One
summer night in 1836, police found George Wilson drunk on the street in the
Lower East Side in New York City. An officer took Wilson to the station. The
officer believed that Wilson was a sailor, and also suspected that Wilson might
not have been a man. Wilson had been legally married to a woman for 15 years,
and living and working as a man for even longer. They told the police that
their masculine gender expression was a temporary disguise for safety and ease
of travel while they pursued the man they loved who had abandoned them.
The best
defence against a hostile police force was to emphasise heterosexual romance
and minimise the significance of gender nonconformity in one’s life. The truth
came to light, however, when Wilson’s wife stormed through the police station
to retrieve her husband. In an interview, Elisabeth disclosed that 15 years
earlier she was not at all disappointed when she learned of her husband’s sex,
and that they were happily married. Like the policemen who detained and
harassed George and Elisabeth, the journalists who would later report on the
incident were derisive. But George and Elisabeth were released without formal
charges.
Female
husbands were people assigned female at birth who ‘transed’ gender, lived as
men, and entered into legal marriages with women. The phrase ‘female husband’
was first used to describe such a person in 1746 by the British playwright and
novelist Henry Fielding. It circulated for nearly 200 years before losing
meaning in the early years of the 20th century. It was never a self-declared
identity category. No one was known to walk up to someone and say: ‘Hello, my
name is George Wilson and I’m a female husband.’ Rather, it was a term used by
others – usually male writers, policemen, judges and doctors – in reference to
people whose gender expression was different from their assigned sex. Far from
being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen to trans gender
throughout history. ‘Female husband’ was a label predominantly used to refer to
white working-class people.
In 1856,
Miss Lewis of Syracuse in New York state fell in love with Albert Guelph, a
charming newcomer. After a brief courtship, they wed in an Episcopal church the
same year. The bride’s father soon became suspicious of Guelph and called the
police. Together, the policeman and the father interrogated and examined Guelph
on the suspicion that Guelph was a woman disguised as a man. They arrested and
imprisoned Guelph. Justice Durnford sentenced Guelph to 90 days imprisonment in
the penitentiary for violating the vagrancy statute – a very vague ‘catch-all’
crime applied mostly to impoverished people for being poor, homeless, begging,
drinking or simply existing in public spaces. Vagrancy laws were also invoked
for minor social infractions against morals or order.
The
Syracuse Daily Standard took great interest in the case and provided regular
updates. When the judge asked Guelph directly: ‘Are you a male or female?’
Guelph refused to answer, instead deflecting the question back to the judge,
stating ‘your officers can tell you’ or ‘have told you’. Neither Guelph nor
their lawyer made any attempt to explain or justify the status of Guelph’s
assigned sex or gender expression. Instead, the lawyer noted that there was no
New York state law prohibiting ‘a person to dress in the attire of the opposite
sex’. This was true. Guelph was soon released.
It was
typical in such cases for people like Guelph to offer an explanation or excuse
as to why they were presenting as male. As long as the accused spun a convincing
tale, assured authorities that they were not threatening, and begged for
forgiveness, they might be let go without further punishment or harassment.
Those who worked as soldiers and fought in a war were the most sympathetic of
such cases, as patriotism was deemed their core motivation. Others who were
poor or alone and explained that presenting as male offered them safety while
travelling and/or a higher wage than they could earn as women were also treated
with a degree of compassion and understanding – provided that they were willing
to change their clothes and resume moving through society as women. Guelph was
different: they assumed male attire because they wanted to and because they
could. They refused to offer any kind of explanation or justification –
sympathetic or otherwise.
Female
husbands in general were different from other groups who transed gender (such
as soldiers or sailors) because they were in longterm committed relationships
with women. Usually, these were legally binding marriages. This posed a much
more dramatic threat to society, raising two different troubling possibilities:
first, that female husbands were able to realise homosexual desire and
participate in a same-sex relationship under the guise of a heterosexual one.
This was a violation of both religious edicts and civil laws against sodomy.
Second, female husbands threatened the notion that only those assigned male at
birth could become men and enter into fulfilling sexual and romantic
relationships with women. Whether husbands had strong identifications of
themselves as people of masculine gender and/or same-sex desire was never
clear. But it also didn’t matter because neither was welcome in society.
The
judge advised Guelph to present as a woman in both clothing and manner. The newspaper
reported that the judge:
“”expressed the hope that she would resume
the habiliments of her sex, and when her term of sentence had expired conduct
herself in such a manner as to win back the confidence and respect of
community, which she had forfeited by her deception and imposition.
Guelph ignored the judge’s request, continued presenting in male attire, and reunited with their wife.””
Early
and mid-19th-century American legal authorities knew that gender could easily
be changed. Gender was defined largely by one’s outward expression – chiefly
indicated by hairstyle, clothing, physical deportment and particular habits.
Men and women were easily distinguishable by these cues – which made it rather
easy for someone to visibly trans gender. So when authorities found someone
assigned female who was living as a man, they didn’t see it as something
distinct or pathological. They didn’t think it signalled cross-gender
identification to realise same-sex attraction. They believed that it could be
‘undone’ just as easily as it was ‘done’ in the first place.
This was
something that Wilson, Guelph and others used to their advantage. When ordered
to cease living as men and present as women instead, they didn’t argue that
they couldn’t comply; nor did they explain why they wouldn’t. They didn’t claim
that their gender was an expression of something deeper and innate. They had no
language for the idea of gender identity – and there is no reason to believe it
would have helped their case anyway. Gender was something one did – it wasn’t
someone one was or a thing one had. The fleeting temporality of gender was
liberating – and gave those who transed genders a variety of ways to wiggle out
of trouble when authorities came calling. When views shifted at the turn of the
20th century to see gender transgression as something more innate and fixed, it
had very negative consequences for female husbands.
Different
language for talking and thinking about gender didn’t mean that there was no
pressure to conform to dominant norms. Wilson gave in to the pressure
temporarily by lying to the police. Guelph ignored and defied the authorities.
Both resumed the lives they were living – as men with their wives – though
perhaps more wary of and cautious around authorities.
Students
have a myriad of reactions to this material. At first, they are wholly
unimpressed. They have come of age in an era of transgender liberation. They
identify as trans or nonbinary in astonishing numbers. Transgender issues,
leaders and celebrities make headlines. They have embraced ‘they’ as an
inclusive and powerful gender-neutral pronoun. They have no problem remembering
and respecting each other’s pronouns while the over-50 crowd continues to
stumble and offer excuses. When I share stories of trans figures from the past,
they are happy to learn of such accounts but are generally nonplussed. They
expect the past to be full of people who lived as they and their friends do
now.
