety of reasons, whether practicality, career, or personal taste. Similarly, the end of the 19th century saw a number of types of female same-sex partnerships that were entered into openly and received varying amounts of social approval. (This was the era of the "Boston marriage" and of many couples formed among the faculty of women's colleges.) With these shifts, some of the motivations for female husbands begin to fall away from the central model and the term became less useful to describe a specific phenomenon. What remained as a motivation was an internal sense of gender identity. But marrying a woman was no longer seen as proof or validation for that masculine identity.

In the end of the chapter Manion summarizes many of the themes covered in this book and reiterates the reasoning for the particular approach to gender reference that she uses. There is also an epilogue discussing the first medically reassigned female to male transsexual (Manion’s wording) and the changes in approaches and attitudes to transing gender that came in the 20th century.

Time period:

19th c

Place:

USA

Misc tags:

Frank Dubois & Gertrude Fuller

gender disguise f>m

transgender identity

female husband

Event / person:

John Coulter & Martha Coulter

Samuel Pollard & Marancy Hughes

Annie Hindle & Annie Ryan

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 208 – Shakespeare’s Queer-Baiting

Saturday, August 21, 2021 - 22:25

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 208 – Shakespeare’s Queer-Baiting - transcript

(Originally aired 2021/08/21 - listen here)

Same-Sex Themes in Shakespeare

I think that in the hearts of most queer girls, there is a cherished memory of some particular performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when you thought, “Say yes, Viola! Just say yes to Olivia and change the story!”

Because of Shakespeare’s ubiquity in Western Anglophone culture, we tend to be more familiar with the brief glimpses of female homoeroticism in his works than in those of his contemporaries. But was the Bard of Avon revolutionary and cutting-edge in his depictions of the possibilities of love between women? Or was he reflecting themes that were common in late 16th and early 17th century English culture? Or was he presenting staid and safely conservative versions of homoerotic tropes that would titillate his audience without challenging them? Was he queer-baiting the groundlings with a wink and a nudge and the image of two women together only to deflect the possibility at the last minute?

Valerie Traub asserts that early modern England saw a renaissance of representations of desire between women in the 16th and 17th centuries, including a gradual increase over that period in depictions of women’s same-sex physical and emotional relations across a wide variety of genres. These representations existed within a social context that believed women to have a stronger sex drive than men, and that considered same-sex desire to be an expected manifestation of that drive. But did those understandings lead naturally to an acceptance of those desires and a positive attitude toward them?

There were two major themes in the depiction of women’s same-sex desire during that era—themes that have chased each other across the landscape of history. One theme came from the philosophical tradition of amicitia—friendship—in which like was expected to be drawn to like, and the passionate expression of that attraction, and the love that resulted from it was treated as expected and normal. The second theme was based on a theory that erotic desire was driven by difference, and specifically from the contrast of masculine and feminine. In this model, female couples were attracted via an analog of heterosexuality, one being more masculine in nature (and sometimes thought to have masculine physiology) and one not simply more feminine, but an ordinary feminine woman who was attracted to masculinity regardless of the body it inhabited.

These themes drove two significant tropes used in early modern drama, but the conventions of the stage added other layers. Was the desire set up to be sympathetic or condemned? Did the characters know they desired someone of the same sex or was that information only available to the audience? Was the love between them allowed to persist at the end of the play or did it need to be contradicted or redirected?

In this podcast, I’m setting aside the complication that in the English theater of Shakespeare’s day, all female parts were played by male actors. This was, in some ways, an English peculiarity limited to a specific period. The Italian theater from which Shakespeare, um, “borrowed” some of his plots (including Twelfth Night) included women in acting troupes by the mid 16th century, and France embraced actresses by a similar era. Besides which, the fashion for homoerotic plots continued to be popular in England even as female actors took their place on stage in the later 17th century. So I’m not going to focus on this aspect of performance and the layers it added to interpretation.

As You Like It

Let’s take a look at a couple of characteristic examples from Shakespeare. As You Like It contains both of our primary motifs: passionate friendship based on similarity, and erotic desire based on apparent gender difference. Rosalind and Celia are cousins whose fathers have become enemies. Their love for each other is stronger than all other familial bonds: when Rosalind is banished on pain of death, Celia refuses to be parted from her and accompanies her into exile. Both will eventually be courted and won in marriage by men (conveniently, by a pair of brothers). This overarching marriage plot allays the anxiety that same-sex devotion might otherwise cause.

Here is the scene where Rosalind is banished and Celia cleaves to her. It begins with Celia imploring her father, the duke, to relent, and then the subsequent conversation between the two women.

CELIA

I did not then entreat to have her stay;
It was your pleasure and your own remorse:
I was too young that time to value her;
But now I know her: if she be a traitor,
Why so am I; we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,
And wheresoever we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.

DUKE FREDERICK

She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience
Speak to the people, and they pity her.
Thou art a fool: she robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone. Then open not thy lips:
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass’d upon her; she is banish’d.

CELIA

Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege:
I cannot live out of her company.

DUKE FREDERICK

You are a fool. You, niece, provide yourself:
If you outstay the time, upon mine honour,
And in the greatness of my word, you die.

Exeunt DUKE FREDERICK and Lords

CELIA

O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go?
Wilt thou change fathers? I will give thee mine.
I charge thee, be not thou more grieved than I am.

ROSALIND

I have more cause.

CELIA

Thou hast not, cousin;
Prithee be cheerful: know’st thou not, the duke
Hath banish’d me, his daughter?

ROSALIND

That he hath not.

CELIA

No, hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one:
Shall we be sunder’d? shall we part, sweet girl?
No: let my father seek another heir.
Therefore devise with me how we may fly,
Whither to go and what to bear with us;
And do not seek to take your change upon you,
To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out;
For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,
Say what thou canst, I’ll go along with thee.

The language of devotion here may seem fairly tame and conventional, but it is unambiguous. When Celia says they “went like Juno’s swans, coupled and inseparable” she is invoking the goddess of marriage and the motif that swans mate for life. When Celia notes that they “slept together and rose at an instant,” this is neither a salacious reference to “sleeping together” in a sexual sense, nor a meaningless co-location in the same bed. Sharing a bed was both ordinary and accepted and indicated a significant bond of friendship, intimacy, and trust between the bedfellows. It is an act infused with erotic potential while being free of any suggestion of immorality. When Celia says “let my father seek another heir…I’ll go along with thee,” there is an inevitable parallel with how marriage removes women from the family of their birth to partner with another.

But As You Like It also brings in the theme of desire arising from difference, via the popular stage motif of gender disguise and mis-directed heterosexual attraction. For greater safety after the two women flee to the Forest of Arden for a pastoral interlude, Rosalind puts on men’s clothing and adopts the name of Ganymede. If the homoerotic implications had not been clear enough, Ganymede was the name of Jupiter’s cup-bearer, abducted to be his sexual companion. Ganymede was slang for the younger or passive partner in a male homosexual couple. We now enter a world of gender play and gender confusion, as the shepherdess Phebe falls in love with Ganymede, despite—or perhaps because of—Ganymede’s scornful dismissal of her.

At the same time, Rosalind (as Ganymede) torments her would-be suitor Orlando by coaching him in courtship having him practice his wooing of Rosalind on Ganymede. This is something of a reversal of the trope that erotic play between women is harmless “practice” for heterosexual marriage.

Thus Orlando goes through the superficial form of a same-sex courtship, believing it to be make-believe, while actually participating in a heterosexual courtship; while Phebe throws herself into what she believes is a heterosexual pursuit, that in truth has a woman as its object. Rosalind declines to engage fully in either courtship: repeatedly rejecting Phebe’s attentions (and thus defusing the possibility of overt same-sex eroticism), and treating her interactions with Orlando as play-acting (again defusing the threat of the appearance of homosexuality).

But homoeroticism is not only present via disguise and pretend. When Phebe praises Ganymede in the following passage, it’s in terms of an androgynous and even feminine beauty.

