Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
cross-dressing
Any context where an individual wears clothing that is socially designated for a different gender than the one they are assigned. The tag includes instances where clothing is used as an overt symbol rather than an overall presentation.
LHMP entry
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
As this chapter focuses on male cross-dressing, I will be skimming it more briefly. As in the first chapter, we begin with an extensive case history. “M” began dressing in female-coded clothing as a youth, and left home for the West at age 15 due to family conflicts. M preferred playing with dolls, cooking, and sewing rather than male-coded activities, but didn’t back down from fighting his bullies. Further questioning indicated that M’s mother had initiated both the cross-dressing and needlecrafts.
This chapter is probably the one of most interest in the book, cataloging and discussing cases of female cross-dressers. The text alternates between detailed case studies and general discussion.
In 1912, in Portland Oregon, Harry Allen (alias Harry Livingstone) was arrested and eventually charged with violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes) due to having written to her partner (who presented herself as his wife) Isabelle Maxwell in Seattle, asking her to come to Portland, where she then engaged in prostitution to support them both.
The chapter opens with an anecdote about Horace Greeley (tagline: Go west, young man!) in 1859 checking out those who had actually followed his advice and speaking with a Colorado gold prospector who had decided to return back east. After the interview, he was informed that the prospector he’d been talking to was a woman.
It is generally agreed on by historians that evidence for prosecutions of women for “sodomy” (however defined) are both rare (in absolute terms and compared to those for men) and often more lightly punished. Roelens explores a context that runs counter to this pattern: the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th century.
As a supplement to the discussion of records of women cross-dressing, the book has an appendix with quotations from the court records. It notes that these are not an exhaustive record—indeed the number of records is relatively small. It’s likely that the attention given to cross-dressing as an offence varied depending on what other concerns might draw attention, for example a rise in the concern over vagrancy in the 1590s.
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