However,
I am most surprised by the certainty with which they declare who was ‘really’
trans in the past and who merely transed gender for some ‘other’ reason. Female
husbands such as Wilson, Guelph and Joseph Lobdell (of whom more later) were
‘really’ trans because we know they lived fully as men for a long portion of
their lives. However, when I share news clippings of so-called ‘female
soldiers’ or ‘female sailors’, students are quick to say that these people were
not ‘really’ trans. When I ask why they think this, students offer two reasons:
the soldiers and sailors were motivated by some other need (patriotism and/or
poverty) or they didn’t live as men for very long. It is my job, of course, to
help students unpack and contextualise these newspaper accounts so that they
can read them with greater skepticism and eventually try to see them from a
19th-century perspective rather than through a 21st-century lens. I think one
of the most powerful insights is the absence, for the most part, of a concept
of ‘gender identity’ in the 19th century. Distinguishing ‘trans’ from
‘not-trans’ is futile and, in many ways, the least interesting route to
approach this rich and varied material. What can we – in our ‘cisgender’ and
‘transgender’ 21st century – learn from an era when this distinction was
murkier?
Guelph ignored the judge’s request, continued presenting in male attire, and reunited with their wife.””
Female husbands. By Jen Manion. Aeon, May 7, 2020.
James
and Abigail Allen married in 1807 at St. Giles’ Church in the Southwark borough
of London. Life was never easy for the couple, but they were hardworking,
resourceful, and had each other. After numerous jobs, several relocations, and
21 years of marriage, things came crashing to a halt. James Allen was bashed in
the head and killed by a falling piece of timber while working as a bottom
sawyer (a worker at a saw pit who stands below the timber) for ship-wright and
builder Mr. Crisp in 1829.
James
was declared dead en route to St. Thomas’ Hospital. The end of James’ life was
the beginning of Abigail’s nightmare. Not only had she just lost her husband of
21 years and the primary earner for their family, but everyone learned that her
husband was assigned female at birth.
Allen’s
death was a public affair with nearly a dozen people witness to the final
moments of their life and the immediate aftermath. Co-workers witnessed the
accident and rushed James to the hospital. Doctors and nurses received the now
lifeless body, which was turned over to medical students, the coroner, and a
jury to determine the cause of death.
Allen’s
wife was summoned and she brought a friend with her. The owner of the shipyard
where the incident took place came too, hoping he would not be found liable.
The parties assembled had different stakes.
Lawyer
Thomas Shelton worked as the city coroner since 1788. He oversaw the jury
inquest into the cause of James Allen’s death, which preceded his own death by
just seven months. Shelton was skilled and experienced — and yet he had never
encountered a situation quite like this one. He expressed “astonishment” about
“so extraordinary a circumstance as two females living together as man and
wife” for over 21 years.
The work
of the autopsy itself was completed by someone with medical training, such as a
senior medical student known as a “dresser.” In the case of James Allen, the
dresser was Mr. John Martin. Martin declared that Allen was dead upon arrival
at the hospital.
The
cause of death was very clear: “The whole of the bones of the skull were
fractured.” This was not an injury anyone was expected to survive.
Inadvertently, Martin discovered that this hardworking man and beloved husband
was anatomically female.
The
inquest itself cites John Martin plainly stating, “The dead is a woman.” Word
spread quickly throughout the hospital that there was something much more
interesting at play in this case than a simple workplace accident. By the time
the coroner arrived to oversee the trial, medical students from throughout the
hospital packed into the jury room.
Coroner
Shelton repeatedly referenced Allen using male pronouns and offered a rationale
for why he did this. Shelton declared, “I call the deceased ‘he,’ because I
considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.”
Shelton
felt the need to substantiate this decision with further information – the fact
that he saw the actual marriage certificate. He used his position to put an end
to further inquiries into Allen’s life, asserting the sole purpose of such an
inquest was to determine cause of death and not to investigate the lives of the
dead.
Shelton
was the most powerful person to officially weigh in on Allen’s life and gender.
He represented the Crown in various capacities throughout his professional life
and was highly regarded throughout his career. Shelton respected law, custom,
and institutions.
He
refused to refer to Allen with female pronouns because Allen was married to a
woman; he refused to question the legitimacy of this marriage because he saw
the legal document that made it so. Allen’s social gender – evident to
co-workers, employers, and themself – was more important to Shelton than
anatomical sex.
The
state of Allen’s legal sex remained in limbo – suspended between competing claims
from medical students asserting female anatomy and a lifetime of relationships,
paperwork, and legal documents stating otherwise.
Perhaps
most remarkable in this era of grave digging, body snatching, and general
desperation on the part of doctors and medical students to gain access to dead
bodies for dissection and training, Shelton declared Allen’s body off-limits.
News
stories reported on “rumors” that “several well-known ‘resurrection men’ were
lurking about, in the hope of procuring the corpse of so remarkable a subject
for dissection.” Shelton took no chances, ordering the body of this
impoverished laborer not to Potter’s field (a public graveyard for poor,
unclaimed corpses) where it may easily have landed for Abigail’s lack of money
but into a vault, safe and secure.
The news
report characterized the vault as “belonging to a private burial-ground, in the
parish of St. John’s Bermondsey, access to which is impossible it being well
secured and guarded against the attack of body-snatchers.” No one was permitted
additional examination of the naked body of James Allen. This was a remarkable
dignity rarely allowed for people of indeterminate sex or gender.
This
tension between legal manhood and anatomical femaleness played out in the
hearing as other people expressed their views of Allen. Clues that would help
make sense of Allen’s gender were believed to be contained in their choice of
clothing, social relations, physical attributes, and emotional disposition.
Allen
was described as “a sober, steady, strong, and active man” and “a smart and
handsome young man, and an excellent groom.” These characterizations were
positive assessments of a laboring man, emphasizing both physical traits –
strong and handsome – as well as mental ones – steady and smart.
Two
co-workers from the shipyard asserted that the pitch of Allen’s voice was
strange and that they teased them because of it. They also noted Allen’s lack
of facial hair led them to believe Allen was intersex.
Allen
was clearly a man in other respects: from their masculine hands to their
sailor’s attire to their 21-year marriage to a woman. When pressed on how it
was possible that she did not realize that her husband was not a man, Abigail
said she was not suspicious of her husband’s sex because Allen was uncannily
strong, with hands of a “masculine character.”
A news
story that spoke of Allen with feminine pronouns conceded as much, stating,
“The deceased appears to have been an interesting looking girl; her limbs were
well proportioned; and the only thing of a masculine character that we observed
about her was her hands, which were large, and the flesh extremely hard, owing
to the work she performed for so many years.”