PHEBE

Think not I love him, though I ask for him:
‘Tis but a peevish boy; yet he talks well;
But what care I for words? yet words do well
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.
It is a pretty youth: not very pretty:
But, sure, he’s proud, and yet his pride becomes him:
He’ll make a proper man: the best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence his eye did heal it up.
He is not very tall; yet for his years he’s tall:
His leg is but so so; and yet ’tis well:
There was a pretty redness in his lip,
A little riper and more lusty red
Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference
Between the constant red and mingled damask.
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him
In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him; but, for my part,
I love him not nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him:
For what had he to do to chide at me?
He said mine eyes were black and my hair black:
And, now I am remember’d, scorn’d at me:
I marvel why I answer’d not again:
But that’s all one; omittance is no quittance.
I’ll write to him a very taunting letter,
And thou shalt bear it: wilt thou, Silvius?

As the resolution of all the disguises nears, the script once more flirts with images of same-sex love and marriage while leaving a secret escape valve. Rosalind, as Ganymede, tells Phebe:

I would love you, if I could. To-morrow meet me all together.
I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be
married to-morrow:

Meaning, in truth, that she will marry her male suitor Orlando, but teasing both the unknowing Phebe and the knowing audience with the idea of two women being wed.

The Wider Context of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama

There is a wide diversity of representations of female same-sex relations in early modern drama, ranging from the overtly sexual, through devoted platonic friendship, to a generalized female solidarity against patriarchal society. Shakespeare has available an audience that considers same-sex relations to be possible and familiar and he plays with those possibilities for dramatic effect. But Shakespeare’s plays include a relatively narrow range of those representations, when considered in context.

Popular culture viewed women’s same-sex erotic possibilities simultaneously as suspect and threatening, and as tolerable and pleasurable, particularly if viewed through the lens of friendship and homosociality rather than strictly in terms of sexual activity. In general, expressions of explicit sexual desire are presented negatively while depictions of romantic love are the most accepted. And it must be noted that depictions of gender disguise on stage are taken largely as harmless, while real-life cross-dressing was a significant point of anxiety and treated as sexually charged.

Scenarios of homoeroticism on stage or in literature could be used as social criticism, but often tangentially, to address entirely different areas of social, religious, or political concern. Yet an overarching theme was that homoerotic desire must be addressed and resolved in some fashion within the story. Idealized, romantic, non-sexual attachment may be presented as praiseworthy and simply diverted into a heterosexual resolution, but predatory, anxiety-provoking sexual scenarios tend to end in tragedy. Direct sexual transgression (and the need for its punishment) can be avoided by misdirection (for example, in cross-dressing plots) or by sidelining the desire in a deniable subtext via innuendo or allusion. The homoerotic presence may be created by the act of denying its possibility, or may exist only by the way in which that possibility disrupts a more central heterosexual plot. A character who protests the impossibility of desire between women acts to raise it as a possibility in the audience’s imagination. A potential heterosexual romance that is disrupted by a gender-disguised woman suggests that a woman could be a more attractive partner for a woman than the man she’s expected to marry.

Fictional treatments of female homoeroticism tended to focus on desire, and to treat it neutrally or sympathetically, while non-fictional evidence focused on actual sexual activity and condemned it. Between those two poles, the assumptions and models through which female homoeroticism was presented followed certain principles.

Erotic attraction is driven by beauty rather than by biological sex. Beauty exists as an abstract quality and is not gendered.
Similarity of body, age, temperament, and situation drives attraction. It is natural and expected for two people who are highly similar to be attracted to each other and to express that attraction openly.
But also, in contrast, female same-sex eroticism is inspired by differences in age, rank, power, and experience.
Gender-segregated institutions and social contexts tend to encourage and inspire same-sex eroticism.
Female same-sex eroticism is always something that belongs to the past, whether it belongs to classical antiquity, to an earlier phase of the history of one’s own culture, or to an earlier stage of a specific person’s life.

“Innocent” intimate friendships between women in such stories typically exist in parallel with heterosexual plots and are abandoned, or at least set aside, at marriage. But rather than framing women’s intimate friendships as being entirely non-erotic, literature regularly draws explicit parallels between same-sex affections and the heterosexual bonds and interactions that are purportedly the ultimate goal of the narrative.

It is a general pattern in comedic works of the early modern period that anxieties are raised explicitly only to be resolved. Femme-femme couples in this literature become significant only when they challenge the patriarchal and marital imperatives of society--when they threaten to become exclusive--at which point they must be dismantled.

Valerie Traub identifies this motif exclusively with courtship plots, but Denise Walen’s study of female homoeroticisim in early modern theater shows the motif occurring more generally. And, by the way, if you are intrigued to the slightest degree by the topic of sapphic themes in early modern drama, do check out Walen’s book: Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama.

Shakespeare Plays it Safe

Femme-femme couples were not viewed as disruptive to the social structure unless they went beyond using the language of marriage to trying to appropriate the social function of marriage. Shakespeare’s women never go quite that far, but various interpretations of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, including John Lyly’s Gallathea directly raise the image of marriage between women, only to nullify it with a magical physical transformation of one of the women to a man.

Shakespeare’s plays are, in many ways, more “innocent” in their depictions of female same-sex erotics than some of the works of his contemporaries. Unlike Lyly’s Gallathea his gender-mistaken women do not continue in their desire once the disguise has been revealed. Unlike several of Thomas Middleton’s plays, his characters don’t engage in ribald jokes that take it as a given that women can engage in sex together. None of Shakespeare’s women knowingly kiss and fondle another woman as in Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage. Unlike Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, his cross-dressing women are not seen as advertising their underlying desires by their clothing.

When Shakespeare’s cross-dressing women are desired by another woman, the misdirected love is unambiguously redirected, not simply into a heterosexual relationship, but into marriage. Olivia transfers her affections rather abruptly and without much motivation onto Viola’s twin brother. Rosalind sends Phebe off with her shepherd suitor and marries the man she’s been teasing as Ganymede.

In romantic comedies, desire for a cross-dressed woman can be treated humorously rather than creating anxiety. In many of these works, the characteristics of the cross-dressed woman that provoke desire are traditionally feminine ones, such as beauty, courtesy, and kindness. Thus, although the desire that the femme-presenting women feel occurs within a superficial framework of heterosexuality, their motivation supports the validity of female-female desire, even though those same characteristics would not provoke female desire if displayed by one known to be a woman. That is, on stage, women can desire female-coded personal traits, but they only perceive this desire as erotic when those traits are overlaid on an apparently male body.

Twelfth Night

Let’s return to the topic of Twelfth Night to see how this “safe” same-sex desire plays out. Viola (in disguise as Cesario) does take an active role in provoking Olivia’s desire, largely in her role as spokesperson for Duke Orsino, but also in the playful bantering between them. In spite of this, Viola herself is unshakable in directing her own desire toward Orsino. Here Viola tries to divert Olivia’s desire:

VIOLA

I pity you.

OLIVIA

That’s a degree to love.

VIOLA

No, not a grize; for ’tis a vulgar proof,
That very oft we pity enemies.

OLIVIA

Why, then, methinks ’tis time to smile again.
O, world, how apt the poor are to be proud!
If one should be a prey, how much the better
To fall before the lion than the wolf!

[Clock strikes]

The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.
Be not afraid, good youth, I will not have you:
And yet, when wit and youth is come to harvest,
Your were is alike to reap a proper man:
There lies your way, due west.

VIOLA

Then westward-ho! Grace and good disposition
Attend your ladyship!
You’ll nothing, madam, to my lord by me?

OLIVIA

Stay:
I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me.

VIOLA

That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA

If I think so, I think the same of you.

VIOLA

Then think you right: I am not what I am.

OLIVIA

I would you were as I would have you be!

VIOLA

Would it be better, madam, than I am?
I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

OLIVIA

O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful
In the contempt and anger of his lip!
A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid: love’s night is noon.
Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honour, truth and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,
For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause,
But rather reason thus with reason fetter,
Love sought is good, but given unsought better.

VIOLA

By innocence I swear, and by my youth
I have one heart, one bosom and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.
And so adieu, good madam: never more
Will I my master’s tears to you deplore.

Of course, not all of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing women attract female desire. Portia, in The Merchant of Venice has the practical purpose of needing to act as a lawyer. Innogen in Cymbeline and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona both cross-dress for safety in traveling (and to avoid recognition by the man they are seeking). Though one possible source for Two Gentlemen did include the Julia character attracting a woman’s desire.

So even in employing the trope of desire within gender disguise, Shakespeare sticks to only the most inoffensive manifestations of the concept.

Apprenticeship

Given this tendency to dodge around the most sexually charged possibilities, it’s interesting that there is one brief scene where Shakespeare touches on the trope of a sexually-experienced older woman “training” a young woman in the arts of love (or at least sex) in preparation for heterosexual relations. We saw a very tame, gender-flipped version in As You Like It when Ganymede teaches Orlando how to court a woman. But in Pericles, that most trope-tastic jumble of a play, we get the version where the proprietor of a whorehouse purchases a maiden to work in her establishment and explains how best to excite a customer, saying:

BAWD

Pray you, come hither awhile. You
have fortunes coming upon you. Mark me: you
must seem to do that fearfully which you commit
willingly, despise profit where you have most gain.
To weep that you live as you do makes pity in your
lovers. Seldom but that pity begets you a good
opinion, and that opinion a mere profit.

[When the maiden is confused, the madam’s servant suggests:]

O, take her home, mistress, take her home!
These blushes of hers must be quenched with
some present practice.

Once again, Shakespeare’s use of this trope is fairly tame—especially as the maiden’s virtue proves invincible. The motif is far more prominent in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London or James Mabbe’s The Spanish Bawd.

Bosom Buddies

There’s a greater range of potential within the depiction of femme-femme love. Characters can express extremes of affection because the absence of a gender contrast doesn’t challenge the social expectations. Without the superficial appearance of a male-female couple, the language of romance is more easily dismissed as non-erotic.

We previously discussed the expressions of passionate friendship between Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, but the evidence is more fleeting in other cases. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia and Helena make reference to an established intimate friendship. Hermia reminds her friend how:

in the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,
Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,

But almost from the start of the play, that closeness is disrupted by their competition for the affections of a man.

Dead Girlfriends

A more drastic way to deflect the transgressive potential of women’s passionate friendships is the dead girlfriend approach. Shakespeare allows women to get really intense about the love they felt for someone who’s already dead at the start of the play. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the domestic conflict between Titania and Oberon that underlies almost everything else that happens is sparked by Oberon’s greed to take possession of a young boy whose mother was beloved by Titania. “A votaress of my order” Titania describes her, which is to say a sworn devotee. A human servant of a fairy queen. But the scenario that Titania paints for us indicates a level of intimacy that justifies Titania’s stubborn refusal to part with the boy.

TITANIA

Set your heart at rest:
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following,–her womb then rich with my young squire,–
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.

In the end, of course, Titania surrenders and becomes a good obedient wife once more. The resolution by marriage is much more obviously forced in the case of Two Noble Kinsmen. Since this play isn’t as well-known as some, a brief plot summary may be in order.

Emilia is an Amazon, the sister of Queen Hippolyta who has just married Theseus. That is, just married within Two Noble Kinsmen, though also in the just aforementioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by coincidence. Emilia is disinterested in marriage and is mourning the death of her friend Flavina. Emilia’s description of how she loved the dead Flavina is charged with passion. The conversation starts with Hippolyta.

HIPPOLYTA

…[that] which he loves best.
EMILIA

Doubtless
There is a best, and reason has no manners
To say it is not you. I was acquainted
Once with a time when I enjoyed a playfellow;
You were at wars when she the grave enriched,
Who made too proud the bed; took leave o’ th’ moon,
Which then looked pale at parting, when our count
Was each eleven.
HIPPOLYTA

’Twas Flavina.
EMILIA

Yes.
You talk of Pirithous’ and Theseus’ love.
Theirs has more ground, is more maturely seasoned,
More buckled with strong judgment, and their needs
The one of th’ other may be said to water
Their intertangled roots of love. But I,
And she I sigh and spoke of, were things innocent,
Loved for we did, and like the elements
That know not what nor why, yet do effect
Rare issues by their operance, our souls
Did so to one another. What she liked
Was then of me approved, what not, condemned,
No more arraignment. The flower that I would pluck
And put between my breasts—O, then but beginning
To swell about the blossom—she would long
Till she had such another, and commit it
To the like innocent cradle, where, Phoenix-like,
They died in perfume. On my head no toy
But was her pattern; her affections—pretty,
Though haply hers careless were—I followed
For my most serious decking. Had mine ear
Stol’n some new air, or at adventure hummed one
From musical coinage, why, it was a note
Whereon her spirits would sojourn—rather, dwell
on—
And sing it in her slumbers. This rehearsal—
Which fury-innocent wots well comes in
Like old importment’s bastard—has this end,
That the true love ’tween maid and maid may be
More than in sex individual.

As a consequence of war, two kinsmen become Theseus’s prisoners. Theseus decides (without input from Emilia) that the two will fight with the victor marrying Emilia and the loser being executed. Don’t worry, it sort of makes sense in context. Emilia spends the whole play saying, “Look, this is stupid. I don’t want to marry at all and I certainly don’t want someone to be executed in my name.” When the rules of the duel are set, Emilia goes to the altar of Diana—goddess of those who refuse marriage—and prays to her.

EMILIA
O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen,
Abandoner of revels, mute contemplative,
Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure
As wind-fanned snow, who to thy female knights
Allow’st no more blood than will make a blush,
Which is their order’s robe, I here, thy priest,
Am humbled ’fore thine altar. O, vouchsafe
With that thy rare green eye, which never yet
Beheld thing maculate, look on thy virgin,
And, sacred silver mistress, lend thine ear—
Which ne’er heard scurrile term, into whose port
Ne’er entered wanton sound—to my petition,
Seasoned with holy fear. This is my last
Of vestal office. I am bride-habited
But maiden-hearted. A husband I have ’pointed,
But do not know him. Out of two I should
Choose one, and pray for his success, but I
Am guiltless of election. Of mine eyes,
Were I to lose one—they are equal precious—
I could doom neither; that which perished should
Go to ’t unsentenced. Therefore, most modest queen,
He of the two pretenders that best loves me
And has the truest title in ’t, let him
Take off my wheaten garland, or else grant
The file and quality I hold I may
Continue in thy band.

Emilia is loathe to be the prize in this contest and refuses to watch the fight. In the end she is resigned to her fate, not eager to embrace it. This clearly isn’t one of the romantic comedies with eager lovers. But although Emilia puts up the strongest resistance of any of Shakespeare’s heroines to having her love hijacked from a woman and turned toward heterosexual marriage, in the final analysis, Flavina can’t compete because she’s safely dead.

Queer-baiting?

So is it fair to characterize what Shakespeare is doing in these plays as “queer-baiting” in the sense of teasing the audience with hints and promises of a same-sex relationship only balk at the fence? I think it is. The context is different from the present day. He didn’t have an audience that actively and openly longed to see a story resolve with two women together. But he did have an audience that accepted such a pairing as within the scope of imagination. And if he didn’t think they would enjoy being presented with that possibility on stage, he wouldn’t have included the motifs in his plays.

Not that the early modern theater audience was ready to have two female-presenting people officially paired off at the final curtain. Even Lyly’s Gallathea dodges that possibility with a magical sex-change. But even within the limitations of the time, Shakespeare is coy and timid with his homoerotic tropes. Viola may whet our appetites but comes nowhere near to sating them. For that, we must write our own stories.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Homoerotic motifs in Shakespeare’s plays
The general context of female homoeroticism in early modern drama
Situating Shakespeare’s material in that context
Sources mentioned
- Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3
This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Shakespeare

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
Twitter: @LesbianMotif
Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

Website: http://alpennia.com
Email: Heather Rose Jones
Twitter: @heatherosejones
Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

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The Several Lives of Lucy Ann (Joseph) Lobdell

Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - 07:42

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

One thing that can be easy to lose track of when researching gender-crossing histories is that, given the historic context, we rarely know about the people who lived happily-ever-after lives, being accepted as the gender they presented to the world, loved and supported by those close enough to know their histories. We may occasionally get a glimpse of those lives after the fact, if their history comes to light after death. But when I read about people like Lucy/Joseph Lobdell, I can't help but take note of all the turning points in their life where things might just as easily turned out differently.