There
was no disputing that working as a servant and laborer for decades, in jobs usually
reserved for men, gave one exceptionally strong, muscular hands. Living as a
certain kind of man – in this case, as a laborer – led one’s body to a physical
transformation.
Clothing
was a crucial indicator of gender and really the starting point for many people
who thought about transing gender. Allen embraced a range of styles of men’s
clothes depending on their occupation. They wore the uniform of a groomsman for
years at service and then later turned to sailor’s clothes.
For the
last two years of their life, Allen worked in a shipyard and would have easily
blended in with their described “thick flannel waistcoats, which extended from
the neck down to the hips.” Not only did this outfit allow Allen to blend in
among co-workers, but it also supported Allen’s attempt to minimize their chest
by binding, for which Allen wrapped a linen bandage around their upper torso.
Abigail
reported she didn’t think twice about this practice because Allen claimed the
bandage was to protect their lungs, something perfectly reasonable to assert
for someone who worked outside, often in cold, rainy, or snowy conditions.
When
people grappled with Allen’s life and gender, one thing was more important than
the others: marriage. The fact that they were married to a woman made Allen
into more of a man than any job, jacket, or beard ever would. In short, being
married to a woman affirmed one’s manhood.
Marriage
was crucial to Allen’s ability to live as a man in the eyes of co-workers who
felt that Allen must be “most of a man” because they were “married so many
years” despite their suspicions that Allen was intersex. While physical
embodiment was one aspect of gender, it stood in contention with – and was
overridden by –marital status as the most meaningful signifier of manhood.
While
marriage served to uplift, legitimize, and verify the manhood of female
husbands, it could lead to an incredible amount of harassment, judgment, and
isolation for their wives. This is precisely what happened to Abigail when
James died.
People
harassed her endlessly, raising doubts about her gender and alleging that she
knowingly entered into a fraudulent marriage. Abigail lived in “great terror”
of those neighbors who targeted her.
But she
had also built up quite a bit of respect and goodwill over the years in her
community. Most newspaper reports verified her good name and trustworthiness,
asserting that “those who know her give her an excellent character” and that
she had an outstanding work ethic.
Still,
Abigail felt the only way people would leave her alone was if she swore that
she did not know that her husband was assigned female.
Abigail
had very real legal, financial, and social reasons for asserting her own
ignorance. The benefits of this clearly outweighed the downsides. But as a
result, she was left standing as someone who was abused, manipulated, and
duped.
If
Abigail had in fact chosen James knowing they were assigned female, who would
ever believe her? Maybe she waited to meet someone who lived between genders
and chose James precisely because of their difference.
There
was something intriguing about someone who blurred the line between sex and
gender, embodying both masculine and feminine traits. Those who were raised and
socialized as girls and then chose to live as men were special.
Abigail
herself – quite possibly uninterested in other men and so thrilled when James
showed interest in her – was no ordinary heterosexual woman. When she married
James, Abigail Naylor took the surname of Allen. This marked a legal and social
transition of her own, even if others were ignorant and assumed they were a
typical couple.
The
general public seemed eager to dismiss the idea that Abigail knew James was
different. This was the path of least resistance. It would establish Abigail as
an ordinary woman.
With
James dead, it was Abigail’s difference that remained an open question and
threat. It would serve the status quo if she went back to life as an ordinary
woman of typical heterosexual desire.
The
social pressure on surviving wives to deny knowledge of their partners’ bodies
and distance themselves from questions of sexual intimacy was tremendous. It
served to minimize the connection between the two parties. This erasure
undermines any claim the Allens represent queer, trans, or same-sex relationships
in the past, while etching a partial truth in the historic record.
An
excerpt from Female Husbands: A Trans History
by Jen Manion. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
The
transgender rights movement has achieved widespread visibility and recognition
in the past decade. For some people, this issue seems very new and modern – a
21st-century development. They reminisce of earlier times, perhaps their own
childhoods, when most people accepted the distinct expectations and
opportunities outlined for boys and girls. In hindsight, the movements for
women’s rights or gay and lesbian equality seem modest in their critique of
gender: none demanded the eradication of the distinction between men and women
in public spaces, an ability to change one’s sex legally or medically, or a
shift away from gendered language towards gender-neutral terms such as ‘they’.
From this perspective, the demands of the transgender rights movement seem novel, as if the emergence of the community itself was triggered by the dawn of a new century and little else. But exploring the history of ‘transing’ gender shows us that nothing could be further from the truth. While the transgender community in recent years has somewhat coalesced around a certain set of experiences, concerns and language, an exploration of historical instances of transing reveals that people took a wide range of paths in challenging gender.
From this perspective, the demands of the transgender rights movement seem novel, as if the emergence of the community itself was triggered by the dawn of a new century and little else. But exploring the history of ‘transing’ gender shows us that nothing could be further from the truth. While the transgender community in recent years has somewhat coalesced around a certain set of experiences, concerns and language, an exploration of historical instances of transing reveals that people took a wide range of paths in challenging gender.
One particular branch that caught my eye as I began researching this topic many years ago was a group of people called ‘female husbands’. This term was used to describe someone who was assigned female at birth, transed genders, lived as a man and married a woman. The phrase was used first in the UK in 1746, circulating throughout the UK and the US during the 19th century, then fading from prominent usage in the early years of the 20th century. The turn of the 21st century has been designated the ‘transgender tipping point’, in part due to highly visible trans women celebrities such as Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner. Turn back the clock to the 18th and 19th centuries, though, and we find an era that belonged to female husbands such as Charles Hamilton, James Howe, James Allen and Joseph Lobdell. But who were they – and why should we care?
Hamilton, Howe, Allen and Lobdell each grew up poor and learned to scrape together a living to support themself, even in their youth. Each found love at least once in their life. For some, it was fleeting, as unsuspecting lovers rejected them for their difference. For others, the spark of love led to marriages lasting 20 years or more. Most of them were known only as men, the origins of their assigned sex undetected by neighbours and co-workers for decades. Some embraced nonbinary genders, moving between expressions of manhood and womanhood as required by desire or circumstance. All were described as ‘female husbands’ by reporters and publishers seeking to attract readers with enticing and original stories.
In the writing of their lives, I decided to embrace the newly popular and increasingly accepted pronoun singular ‘they’ when referring to husbands in the third person. This was a difficult decision, inspired by dozens of conversations with students and colleagues about the merits and pitfalls. ‘They’ seemed the perfect way to honour these extraordinary lives that never fit neatly into the box of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, and will make the past legible and relatable to contemporary transgender and nonbinary readers – a group that has long been denied a history of their own.