In this chapter, once again, Manion identifies a theme in the chapter title (poverty) that seems only tangentially -- or at least, not uniquely -- associated with the content of the chapter. Yes, Lobdell had economic motivations. And at a key point in their life, poverty (and residence in a poor house) provided a significant turning point, although a positive one in that case. But I see the theme of this chapter being another point that Manion discusses, but does not make the official theme. This is the shifting attitudes toward those who transed gender, depending not only on how they were doing it (openly vs. covertly, to support a family vs. in isolation), but also on where and when they were doing it. The American frontier offered a lot of opportunities (and Manion touches in passing on the irony of those opportunities being at the expense of participating in settler colonialism and genocide), but for reasons of historic context it also institutionalized a religious-based morality into the legal systems more strongly than many of the older eastern states. On another track, the relatively greater acceptance of "masculine women" in the context of the demands of farm living was undermined as new psychological theories of gender performance began to spread at the end of the 19th century. One's personal situation determined how vulnerable one was to these shifting attitudes.

And there, perhaps, Manion's chapter theme does turn out to be relevant. To be poor was to be vulnerable. Vulnerability often took the form of having one's idiosyncracies criminalized. But Lobdell's life also illustrates another through-line of this book: the extent to which the public was fascinated by those who transed gender. Their lives were documented, mythologized, and widely publicized. And we know that at least in some cases, that publicity offered inspiration to others who were finding the lives they had been born to didn't quite fit comfortably.

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LHMP #331h Manion 2020 Female Husbands Chapter 7: The Criminalized Poor

Full citation:

Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3

Chapter 7: The Criminalized Poor

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

In this chapter, once again, Manion identifies a theme in the chapter title (poverty) that seems only tangentially -- or at least, not uniquely -- associated with the content of the chapter. Yes, Lobdell had economic motivations. And at a key point in their life, poverty (and residence in a poor house) provided a significant turning point, although a positive one in that case. But I see the theme of this chapter being another point that Manion discusses, but does not make the official theme. This is the shifting attitudes toward those who transed gender, depending not only on how they were doing it (openly vs. covertly, to support a family vs. in isolation), but also on where and when they were doing it. The American frontier offered a lot of opportunities (and Manion touches in passing on the irony of those opportunities being at the expense of participating in settler colonialism and genocide), but for reasons of historic context it also institutionalized a religious-based morality into the legal systems more strongly than many of the older eastern states. On another track, the relatively greater acceptance of "masculine women" in the context of the demands of farm living was undermined as new psychological theories of gender performance began to spread at the end of the 19th century. One's personal situation determined how vulnerable one was to these shifting attitudes.

# # #

This chapter begins with a discussion of the social and legal systems that operated to police gender expression and identity. The post Civil War era involved an expansion of official police intervention with regard to moral and social crimes, not only crimes of violence and property. These systems operated overtly against the transing of gender in small everyday ways, not only those cases where complete gender crossing was involved. This postwar era also saw examples of individuals who crossed gender boundaries multiple times in multiple ways, not only those who made a one-way transition from one side of the binary to the other.

The chapter primarily focuses on one particular biography: that of Joseph Lobdell, born Lucy Ann Lobdell, and covers multiple different performances and perceptions of their life.

Lobdell was assigned female at birth and came to adopt male clothing in specific circumstances such as for horseback riding or hunting. Lobdell wrote a memoir at an early point in their life, discussing this gender crossing as a functional matter. But the memoir ends before they took up a life fully read as male. Their later experiences can be pieced together from the trail of news stories generated by various critical points in their life.

Lobdell grew up on a farm and early adopted habits and skills more typical for boys, such as hunting. After showing little interest in heterosexual courtship, Lobdell eventually became involved with a young man where Lobdell played a more stereotypically masculine role in the relationship, being more protective and dominant. Despite Lobdell’s continued reservations about the relationship, eventually they married. The marriage was short-lived, not so much due to Lobdell’s reservations but due to their husbands abusive behavior.

Lobdell return to living with their parents but soon took up the role of “man of the family” when their father became disabled. This included both hunting and farm chores.

Encouraged by an encounter with a traveler who took them for a man, and wishing to avoid a visit by their estranged husband, Lobdell decided to leave home and seek work presenting as a man and receiving a man’s wages. Previously Lobdell had been understood as “a woman in man’s clothing”, but in this new life they took on the name Joseph and spent 15 years moving through the world as a man, including pursuing romantic relationships with women.

The jobs they took at first were not necessarily the physical labor they had previously engaged in while transing gender. One early position was as a singing teacher, primarily teaching young women, one of whom they came close to marrying except at the last moment someone discovered “by accident” that Lobdell was assigned female. This resulted in a hasty departure from the town.

After that, Lobdell moved further west, away from familiar territory and took up more physical jobs. After some years, someone again raised the issue of Lobdell’s gender and made a charge before a court that Lobdell was impersonating a man. Unlike in previous eras, now there did exist laws against transing gender, particularly in the midwestern territories that were newly establishing law codes in a context of repressive religious movements. There is a brief digression of the topic of “blue laws,” which were moral-based law codes generally meant to enforce the principles of a particular dominant religion.

Lobdell’s lawyer appears to have successfully argued against the charges and an evidently sympathetic judge agreed and no verdict of guilty was found. But the experience was emotionally devastating to Lobdell, who decided to return to the family home after that.

From having been a productive member of society, Lobdell now became destitute, and after briefly returning to their birth family ended up in a poor house. It was in that institution that they met a woman who turned their life around one more time. Lobdell and Marie Louise Perry began cohabiting together in the house of Lobdell’s parents and remained together for almost 20 years.

The two were recorded as being considered an odd couple but clearly devoted to each other and bringing out the best in each other. Their financial situation, however, continued to be rocky. Returning to public attention due to being involved in public disturbances, Lobdell was written up in a newspaper article that focsed on their prior trans experiences, referring to “Joe Lobdell and wife” and describing Lobdell with male pronouns. At this time, Lobdell was perceived as a masculine-performing woman, not as a man.

Manion reviews the different ways in which Lobdell’s various presentations were received, depending on whether they were understood as being a masculine woman or as a gender crossing man. Lobdell’s wife, in contrast, was described as lady-like with upper class manners. She embodied the stereotypes of approved womanhood. Newspaper articles about the couple found their attraction inexplicable, and yet they were clearly inseparable. Lobdell was sometimes celebrated in news articles as an activist for women’s rights, though perhaps only the rights that they needed in order to act as a legal entity in society: signing contracts and owning property.

The property came as an unexpected legacy of their long departed husband Lobdell’s husband had enlisted during the Civil War and been killed, and it turned out that Lobdell was entitled to a widow’s pension with significant backpay. Lobdell’s brother John helped them retrieve the funds and purchase property. And then--for unclear reasons--John claimed that Lobdell was insane and had been so for 10 years and had them committed to an asylum, cutting all communication with Marie Louise Perry, Lobdell’s wife. Among the evidence presented by John and other neighbors for Lobdell’s insanity was dressing as a man, claiming to be a man, and claiming to be married to a woman. Whether John believed that his sibling was genuinely insane on the basis of gender transgression, or whether John simply wanted access to Lobdell’s property, is open for a question.

The last stage of Lobdell’s life overlapped with the rise of the medicalization of gender transgression and Lobdell became the subject of a doctor’s study, transforming what has been originally viewed as a legal or moral issue into one of psychological disturbance. As was not uncommon in such studies, the doctor interpreted much of Lobdell’s behavior and character through a lens of sexual desire.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the sexologists’ theory of gender inversion that characterized lesbian desire as existing only within a pseudo-heterosexual framework. For some people who were transgender this framework may be apt, but plenty of examples demonstrate that it was not the only framework in which desire between two assigned female people existed.

Time period:

19th c

Place:

USA

Misc tags:

Lucy Ann Lobdell (Joseph Lobdell) & Marie Louise Perry

gender disguise f>m

transgender identity

female husband

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A Woman Presenting as a Man Presenting as a Woman

Monday, August 9, 2021 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

It's hard enough trying to untangle the interesections of gender identity, sexuality, economic necessity, and sexism without tossing a completely unreliable narrator into the mix. The narrators of gender-crossing stories already have enough motivations to be unreliable, even setting aside the question of the language and concepts they have to work with. They may be motivated by identifying the narrative that will make their audience most sympathetic (which may change with the audience). They may be motivated by trying to protect a spouse, by presenting her as naive and ignorant. They may be motivated by trying to fit their experiences into existing familiar tropes. (And that's without getting into the motivations that the press and biographiers have for adjusting and modifying their stories.) But sometimes their stories go beyond immediate practicality.

In reading the biography of Albert Guelph (which Manion reveals in a convoluted tangle), I'm reminded a bit of the 17th century biography of James Howard/Amy Poulter and Arabella Hunt. In both cases, a Person Assigned Female initially struck up a relationship with a woman while presenting as female, then claimed that they were a man who had been using female disguise for some strategic purpose and transitioned to presenting as male in order to enter into a marriage. In both cases, the wife's family was actively involved in questioning the marriage when the story started to fall apart. The eventual outcome varied (including different outcomes from Guelph's two marriages).

Guelph presented a romantic back-story: a secret descendent of King George IV and his estranged wife Caroline, forced to live in disguise as a woman for safetey's sake, and supported by income from mysterious benefactors. The themes are less clear in Howard/Poulter's case: a witness at the trial said they had justified the female disguise for reasons relating to a family inheritance which would be resolved when they came of age. In both cases, this raises the question of why the bride and her family would find the story of female disguise so plausible that they were shocked (shocked, I say!) to later discover that the person in question was, in fact, assigned female. The unreliability of all the participants comes into play. Was the bride initially ok with being married to a female-bodied person? (In the case of Guelph's second wife, she continued to support her spouse through the trial instigated by her father, and may well have been a knowing and willing participant.) What role did the parents play either in accepting the original framing or in challenging the marriage after the fact? Can we trust their claims of surprise? (In the case of Guelph's second father-in-law, he does seem to have been opposed to the marriage from the start, and given that he evidently had met Guelph in both gender presentations, one perhaps can't blame him for being suspicious, though one can blame him for not trusting his daughter's choices.)

In any event, if you want some inspirational fodder for plotting the possibilities of queer lives in history, these stories are useful in remembering that truth can be stranger than fiction.

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LHMP #331g Manion 2020 Female Husbands Chapter 6: The Activists

Full citation:

Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3

Chapter 6: The Activists

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

Guelph presented a romantic back-story: a secret descendent of King George IV and his estranged wife Caroline, forced to live in disguise as a woman for safetey's sake, and supported by income from mysterious benefactors. The themes are less clear in Howard/Poulter's case: a witness at the trial said they had justified the female disguise for reasons relating to a family inheritance which would be resolved when they came of age. In both cases, this raises the question of why the bride and her family would find the story of female disguise so plausible that they were shocked (shocked, I say!) to later discover that the person in question was, in fact, assigned female. The unreliability of all the participants comes into play. Was the bride initially ok with being married to a female-bodied person? (In the case of Guelph's second wife, she continued to support her spouse through the trial instigated by her father, and may well have been a knowing and willing participant.) What role did the parents play either in accepting the original framing or in challenging the marriage after the fact? Can we trust their claims of surprise? (In the case of Guelph's second father-in-law, he does seem to have been opposed to the marriage from the start, and given that he evidently had met Guelph in both gender presentations, one perhaps can't blame him for being suspicious, though one can blame him for not trusting his daughter's choices.)

In any event, if you want some inspirational fodder for plotting the possibilities of queer lives in history, these stories are useful in remembering that truth can be stranger than fiction.

# # #

The feminist movement of the later 19th century tackled questions of the differences and similarities between the genders, however feminism had an uneasy relationship with transing gende, due to the use of gendered criticism of both feminist ideals and feminists themselves. It was a common tactic to accuse feminists of being masculine. Both for philosophical and practical reasons there was a sense that gender crossing undermined their arguments for the equality of women.

[Note: There are a number of historical intersections with themes that are currently showing up in TERF rhetoric, and it can be useful to understand the deep background of some of those themes and ideas. There’s also cross-over here with the “lavender menace” phenomenon, where the accusation that feminists were all lesbians led some parts of the feminist movement in the ‘70s to try to purge lesbians from the movement. Conversely, this chapter points out that while those who transed gender were implicitly critiquing gender norms and boundaries, that does’t mean they consciously challenged sexist social structures. In some ways, it feels like the bringing in feminism as a sub-theme in this chapter is another case of Manion shoehorning her biographical studies into an artificial chapter structure. But the topic is definitely worth exploring, whether or not it relates to the specific female husband biographies in this section.]

In general, female husbands were not understood or depicted as political actors or as gender activists. They were seen not as critiquing the institution of heterosexual marriage but as subverting it for individual benefit. Feminists, in contrast, agitated for the right to enjoy the freedom of dress, movement, and employment that men enjoyed, but as women, not by becoming men. Nonetheless, this chapter explores how the two groups were conflated in the popular imagination.

The first focus biography in this chapter is John Smith, a tinker in New York in the mid 19th century. Smith courted and married a widow named Mrs. Donnelly. We know essentially nothing about how they met or their personal life, although Manion is happy to speculate certain biographical details. Donnelly became unsatisfied with the marriage, evidently due to the lack of sexual intimacy. She appears to have expressed the suspicion that her husband was not a man to a male acquaintance who then challenged Smith on that basis and forcefully determined that Smith’s physiology was female. Unlike some other cases of female husbands in the US, the newspaper coverage was hostile and negative, though not very prominent. However although Smith was arrested on the basis of Donnelly’s charge, it was determined that there was no applicable law that prohibited cross dressing or transing gender. Furthermore, Smith could not be charged with the vague vagrancy laws due to being gainfully employed and part of the social fabric of the community.

New York state had no laws specifically against cross-dressing at that time, so an arrest on that basis might result in embarrassment and but unless some other charge were involved could not result in imprisonment. Some commenters on cross-dressing arrests offered sympathetic objections that women wearing male attire were accepted as ordinary in other communities and should not be prosecuted.

To some extent the rise of a visible feminist movement and the use of accusations of masculinity against them created a new hazard for those who transed gender, because it elevated the visvibility of gender issues in the popular imagination. Those who felt there should be legal barriers to the appropriation of masculine prerogatives that feminists called for set about creating the very laws the absence of which had protected gender crossers. The chapter spends several pages discussing the intersection of the feminist movement and abolitionism. This provided another topic on which feminists were considered dangerous, and were attacked as intruding into the male sphere. Femininity was used as a weapon to try to force feminists into silence and passivity.

The accusation that the support of feminism made women masculine resulted in a backlash of respectability politics within the feminist movement, where some felt the needed to emphasize that they did not want to become men. This undermined what might otherwise have been a natural alliance between feminists and trans men.

The next focus biography is of Albert Guelph, which begins in England. Guelph’s story is a peculiar one. They first came into contact with their future wife while presenting as a woman. After becoming friendly with the family, Guelph revealed a curious family history: that they were a secret descendent of King George IV and queen Caroline but had been hidden from the world and disguised as a girl from a young age, even though assigned male at birth. But Guelph asserted they were revealing this out of love for Mary Ann Robins. At that point Guelph transitioned into living as a man and married Miss Robins. Shortly after the marriage, Robins came to her mother complaining that she had discovered her husband was a woman. Her mother took the story to the police, who were understandably confused by the twists and turns. Guelph seems to have been fairly well off and always had plenty of money, which may have been part of the inducement to overlook the strangeness of their original story. At any rate after the matter came into the open, Guelph disappeared. But wait…!

Like many female husband stories, the press coverage was not confined to the location where the events occurred, and the US press picked it up only a month after it came out in England. This is relevant, because Albert Guelph moved to New York (evidently in company with their married sister and children, and at least one of Guelph’s only children). Guelph contracted yet another marriage. In this case it was the bride’s father who became suspicious of the nature of his son-in-law and--against the bride’s wishes--he confronted Guelph about their gender and elicited an admission of sorts that they were female.