English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding first popularised the phrase ‘female husband’ in reference to someone assigned female who lived as a man and married a woman. His fictionalised essay ‘The Female Husband’ (1746) was based on the real case of the charismatic mountebank Charles Hamilton and their bride, Mary Price.
We can only speculate as to what drew the pair together in the first place. Charles was affable, charming and outgoing, living a life mostly on the road. Mary proved herself to be confident, strong and assertive. She was probably bored living with her aunt, who rented rooms for extra income – which is how the travelling quack doctor came into her life in the first place.
But the excitement and anticipation of young love was short-lived. After about two months of marriage in 1746, Mary decided that she did not want to be with Charles. It may have been that she realised for the first time that her husband was no ordinary man; at least, that is what she told authorities.
We know this from records drawn up in Glastonbury, about six miles from Mary’s home in Wells. The court there charged Charles with vagrancy, a category of crime that was vague and flexible, and often used in cases in which the transgression was highly subjective, concerning morals and norms. The judge found Charles guilty of fraud and declared them “an uncommon, notorious cheat”. They were sentenced to six months of hard labour in prison and public whipping in the four different towns in which Charles was known to have lived: Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet. The punishment was quite severe, especially because the court struggled to even determine which law Charles had actually violated. But the ruling sent a strong message: transing gender and marrying a woman would be met with swift and severe punishment.
News of such punishments, however, did not deter others from transing gender. James Howe ran the White Horse Tavern in the Poplar district of London’s East End with their wife, Mary, for more than 20 years from around 1740. Both James and Mary had grown up poor, and were put out to work by their families as teenagers. They worked on their feet at physically demanding labour every day at the bar – and, probably, most days of their lives. Only by grit, sacrifice, collaboration, consistency and some luck did they manage to build a successful business. They worked, paid taxes, went to church, donated to the needy, and saved some money for the unpredictable future. Life was good – far better than either expected, given the hardship and turmoil that marked their early years. James and Mary found love, companionship and security in each other, working side by side for their more than 30 years of marriage.
Mary had
known James as a child, when the latter had lived in society as a girl.
Together, in 1732 they decided that James would trans gender and live as a man
so that they could marry and live together as a married couple. Mary knew
exactly what she was getting into. Who knows – maybe it was even her idea? So
much is said about those who visibly reject gender norms and live as men; so little
is said and known about the women who love them, live with them, and in many
ways enable their gender to be socially legible.
Mary’s name is not mentioned in the popular magazine and newspaper articles that circulated about the couple for more than a century, from 1766 into the 1880s. While the female husbands were deemed so remarkable as to merit a new category to describe them, their wives were offered no such importance. Rather, they were often viewed as ‘normal’ or ‘straight’ women who were victims of circumstance or got swept away and deceived by one particular man. But there is no denying their queerness – especially for someone like Mary who chose to marry a female husband.
And yet sometimes circumstances required female wives to do just that: deny their difference and claim that they didn’t even know that their husbands weren’t male. In 1829, James Allen lay dead on a table at St Thomas Hospital, as the senior medical student, John Martin, undertook an autopsy. Martin declared Allen dead upon arrival, and determined the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head, reporting, “the whole of the bones of the skull were fractured”. Unexpectedly for all involved, Martin had more to report, declaring: “the dead is a woman”.
Though Martin reported his news rather matter-of-factly, the room was filled with those who knew James Allen to be a man: co-workers, boss, neighbours. Even the coroner, Thomas Shelton, had to reckon with the conflict: the marriage certificate declared James a legally married man, whereas Martin had created a medical document that designated them a woman.
Shelton was a lawyer, not a medical man. His work as coroner was about making sure that cause of death was properly designated, and holding appropriate parties accountable in the event of murder, negligence or other wrongful death. In this case, Shelton believed that a marriage certificate carried more weight than a medical report. He declared: “I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.” While others were flabbergasted at the development, and reporters began using feminine pronouns in reference to Allen, Shelton stood fast in his view of Allen’s manhood.
For those assigned female at birth, living as a man was never without risk; for some, it was filled with hardship and danger. Such was the case for Joseph Lobdell, a hardworking and resourceful person who grew up in Westerlo, New York state, outside Albany. Lobdell had considerable responsibility in their family from a young age, working on the farm, tending the animals and hunting game in the surrounding woods.
As someone who was perceived as a young woman, Lobdell was celebrated for their devotion and many talents, including a knack for hunting, farming, reading, writing and teaching. In Lobdell’s 1855 memoir of these early years, The Female Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties, NY, they complain of the hardship of supporting a family on the wages available to women. They were confident that they could do any work that a man did, and set off to do so – now presenting fully as male.
This decision marked a new course in their life – one that was filled with many new experiences, feelings of visibility and recognition in their manhood, and many feelings of erasure and hurt in the face of hostility. Indeed, across the course of decades, Lobdell would have their gender challenged repeatedly in the court of law, the court of public opinion and, finally, at the behest of their birth family, who had them declared insane and institutionalised on account of their gender in 1879. Their wife of nearly 20 years, Marie Louise Perry, was even misled into believing that Joseph had died; Joseph’s brother, James, circulated a false newspaper obituary, and it took Marie nearly a year to discover the truth. Such was the cruelty with which family members and mental-health officials often treated those who transed gender in the late-19th-century United States.
We know about female husbands and their wives only because newspapers in both the UK and the US took great interest in printing stories about them. Female husbands usually became known to local media in times of crisis or duress, often arrest or death. The stories focus on tragedy and hardship. Some of them, especially the accounts about Lobdell, are heartbreaking.
Charles Hamilton, James Howe, James Allen and Joseph Lobdell are just four people who earned the label ‘female husband’ in the press in the 18th and 19th centuries. Assigned female at birth, they transed gender to live as men and marry women, long before the term ‘transgender’ was coined or the development of treatments and surgeries that enabled people to physically change their sex.
Their partners – long overlooked by writers, readers, and historians alike – were crucial to their happiness and social respectability. In countless ways, these legal marriages to queer wives affirmed and stabilised the gender of female husbands. Together, these couples carved out lives for themselves that were never easy, filled with uncertainty and risk – but, for most of the pairs, they couldn’t imagine an alternative.
‘Female husbands’: the secret lives of 18th-century transgender pioneers. By Jen Manion. History Extra , February 1, 2021.