Guelph was arrested and put in prison, where their wife visited with expressions of affection and protestations that the arrest had been a conspiracy by her father, who had disapproved of the marriage. In the trial Guelph refused to identify themselves by gender referring the question to the arresting officers, who they said could tell the judge the facts of the matter. Guelph was still appearing in male clothing for the trial. The charge was vagrancy, which is a bit confusing given that Guelph had a fixed residence (with his sister and sister’s family, who also offered a home to Guelph’s wife after the marriage). Guelph also clearly had money.

The family connections make Guelph’s case unusual, as does the fact that Guelph changed gender presentation regularly, depending on circumstances and this was well known by their family and local community. In fact, as with Guelph’s previous marriage in England, they first got to know their New York wife’s family while presenting as a woman and only later changed into male attire with the knowledge of that family. The same rationale seems to have been used to explain this: that Guelph was assigned male but was wearing women’s clothing as a disguise on occasion. This may go some distance to explaining why the bride’s father had certain objections to the marriage.

Guelph seems to have been comfortable in both gender presentations but used the male presentation as a context for sexual intimacy and love. Guelph’s wife’s acceptance and support after the arrest suggest strongly that she was well aware that Guelph was assigned female and that this was perfectly acceptable to her. The newspapers vacillated between two theories: that Guelph had tricked their wife into thinking that they were biologically male; alternately that this was a same-sex relationship that was disguised for public acceptance. There were jokes about women being so desperate for a husband that they took to marrying each other.

At the trial, Guelph’s lawyer argued on two points: that vagrancy carried a maximum sentence of 60 days which had already passed, and that there was no state law prohibiting cross dressing. The judge had invoked an existing law against disguise but the law had been clearly implemented to address political agitators who disguised themselves to avoid identification. After being acquitted Guelph continued to appear in the clothing of both genders, although public criticism of this was noted in the papers. And some used the case as a spur to arguing that there should be laws against gender cross-dressing.

Another thread in the question of wearing the clothing of a different gender came in the form of the bloomer movement. (We get back to the feminists here.) It could not be said that women wearing a bloomer costume were wearing “male clothing” as the style was one that no man would have worn. However due to the use of loose trousers as part of the outfit, bloomer wearers were accused of being masculine. And bloomers were strongly associated with the feminist movement, even though not all feminists embraced the concept. They were part of a general movement for dress reform that argued that women should not be required to wear physically restrictive clothing.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of conflicts between feminist activism and trans masculinity.

Time period:

19th c

Place:

USA

England

Misc tags:

John Smith & Mrs Donnelly

gender disguise f>m

transgender identity

female husband

Event / person:

Nancy Stours (Albert Guelph) & Mary Ann Robins & Miss Lewis

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 207 - On the Shelf for August 2021

Saturday, August 7, 2021 - 14:55

lhmpodcast.jpg

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 207 - On the Shelf for August 2021 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2021/08/07 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2021.

I’m getting to the point in the pandemic where I feel like I’m living too much inside my own head. All the days feel exactly the same. I’ve been doing a little more going out and about, but even now the thought of sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by unmasked people with who knows what sort of vaccination status still freaks me out too much. I’m not ready to go back to how things were in the Before Times, but I’m also not ready to decide that this is just how it is now. Well, except for the working from home part. I’m delighted that my employer is including a permanent work-from-home option. I hope the ongoing restrictions of the pandemic aren’t hitting you-all too hard.

I don’t know if it’s the pandemic malaise or what, but I’m still on something of an unplanned vacation from podcast tasks that involve outreach to other people. I still hope to do all of the interviews that I’ve contacted people about, so we may have some interview-heavy shows once I start getting caught up. The malaise has also affected scheduling of the fiction episodes. You may not have noticed, but last week there was a fifth Saturday, which should have been a fiction episode and I just…failed in terms of having my act together in the last couple months enough to get the stories out to the narrators for recording. There, too, we will cover all the planned material, but on a slightly adjusted schedule. Maybe I’m taking a tip from Simone Biles and adjusting what “winning” looks like.

I’ve been doing a couple of fun research things lately related to the blog. One was a request from a comedian for some examples of queer women from the European middle ages to use as inspiration for a routine she’s putting together. I really enjoyed putting together a list of mini biographies and resources, and eventually I hope to give you more information about the show when things get to that point.

The other fun research is perhaps my most ambitious primary source project for the blog so far, and it’s all due to the wonders of the world wide web. Several of the podcasts have mentioned an individual from 18th century France who provides a unique look into attitudes toward the intersection of sexuality and gender in that era. Anne Grandjean, also known as Jean-Baptiste Grandjean, was assigned female as a child, but during adolescence they experienced sexual desire for women and confessed this to their priest. The priest told Grandjean that if they desired women, they must be a man and instructed them to change gender presentation. This they did, with the full knowledge of their family and community. They courted several women, married one of them, and established a household. Then one of their ex-girlfriends, from unknown motivation, started making trouble about Grandjean “actually being a woman”. The court, having established Grandjean’s female physiology, charged them with “profaning the sacrament of marriage” by being a woman married to a woman. Grandjean was all “I’m just doing what my priest told me to do,” but that didn’t cut it. Fortunately, Grandjean got a clever and sympathetic lawyer who argued, in essence, that Grandjean was some form of intersex except in a way that was only detectable via their experience of sexual desire. Which, in a way, was a more medicalized version of what the priest had concluded: that a person who desires women must, to some degree, be a man. The lawyer’s argument, looked at from a different angle, could be seen as trans-affirming: that is, that it was possible for someone’s gender identity to be misaligned with their physiology and that this was not a sin or a crime, simply a “trick of nature”. The judge split the difference, to some extent, ruling that Grandjean was innocent of “profaning the sacrament of marriage” as the marriage had been entered into in good faith, but also ruling that Grandjean should return to presenting as a woman, the marriage would be dissolved, and Grandjean was not allowed to continue cohabiting with their wife. Not exactly the happiest of endings, but definitely not the sort of tragedy that happened to others.

The question of how Grandjean might have categorized themselves in modern terms is not at all clear, and I don’t have an interest in trying to pin down a definitive answer. It wasn’t so much that 18th century French society didn’t have a category for “a woman who sexually desired a woman”—that it did is demonstrable from other sources. But that wasn’t a category that a priest or a sympathetic lawyer was willing to place a respectable, well-meaning young woman in. And so Grandjean was pressured into several other categories in turn. But Grandjean’s story would easily and comfortably fit a trans narrative, and the lawyer’s arguments could be seen as applying equally to the transgender experience, even if couched in different language than we would use. I pass over the intersex option because there doesn’t seem to be any direct evidence for that interpretation, except as a conceptual framework for arguing the possibility of contradictory gender features.

In any event, getting back to the research question, I had previously read about Grandjean’s story through several articles discussing various aspects of queer history, and like any historian I wanted to take a look at the primary sources myself. I had questions that were different from what other people were asking and there’s nothing like going to the source. The original source for the information was a write-up of the court case, with additional background information. But I could find no evidence that it had ever been published in English translation. What I did find, was a Google Books scan of a 1765 edition of the work, and a moderately good OCR conversion of a slightly different edition of the work with some additional material (primarily some verses appended to the end).

That was a solid starting point. I wouldn’t have had the time to transcribe the scans myself (and the images would have needed a lot of cleaning up from OCR), but it was the work of a few hours to do a comparison of the scans to the existing conversion and clean up the errors: fixing lots of long-s’s that had been interpreted as f’s and so forth. So now I had a clean text of 18th century French. Um…I have never actually studied French, so where does that leave me? I mean, I’ve picked up enough reading familiarity from studying other Romance languages and from cognates and just from osmosis that I can figure out what a French text is about. But not enough to do a confident translation. I could have asked my girlfriend to translate it, since French is one of her languages. Let’s not talk about Google Translate – it can manage basic stuff, but I know from having run novel cover copy through it that it has some serious limitations. But my girlfriend turned me on to a much better online translation resource and it turns out to be perfectly happy with 18th century French (which evidently isn’t too far from modern literary French). That got me a solid starting translation, which I am now going through in more detail, looking especially at points where the alternation of gender reference may have confused the AI. By the time I’m done I just may have mastered a knowledge of French pronouns. Then I only need to work on the rest of the language! Once I’m done with the analysis, my girlfriend is going to check over the results and then I’ll put it in the blog.