Mary’s name is not mentioned in the popular magazine and newspaper articles that circulated about the couple for more than a century, from 1766 into the 1880s. While the female husbands were deemed so remarkable as to merit a new category to describe them, their wives were offered no such importance. Rather, they were often viewed as ‘normal’ or ‘straight’ women who were victims of circumstance or got swept away and deceived by one particular man. But there is no denying their queerness – especially for someone like Mary who chose to marry a female husband.
And yet sometimes circumstances required female wives to do just that: deny their difference and claim that they didn’t even know that their husbands weren’t male. In 1829, James Allen lay dead on a table at St Thomas Hospital, as the senior medical student, John Martin, undertook an autopsy. Martin declared Allen dead upon arrival, and determined the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head, reporting, “the whole of the bones of the skull were fractured”. Unexpectedly for all involved, Martin had more to report, declaring: “the dead is a woman”.
Though Martin reported his news rather matter-of-factly, the room was filled with those who knew James Allen to be a man: co-workers, boss, neighbours. Even the coroner, Thomas Shelton, had to reckon with the conflict: the marriage certificate declared James a legally married man, whereas Martin had created a medical document that designated them a woman.
Shelton was a lawyer, not a medical man. His work as coroner was about making sure that cause of death was properly designated, and holding appropriate parties accountable in the event of murder, negligence or other wrongful death. In this case, Shelton believed that a marriage certificate carried more weight than a medical report. He declared: “I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.” While others were flabbergasted at the development, and reporters began using feminine pronouns in reference to Allen, Shelton stood fast in his view of Allen’s manhood.
For those assigned female at birth, living as a man was never without risk; for some, it was filled with hardship and danger. Such was the case for Joseph Lobdell, a hardworking and resourceful person who grew up in Westerlo, New York state, outside Albany. Lobdell had considerable responsibility in their family from a young age, working on the farm, tending the animals and hunting game in the surrounding woods.
As someone who was perceived as a young woman, Lobdell was celebrated for their devotion and many talents, including a knack for hunting, farming, reading, writing and teaching. In Lobdell’s 1855 memoir of these early years, The Female Hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties, NY, they complain of the hardship of supporting a family on the wages available to women. They were confident that they could do any work that a man did, and set off to do so – now presenting fully as male.
This decision marked a new course in their life – one that was filled with many new experiences, feelings of visibility and recognition in their manhood, and many feelings of erasure and hurt in the face of hostility. Indeed, across the course of decades, Lobdell would have their gender challenged repeatedly in the court of law, the court of public opinion and, finally, at the behest of their birth family, who had them declared insane and institutionalised on account of their gender in 1879. Their wife of nearly 20 years, Marie Louise Perry, was even misled into believing that Joseph had died; Joseph’s brother, James, circulated a false newspaper obituary, and it took Marie nearly a year to discover the truth. Such was the cruelty with which family members and mental-health officials often treated those who transed gender in the late-19th-century United States.
We know about female husbands and their wives only because newspapers in both the UK and the US took great interest in printing stories about them. Female husbands usually became known to local media in times of crisis or duress, often arrest or death. The stories focus on tragedy and hardship. Some of them, especially the accounts about Lobdell, are heartbreaking.
Charles Hamilton, James Howe, James Allen and Joseph Lobdell are just four people who earned the label ‘female husband’ in the press in the 18th and 19th centuries. Assigned female at birth, they transed gender to live as men and marry women, long before the term ‘transgender’ was coined or the development of treatments and surgeries that enabled people to physically change their sex.
Their partners – long overlooked by writers, readers, and historians alike – were crucial to their happiness and social respectability. In countless ways, these legal marriages to queer wives affirmed and stabilised the gender of female husbands. Together, these couples carved out lives for themselves that were never easy, filled with uncertainty and risk – but, for most of the pairs, they couldn’t imagine an alternative.
‘Female husbands’: the secret lives of 18th-century transgender pioneers. By Jen Manion. History Extra , February 1, 2021.
Amherst
College professor Jen Manion talks about their new book, Female Husbands: A
Trans History. Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there
were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people
assigned female - lived as men, and married women. Moving deftly from the
colonial era to just before the First World War, Professor Manion uncovers the riveting
and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite
tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. They will examine
the broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States
and the United Kingdom, while also exploring how attitudes towards female
husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's
rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in
the early twentieth century.
Cary Memorial Library, February 10, 2021.
There
are few experiences more universally human than to strive for belonging. We all
long for a slice of a shared history, a touchstone to connect us to something
larger than ourselves. Television commercials advertise websites devoted to
tracking down ancestors or tests to decode the legacy ingrained in DNA, while
reality TV takes celebrities on trips to Ellis Island or reconnects family
members thought lost to time or circumstance. But some histories cannot be
found in yellowed records or genotypes, the people and their stories
systemically suppressed and erased to the point that they are lucky to be found
at all.
Female Husbands cover Queer history has often landed in the crosshairs of such malevolent efforts, but Jen Manion has ensured the truth rises to the top in Female Husbands, a pivotal work exploring an underrepresented period of trans history. The existence of female husbands—individuals who were assigned female at birth but lived and took wives as men—first became well-known in eighteenth-century Britain, and the episode of trans history has been subjected to mischaracterizations ever since.
Intrigued by reviewer Eileen Gonzalez’s luminous review in the May/June issue of Foreword Reviews, we reached out to Cambridge University Press to connect with Jen for an interview to delve further.
EG : Trans and gender-nonconforming people have always existed in every corner of the globe. What interested you about the female husbands of the UK and America in particular?
JM : We have known for a while now that trans and GNC people have always existed. That was the first step in recovering our past. But the next step is really to understand these lives within the context of their own time, place, and communities. I came to focus on “female husbands” because I hoped to gain greater depth of understanding of this one particular experience of transing gender. Unlike other kinds of accounts, stories of female husbands were filled with all kinds of details—such as full names of several people, towns, churches, birthdates, marriage dates, etc.—that made it possible to verify the stories in traditional archival records. Plus, female husbands are just really cool.
EG : You did so much research for this book. Most of your sources are contemporary news reports and fictionalized accounts of the female husbands’ lives, which means you were pretty much at the mercy of disrespectful and incomplete reporting. Was it difficult to figure out how much of these accounts you could trust versus how much was sensationalist exaggeration?
JM : I think the challenging nature of the sources is probably a reason more people haven’t extensively worked with these records already. Literary scholars have argued how this style of writing served to intentionally obscure the meaning of such accounts, which I think is true. But the records are too rich and abundant for historians to ignore. Once you read hundreds of the accounts, you develop a way to sort through claims that were likely true and claims that were formulaic and exaggerated. I verified as much as I possibly could in other places, but you can never verify the really subjective details that brought the stories to life. Even though the accounts were sensationalized and often mean and objectifying of my trans and queer ancestors, there are also moments where the records are respectful, understanding, curious, favorable, or neutral. It’s really important for us to know about this past as well!
EG : You note that little attention has been paid, both historically and currently, to the female wives of the female husbands. We know next to nothing about their motivations for entering such marriages, or how and when they learned their female husbands were not assigned male at birth. Why do you think there’s been so little interest in exploring these women’s side of the story?
JM : Great question. There is a longstanding view we inherited from early twentieth century sexology that women who were feminine or femme could not really be “true” homosexuals. Rather, the idea was that they were duped or seduced by gender non-conforming (GNC) or masculine women. The same logic seems to have applied to women who partnered with female husbands. There was tremendous pressure for them to claim that they did not know their husbands were assigned female. This removed any notion of stigma or difference and allowed them to be seen as normative heterosexual women, for the most part. Often, their names were changed or shortened in the newspaper stories of their relationships with female husbands, which makes it nearly impossible to develop fuller biographies for them.
EG : I really appreciate how nuanced the book is. You’re careful to point out how the female husbands benefited from other circumstances, e.g., being white, and you illustrate these advantages through such examples as the story of Charles Williams, a black sailor assigned female at birth. At what point in your research did you notice these trends, and why was it important for you to point them out in the book?
JM: It was pretty quickly apparent that female husbands were common laborers. This wasn’t a life or a category that was applied to wealthy people. I expected to encounter female husbands who were black or Indigenous, but did not. The fact that female husband was a category bound by whiteness is really interesting. For all of the hardships husbands and their wives faced, it was still an experience and category marked by some amount of privilege, freedom, and mobility. I wish I had more room to unpack the role of whiteness, honestly, because it is certainly a pattern in transgender history. Transness for communities of color looked different and we have much more to learn about that.
EG : In chapter six, you discuss how the rise of American women’s suffrage affected public perception of female husbands. Naysayers regarded the apolitical female husbands as something of a cautionary tale, i.e., if women are granted the right to vote, what’s to stop them from abandoning their wifely duties, marrying women, etc. I was especially interested in your observation that “arguments that politics made women into manly people who were undesirable for marriage never really went away.” Could you elaborate on that statement? Do you see this attitude echoed in modern reporting, and how does it relate (if at all) to current narratives and depictions of trans and gender non-conforming people?
JM : Starting in the late eighteenth century when white middle- and upper-class women began fighting for access to formal education and political rights, they were immediately mocked for wanting to be like men. This argument went pretty far in deterring significant numbers of women who recoiled at the accusation they were “masculine.” Female anti-slavery activists were also accused of being too manly as a way to deter their advocacy. I think lots of people would say this view has never gone away and is used to disparage twentieth-century feminists and women who have successful professional careers. The reason I bring it up in the book is that I think it is important for people to see the way gender norms have been used to mock, punish, and restrict peoples’ lives for a long time. Everyone assigned female—whether they go on to identify as transgender, lesbians, women, feminists, or some combination of those categories—has been restricted by norms that punish women for wanting to be strong, smart, ambitious, aggressive, physical, independent, educated, powerful, etc.
EG : If you had a time machine and could meet any or all of the female husbands in your book, is there anything you would want to say to them?
JM : I think my heart breaks the most for Joseph Lobdell because of how they were treated in the final decades of their life—ripped away from their wife and institutionalized for decades. But what would I say: I’m sorry? Thank you? Nothing really seems sufficient.
I have become the fondest of James Howe, probably because so much was written about them over a long period of time. You can get a pretty clear picture of their life—and also see how attitudes toward female husbands changed from that of curious respect in the 1760s to that of mocking disdain in the 1850s. If I could get to the bottom of one thing about their lives, it would be to understand their relationships. Who were their wives to them? Were their relationships markedly different from those of other married couples at the time? And finally, did they feel free and happy in their lives or restrained and fearful?
Reviewer Eileen Gonzalez interviews Jen Manion, Author of Female Husbands, a Trans History. Foreword Reviews, April 17, 2020.
Female Husbands cover Queer history has often landed in the crosshairs of such malevolent efforts, but Jen Manion has ensured the truth rises to the top in Female Husbands, a pivotal work exploring an underrepresented period of trans history. The existence of female husbands—individuals who were assigned female at birth but lived and took wives as men—first became well-known in eighteenth-century Britain, and the episode of trans history has been subjected to mischaracterizations ever since.
Intrigued by reviewer Eileen Gonzalez’s luminous review in the May/June issue of Foreword Reviews, we reached out to Cambridge University Press to connect with Jen for an interview to delve further.
EG : Trans and gender-nonconforming people have always existed in every corner of the globe. What interested you about the female husbands of the UK and America in particular?
JM : We have known for a while now that trans and GNC people have always existed. That was the first step in recovering our past. But the next step is really to understand these lives within the context of their own time, place, and communities. I came to focus on “female husbands” because I hoped to gain greater depth of understanding of this one particular experience of transing gender. Unlike other kinds of accounts, stories of female husbands were filled with all kinds of details—such as full names of several people, towns, churches, birthdates, marriage dates, etc.—that made it possible to verify the stories in traditional archival records. Plus, female husbands are just really cool.
EG : You did so much research for this book. Most of your sources are contemporary news reports and fictionalized accounts of the female husbands’ lives, which means you were pretty much at the mercy of disrespectful and incomplete reporting. Was it difficult to figure out how much of these accounts you could trust versus how much was sensationalist exaggeration?
JM : I think the challenging nature of the sources is probably a reason more people haven’t extensively worked with these records already. Literary scholars have argued how this style of writing served to intentionally obscure the meaning of such accounts, which I think is true. But the records are too rich and abundant for historians to ignore. Once you read hundreds of the accounts, you develop a way to sort through claims that were likely true and claims that were formulaic and exaggerated. I verified as much as I possibly could in other places, but you can never verify the really subjective details that brought the stories to life. Even though the accounts were sensationalized and often mean and objectifying of my trans and queer ancestors, there are also moments where the records are respectful, understanding, curious, favorable, or neutral. It’s really important for us to know about this past as well!
EG : You note that little attention has been paid, both historically and currently, to the female wives of the female husbands. We know next to nothing about their motivations for entering such marriages, or how and when they learned their female husbands were not assigned male at birth. Why do you think there’s been so little interest in exploring these women’s side of the story?