I’ve done a few of my own translations for the blog before: German, Latin, Greek—though for the Greek I was using someone else’s translation as a start and just focusing on specific words and phrases. But this is the longest text I’ve ever tackled. The other source text that I have on my to-do list for the blog is a medieval Welsh love poem, written from one woman to another. Now, medieval Welsh definitely is something I’ve studied—it’s what I did my PhD on—but poetry is…hard. So that’s a challenge waiting for another day and a lot more time.

News of the Field

If you’ve paid attention to my annual publishing analysis, you know that all it takes to be “one of the most prolific publishers of sapphic historical fiction” is to put out at least 2 books a year in the field. So when I’m updating my spreadsheet of new books, I tend to pay attention when a previously unfamiliar publisher or imprint shows up a couple times in the same year. Given that, I wanted to take note of three publishers who just caught my attention in this way. They all have very different relationships to queer content, and especially to sapphic content. But at the very least, they show the growing normalization of women loving women characters among publishers of all sizes.

Kalikoi is a very new press that specializes in books about women loving women, whatever label the characters might use. They focus on a variety of genre literature and a delightfully high proportion of historical stories. I haven’t had a chance to read any of their output yet, but I strongly recommend that my listeners check them out and see if you find books to your taste. Because a new press can use all the encouragement they can get, and it would be nice to see them stick around and grow.

Entangled Publishing has been around since 2011 but my database doesn’t have any sapphic historicals from them earlier than 2020. They appear to be incredibly prolific and specialize in romance for both adult and YA markets. They have a number of specialized imprints for particular flavors of books and their website has a fairly powerful set of search filters. The filter for LGBTQ books doesn’t apply independently of genre, so there’s no way to search specifically for sapphic historicals. But on the other hand, there are only 32 books in that filter, so it isn’t too much to scroll through. Only one of their books in my spreadsheet is already out, so the selection doesn’t look like much currently, but that book was Diana Pinguicha’s A Curse of Roses, which was excellent, so I have high hopes for their future output.

Feiwel & Friends is an imprint of MacMillan, specializing in books for readers up to age 16. There’s no particular focus on queer characters, and the two books from them that I have in my spreadsheet for the upcoming year were both ones where I had to reach out to the authors to get confirmation of sapphic content. But the stories look fascinating and we can always hope that they’ll publish more like these – even if they don’t seem to care if the books are discoverable.

In focusing on these publishers recently entering the genre, I don’t mean to slight the presses that have been putting out even larger numbers of titles for a long time. But it’s always great to see a growing backfield of sources for the books we love.

Publications on the Blog

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog continued reading through Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History in July and will finish the book out in August. I have another book in the relatively recent set of studies on historical transmasculine identities that I’d like to cover while I’m on a roll. And the source material on Anne Grandjean will fit into the current theme nicely, so the blog looks like it’s set for a while.

Book Shopping!

No new books picked up for the Project this month. I have a couple newly on order, but I’ll wait to blog them when they arrive.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

That brings us up to the new and recent fiction. We have one June book to catch up with. I knew about it last month, but the website was unclear on publication date so I wasn’t aware it was already out.

A Lady's Fine Companion by Margaret K. Mac from Kalikoi is a short story with an unclear setting in space and time, but my guess is maybe late 19th or early 20th century? This is predicated on the central role of a typewriter in the protagonist’s career, plus her brother’s insistence that she have a female companion in her household. So…um…you can guess what comes next. A workplace romance of sorts. The description makes it sound fairly spicy.

There are two July books I didn’t spot earlier. Another short one from Kaliloi: All Manner of Hats by Elva Birch. This has a magical steampunk-flavored setting with two rival milliners, distracted from their business truce (and from the quest for a marriage of convenience) by the need to collaborate on a mystery…and on something more personal.

We also have the start of a series by J.E. Leak, from Certifiably Creative which appears to be the author’s own imprint. In the Shadow of the Past (Shadow Series #1) is a World War II romantic thriller with spies, night clubs, and a slow burn romance that continues on into the next installment.

I’ve found seven August releases at this point, all set in the 19th or 20th century. Let’s take them in roughly chronological order.

Jane Walsh has another Regency out from Bold Strokes Books. In Her Countess to Cherish, a runaway bride encounters a dashing rogue, but the rogue has another life as an upper class bluestocking. Both women have secrets that could destroy their growing attraction, and the problem of how to achieve their hearts’ desire while staying true to themselves. From the cover copy, it appears that this is definitely a gender disguise story, rather than a transgender story, with consideration of how the character understands her identity.

I’m not quite as certain on that point about Kate Hershberger’s self-published Blackpoint. In a wild west setting, the town sheriff is an outsider along multiple axes and doesn’t need the complication of falling in love with a beautiful runaway, fleeing an abusive home. But the town of Blackpoint has provided a haven for many people and maybe it can provide the two a place to be themselves and be together. The book is tagged as “lesbian romance” on Amazon, but the cover copy consistently uses male pronouns for one of the protagonists. So it’s unclear how the gender identity issues are handled within the story.

The Fiend in the Fog by Jess Faraday from Bold Strokes Books is something of a supernatural gaslamp adventure set in London that…well, this is complicated enough that I’m going to step out of my usual briefer summary and just read the cover copy.

Abigail and Gideon are under siege. Noxious fogs have been bringing their clinic waves of indigent patients with inexplicable symptoms, telling wild tales of a demonic presence in the fog. If that’s not enough, someone wants the clinic for themselves, and they’re using the force of law to get it. On the other side of town, heiress Meg Eisenstadt and her brother Nat live a life of well-intentioned aimless luxury. She dabbles in social justice causes and he pursues alchemy. And in a secret lab in the depths of Whitechapel, disgraced physician Jin Wylie attempts to rebuild his shattered life by performing dubious research for a shadowy cabal. They live in separate worlds on different trajectories until the mysterious fiend in the fog brings them together. Abigail and Meg discover a shared passion for social justice, and for one another. But where does that leave her plans with Gideon? And what of the future of the clinic? Gideon has his own monster. Can he keep it in check without Abigail’s constant presence? Does Dr. Wylie’s research hold the solution to Gideon’s problems, or is it the cause of them? And could Nat’s own dabblings be the key to defeating the vicious killer in the fog?

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to go slightly out of chronological order and pair another “fog” title. In A.L. Lester’s self-published The Fog of War (Bradfield #1), Dr. Sylvia Marks is trying to find equilibrium as a village doctor after returning from a World War I field hospital. It isn’t just a matter of leaving the war behind; her lover disappeared while driving an ambulance and some strange events are making her question Anna’s fate. Will everything change with the arrival of another close friend from the field clinic? There seems to be a bit of mystery here—perhaps a supernatural one—as well as the potential for romance.

Backing up a smidge to the disastrous voyage of the Titanic, Charlotte Anne Hamilton’s The Breath between Waves from Entangled follows two strangers who are thrown together as cabin-mates on the doomed voyage. A shipboard romance helps them put aside the sorrows of what they left behind and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. And then…well, we all know what happens next.

Shifting gears from the more common romance fare, Shannon Carr’s self-published The Haunting of Meade Manor falls solidly in the horror genre. In 1933 England, Mary Meade has unexpectedly inherited her great-uncle’s manor house, complete with a lurking murderer and the spirit of the woman he killed. But there are more spirits inhabiting the house and one of them can cross back into the physical world. Can Mary find happiness in the arms of a woman who’s been dead for half a century? And what will it take to rid Meade Manor of the evil that is haunting it from both sides of the grave?

The last book for this month isn’t actually a historical novel at all, but is of tangential interest because it features two women working at a living history museum, portraying the Australian gold fields. The Commitment by Virginia Hale from Bella Books is very much a contemporary romance, with themes of marriage of convenience, unspoken pining, and the unexpected appearance of a not-entirely-ex girlfriend. I don’t know how big a part the historic re-enactment aspect plays in the book, but listeners might find it an intriguing setting.