JM : Great question. There is a longstanding view we inherited from early twentieth century sexology that women who were feminine or femme could not really be “true” homosexuals. Rather, the idea was that they were duped or seduced by gender non-conforming (GNC) or masculine women. The same logic seems to have applied to women who partnered with female husbands. There was tremendous pressure for them to claim that they did not know their husbands were assigned female. This removed any notion of stigma or difference and allowed them to be seen as normative heterosexual women, for the most part. Often, their names were changed or shortened in the newspaper stories of their relationships with female husbands, which makes it nearly impossible to develop fuller biographies for them.
EG : I really appreciate how nuanced the book is. You’re careful to point out how the female husbands benefited from other circumstances, e.g., being white, and you illustrate these advantages through such examples as the story of Charles Williams, a black sailor assigned female at birth. At what point in your research did you notice these trends, and why was it important for you to point them out in the book?
JM: It was pretty quickly apparent that female husbands were common laborers. This wasn’t a life or a category that was applied to wealthy people. I expected to encounter female husbands who were black or Indigenous, but did not. The fact that female husband was a category bound by whiteness is really interesting. For all of the hardships husbands and their wives faced, it was still an experience and category marked by some amount of privilege, freedom, and mobility. I wish I had more room to unpack the role of whiteness, honestly, because it is certainly a pattern in transgender history. Transness for communities of color looked different and we have much more to learn about that.
EG : In chapter six, you discuss how the rise of American women’s suffrage affected public perception of female husbands. Naysayers regarded the apolitical female husbands as something of a cautionary tale, i.e., if women are granted the right to vote, what’s to stop them from abandoning their wifely duties, marrying women, etc. I was especially interested in your observation that “arguments that politics made women into manly people who were undesirable for marriage never really went away.” Could you elaborate on that statement? Do you see this attitude echoed in modern reporting, and how does it relate (if at all) to current narratives and depictions of trans and gender non-conforming people?
JM : Starting in the late eighteenth century when white middle- and upper-class women began fighting for access to formal education and political rights, they were immediately mocked for wanting to be like men. This argument went pretty far in deterring significant numbers of women who recoiled at the accusation they were “masculine.” Female anti-slavery activists were also accused of being too manly as a way to deter their advocacy. I think lots of people would say this view has never gone away and is used to disparage twentieth-century feminists and women who have successful professional careers. The reason I bring it up in the book is that I think it is important for people to see the way gender norms have been used to mock, punish, and restrict peoples’ lives for a long time. Everyone assigned female—whether they go on to identify as transgender, lesbians, women, feminists, or some combination of those categories—has been restricted by norms that punish women for wanting to be strong, smart, ambitious, aggressive, physical, independent, educated, powerful, etc.
EG : If you had a time machine and could meet any or all of the female husbands in your book, is there anything you would want to say to them?
JM : I think my heart breaks the most for Joseph Lobdell because of how they were treated in the final decades of their life—ripped away from their wife and institutionalized for decades. But what would I say: I’m sorry? Thank you? Nothing really seems sufficient.
I have become the fondest of James Howe, probably because so much was written about them over a long period of time. You can get a pretty clear picture of their life—and also see how attitudes toward female husbands changed from that of curious respect in the 1760s to that of mocking disdain in the 1850s. If I could get to the bottom of one thing about their lives, it would be to understand their relationships. Who were their wives to them? Were their relationships markedly different from those of other married couples at the time? And finally, did they feel free and happy in their lives or restrained and fearful?
Reviewer Eileen Gonzalez interviews Jen Manion, Author of Female Husbands, a Trans History. Foreword Reviews, April 17, 2020.
Jen
Manion’s new book is a detailed, synoptic history of a fascinating dimension of
18th- and 19th-century cultural history in Britain and the US: it comprises
dozens of anecdotes and narratives, primarily drawn from newspapers detailing
the lives of people who were considered girls at birth, but who adopted
masculine names and appearances and who loved and lived with people Manion
cheekily calls “female wives”.
We meet, for example, James Howe, an 18th-century publican and businessman, who served his customers with ale and bonhomie while his wife did most of the housework. Howe’s name in obituaries was “Mary East”, sometimes “Mrs Mary East”, as though this person – never legally married – had somehow been a wife.
For many members of Manion’s cast, sex was paramount. George Johnson, a whaler and Massachusetts manufacturing worker, was described in an 1856 news clipping as “a male girl” and claimed to have “pretended to be a nice young man of 17, smoked strong cigars, [and] was a successful beau among the young ladies”. The vigour and the taste for pleasure that Manion ascribes to Johnson runs throughout Female Husbands; one encounters outlaws of sexual gender being punished, humiliated and castigated, but one also finds them engaged in delightful, confrontational, unapologetic presentations of masculinity.
The title of this study derives from a 1682 fictional broadside entitled The Male and Female Husband, which concerns an intersex person named Mary Jewit, raised as a girl, who impregnates someone and is compelled by a court to present as a man. “And changing habit for a man he to the Church straight went,” the broadside briskly puts it. But Manion’s real starting point is Henry Fielding’s still widely read 1746 fictionalised narrative of the life of Charles Hamilton, The Female Husband, the title of which, Manion suggests, echoes other “female X” formulations of the mid-18th century: “female actor”, for one. Hamilton was the first person to be known in the UK by the soubriquet, which became more than a joke – it was a way of life, almost a vocation.
Manion’s book, which considers, at an angle, sexual norms between the mid-18th century and the early 20th, is published at a fractious moment in the history of gender and sex. Attempts have been made to argue that “reclaiming” transgender ancestors is ahistorical. Female Husbands demands a rethink of this position. Charles Hamilton, George Johnson, James Howe and the dozens of other characters animated by Manion’s lively pen may not have seen themselves as “trans”, but nor did they see themselves as “lesbians”. Indeed, among the virtues of Manion’s study is the provision of an entirely pragmatic, value-neutral description of “trans history” as a study of social practices conducted in contravention of a person’s birth-assigned gender.
I am not entirely persuaded that referring to each of the husbands as “they” is a necessary precaution. But then the question of how we refer to conditions of being that we cannot fully comprehend is one of the central challenges of history committed (as Manion certainly is) to the feminist principle that the personal is political.
Consider Frank Dubois, who left a husband and two children in Illinois for a wife in Wisconsin. The authorities instructed Dubois to dissolve the latter marriage and reconvene the former. An article on the subject, headlined “Frank Dubois a Woman”, was published in the New York Times on 2 November 1883, in which a scandalised reporter exclaimed: “You insist that you are a man?” prompting Dubois to reply, resplendently: “I do; I am. As long as my wife is satisfied, it’s nobody’s business.”