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading lately? I feel like I’ve slowed down a little since last month’s dam-breaking. I had a listener request that I include the books I mention in this segment in my show notes, so I’ll be doing that from now on. There was the pirate-themed short story “At Word’s Point” by Carolyn Elizabeth, which is a spinoff from her forthcoming novel from Bella Books. I’ve been listening to some SFF audiobooks as part of working on my Hugo Award ballot, since I can fit them into odd moments. This month’s books were volumes from the best series finalists: Network Effect by Martha Wells, Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire, and City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty. No lesbian content, alas. I also really enjoyed Gail Carriger’s non-fiction The Heroine’s Journey which dissects a deep-rooted story structure that exists in parallel to, and in contrast with, the “Hero’s Journey” promulgated by Joseph Campbell. I think my writing has strong elements of the Heroine’s Journey, but it’s also interesting to see how individual characters in an ensemble cast can be living out different journeys, and how that creates conflict within the story. I mean, in the Alpennia series, Margerit Sovitre is definitely on a heroine’s journey, but her partner Barbara Lumbeirt keeps trying to follow a hero’s journey and it definitely causes problems at times. Carriger’s book isn’t a “how to write” book. I have an uneasy relationship with books that feel like they’re telling me how to write. It’s much more of a “how to think about writing” book, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s analyzing things!

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

Delays in the interview and fiction segments
Processing a primary source for the blog
Publishers on our radar
Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3
New and forthcoming fiction
What have I read?
- ”At Word’s Point” by Carolyn Elizabeth
- The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger
- Network Effect by Martha Wells (audiobook)
- City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (audiobook)
- Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire (audiobook)

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
Twitter: @LesbianMotif
Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

Website: http://alpennia.com
Email: Heather Rose Jones
Twitter: @heatherosejones
Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

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By His Work Shall You Know Him

Monday, August 2, 2021 - 07:00

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project

In this chapter, Manion touches on--but doesn't fully explore--a couple of key differences between the trans-masculine experience in England and in America. English social structures around marriage, employment, charitable support, and rights to residence were deeply embedded in an assumption of static location. The parish you were born into was obliged to support you if you were indigent, which meant other parishes could be hostile to if they felt you might be (or become) a burden. Marriage laws were in a state of flux, but relied on communal familiarity with the couple's history to validate their status (reading the banns). But in America, everyone was on the move and many were very recent arrivals to the continent, to say nothing of a particular community. Changing one's presented identity in any respect was easier. And if people were not always automatically taken at face value when they showed up in a community, the residents were often willing to let their deeds and work speak for them. You were what you could do, whether it was a specific occupation or a gender. Americans also seemed a bit more willing to shrug and accept the situation when it turned out someone had a different background than originally believed. But in contrast to all that, the increasing professionalization of the police force, and social suspicion of "others", whether along class, nationality, race, or religious boundaries, meant that official scrutiny was often turned on the details of someone's life if they were morally suspect, not simply if they were legally suspect. This legal interest in controling gender presentation would increase across the 19th century and well into the 20th.

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LHMP #331f Manion 2020 Female Husbands Chapter 5: The Workers

Full citation:

Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3

Part Two: US Husbands, 1830-1910 - Chapter 5: The Workers

[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]

# # #

While the first half of Manion's book focuses primarily on female husbands in England, the second half moves across the ocean to the United States. People who transed gender in 19th century America for economic reasons operated not only within the binary of male and female, but within a racial context that largely categorized work along racial lines. The white male worker had the best economic opportunities, but the frequency with which people assigned female could trans gender to access those opportunities undermined the theory of a clear gender divide, and highlighted the opportunities for those who were willing to trade female gender presentation for economic access.

One of the greatest contrasts with the situation in England was easy geographic mobility. Mobility made transing gender easier, and economic motivations tended to be taken at face value at discovery, especially in contrast to the usual alternative of sex work.

The one context in which transing gender as part of identity change was looked askance was for Black workers who were suspected of using gender change as a disguise when escaping slavery. Black mobility was more constrained even in the North or after Emancipation, so several of the advantages to white gender-crossers were eliminated.

This chapter also focuses on the increasing importance of a professional police force to the identification, pursuit, and management of gender transgression.

The first focus biography in this chapter is George Wilson, a factory worker who was accosted by the New York City police in 1836 for apparent public intoxication, in the course of which Wilson’s assigned gender was identified. Wilson presented a life history that was significantly fabricated and designed to elicit sympathy, but which was undermined somewhat when Wilson’s wife Elizabeth turned up at the station, willing to provide further details.

The couple were both from working class Scottish families and had likely met in Glasgow when Wilson was working in the same factory as Elizabeth’s father. They married in 1821 and emigrated to North America, settling first in Canada where they were joined by Elizabeth’s father, and then the whole family moved to New Jersey where father and son-in-law again worked in the same factory. When that factory went out of business, they moved to NYC where Wilson worked in a hat factory. Manion speculates that Elizabeth may have been a factory worker as well, though no specific evidence is given.

At the police station, Elizabeth’s goal was to gain Wilson’s freedom, as his continued employment was essential for the family’s financial security. The magistrate’s goal was to satisfy his curiosity about Wilson’s personal history. Elizabeth stated that she hadn’t known her husband’s assigned gender before the wedding, but Wilson told her afterward while they were in the middle of the voyage to America—a context that would have reduced her options for response. She reported that she accepted the situation and was content to continue as husband and wife. And certainly, after they were joined by her father, her options would have been somewhat wider if she had objected.

Several versions of Wilson’s history prior to the marriage were offered, but all revolved around the desire to leave an undesirable family situation around age 12 and taking up life as a boy in the context of leaving home.

The consideration of George and Elizabeth Wilson's fate leaves off without any resolution and the thread picks up with other examples of transing gender, particularly as sailors (which Wilson was originally thought to be by the arresting officer). Accounts of “female sailors” were common in American newspapers of the time, even as they were growing less common in British accounts. Their stories were popular tabloid fare and some related that it was other such accounts, or biographies like Deborah Sampson’s, that inspired them to take up the profession.

Although nautical jobs were more open to Black workers than many other professions, the treatment of Charles Wilson in the press shows that the journalistic category “female sailor” was inherently categorized as white. Charles Wilson was variously described as Black or colored, but was never offered the label of “female sailor”. After serving in the navy, Wilson was convicted of stealing pigs in New York City and their assigned gender was identified when they were forced to change into prison clothing.

Several other examples from nautical contexts are discussed, including George (Ann) Johnson who signed on with a whaling vessel after being abandoned by a lover. (Abandonment by a lover or fiance was a common motivation offered in trans biographies. The motif was guaranteed to elicit sympathy and may not always have been rooted in truth.) When Johnson's assigned gender was discovered while at sea, the captain decided to enforce gender norms by requiring Johnson to return to a female presentation, to cease working as a sailor (against Johnson’s wishes), and to be confined to a private cabin until they could be returned to land. But having gotten a taste for a different life, after returning to New York, Johnson again took up working as a man in a whip-making factory, with occasional ventures into working on a riverboat or setting up a confectionary shop. When an accident once more revealed Johnson’s assigned gender, their friends and coworkers had only positive reports of them and although it is suggested they were no longer able to continue in their profession(s), no one could find any complaint to press legally.

Manion concludes the chapter with a consideration of the sexuality of these 19th century laborers. Most of their stories don’t involve intimate relationships. (Manion calls them “asexual” but a more accurate description might be either celibate are unpartnered.) Manion suggests that within the American context, masculinity could be established purely by laboring at male-coded jobs, and the establishment of a marriage was less relevant as evidence than it had been in the Old World. (Note that George Wilson’s marriage was established before emigrating.)

Time period:

Place:

Misc tags:

George & Elizabeth Wilson

Event / person:

Charles Wilson

Ann Johnson (George Johnson)

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Just In Case You Were Wondering

Saturday, July 31, 2021 - 16:21

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By the usual calendar schedule, given that this is a 5th Saturday, there should have been a fiction podcast today. I've gotten behind on the podcast activities that involve reaching out to set things up with other people, and that includes lining up my narrators. Be assured that all the planned stories will be podcast, but perhaps not on the planned schedule. I'd rather put out a great episode than be chained to a specific format.

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