Outside the bedroom, nothing about Dubois’s gender defused the impression. Reporting on the Times’s article about Dubois, the New York World found that Dubois “chewed tobacco and swore”, adding that “in spite of these irrefutable proofs of sex, Wisconsin, with inscrutable pertinacity, insists that she is a woman”. So, while the question of how Dubois would self-describe today remains the “ahistorical” question par excellence, two points can be deduced. First, that Dubois did not concede that the designation “a man” was inaccurate. Second, that those wishing to send Dubois back to an unsatisfying marriage found the very idea of transition a self-evident fiction, nothing more than an occasion for a snippy little phrase.
The more that people have, in the century since the end of the era Manion studies, diversified the possibilities of terms such as “husband”, “female”, “wife” and “sex”, the more fraught appear the attempts to treat sex as the stabilising counterpart to gender. One thinks of the almost comical cascade of this-time-we’ve-got-’em constructions of “biological difference” against which the self-designations of trans people have been contrasted in recent years. Genitals! Chromosomes! The present jargon is “large, immobile gametes” – which at least has the benefit of sounding as absurd as would be any attempt to prove, like a chemist on Gulliver’s Laputa, the formula for a husband.
Female Husbands by Jen Manion review – a trans history. By Grace Lavery. The Guardian, July 10, 2020.
We meet, for example, James Howe, an 18th-century publican and businessman, who served his customers with ale and bonhomie while his wife did most of the housework. Howe’s name in obituaries was “Mary East”, sometimes “Mrs Mary East”, as though this person – never legally married – had somehow been a wife.
For many members of Manion’s cast, sex was paramount. George Johnson, a whaler and Massachusetts manufacturing worker, was described in an 1856 news clipping as “a male girl” and claimed to have “pretended to be a nice young man of 17, smoked strong cigars, [and] was a successful beau among the young ladies”. The vigour and the taste for pleasure that Manion ascribes to Johnson runs throughout Female Husbands; one encounters outlaws of sexual gender being punished, humiliated and castigated, but one also finds them engaged in delightful, confrontational, unapologetic presentations of masculinity.
The title of this study derives from a 1682 fictional broadside entitled The Male and Female Husband, which concerns an intersex person named Mary Jewit, raised as a girl, who impregnates someone and is compelled by a court to present as a man. “And changing habit for a man he to the Church straight went,” the broadside briskly puts it. But Manion’s real starting point is Henry Fielding’s still widely read 1746 fictionalised narrative of the life of Charles Hamilton, The Female Husband, the title of which, Manion suggests, echoes other “female X” formulations of the mid-18th century: “female actor”, for one. Hamilton was the first person to be known in the UK by the soubriquet, which became more than a joke – it was a way of life, almost a vocation.
Manion’s book, which considers, at an angle, sexual norms between the mid-18th century and the early 20th, is published at a fractious moment in the history of gender and sex. Attempts have been made to argue that “reclaiming” transgender ancestors is ahistorical. Female Husbands demands a rethink of this position. Charles Hamilton, George Johnson, James Howe and the dozens of other characters animated by Manion’s lively pen may not have seen themselves as “trans”, but nor did they see themselves as “lesbians”. Indeed, among the virtues of Manion’s study is the provision of an entirely pragmatic, value-neutral description of “trans history” as a study of social practices conducted in contravention of a person’s birth-assigned gender.
I am not entirely persuaded that referring to each of the husbands as “they” is a necessary precaution. But then the question of how we refer to conditions of being that we cannot fully comprehend is one of the central challenges of history committed (as Manion certainly is) to the feminist principle that the personal is political.
Consider Frank Dubois, who left a husband and two children in Illinois for a wife in Wisconsin. The authorities instructed Dubois to dissolve the latter marriage and reconvene the former. An article on the subject, headlined “Frank Dubois a Woman”, was published in the New York Times on 2 November 1883, in which a scandalised reporter exclaimed: “You insist that you are a man?” prompting Dubois to reply, resplendently: “I do; I am. As long as my wife is satisfied, it’s nobody’s business.”
Outside the bedroom, nothing about Dubois’s gender defused the impression. Reporting on the Times’s article about Dubois, the New York World found that Dubois “chewed tobacco and swore”, adding that “in spite of these irrefutable proofs of sex, Wisconsin, with inscrutable pertinacity, insists that she is a woman”. So, while the question of how Dubois would self-describe today remains the “ahistorical” question par excellence, two points can be deduced. First, that Dubois did not concede that the designation “a man” was inaccurate. Second, that those wishing to send Dubois back to an unsatisfying marriage found the very idea of transition a self-evident fiction, nothing more than an occasion for a snippy little phrase.
The more that people have, in the century since the end of the era Manion studies, diversified the possibilities of terms such as “husband”, “female”, “wife” and “sex”, the more fraught appear the attempts to treat sex as the stabilising counterpart to gender. One thinks of the almost comical cascade of this-time-we’ve-got-’em constructions of “biological difference” against which the self-designations of trans people have been contrasted in recent years. Genitals! Chromosomes! The present jargon is “large, immobile gametes” – which at least has the benefit of sounding as absurd as would be any attempt to prove, like a chemist on Gulliver’s Laputa, the formula for a husband.
Female Husbands by Jen Manion review – a trans history. By Grace Lavery. The Guardian, July 10, 2020.
In the Castro
District, the well-known hub of San Francisco’s gay community, bronze plaques
embedded in the sidewalks honor famous LGBTQ individuals from around the world.
Recognizing ancestors has a long pedigree in LGBTQ activism, dating back to
19th-century efforts to repeal sodomy laws in Germany. For generations, doing
so allowed queer people to feel a sense of kinship with the past. It also
enabled them to dispute those who argued that homosexuality, along with other
queer gender and sexual identities, is an aberration of the modern world.
Campaigners could point to ancients such as the poet Sappho or Alexander the
Great as proof that homosexuality was neither unnatural nor harmful. Curiously,
though, almost every single person in the Rainbow Honor Walk, as the Castro
installation is known, is a figure of the 20th or 21st century. The oldest, the
two-spirit Zuni tribal leader We'wha, was born in 1849 and died in 1896. There
is seemingly no place for those older figures who were once held up as evidence
of queerness in history.
This
exclusion points to a fundamental tension in the history of sexuality. Whereas
early activists and chroniclers of the gay past looked to resurrect a pantheon
of ancestors, historians of the last several decades routinely express
skepticism that those figures can be labeled gay, lesbian, trans, or queer in
any productive sense, or that those figures would even recognize themselves or
their experience in such labels. In so doing, they take their cue from the
French philosopher Michel Foucault, who memorably and convincingly argued in
his 1976 The History of Sexuality that “the homosexual” had only come into
being in the late 19th century. Up until that point, there had been “sodomites”
— men who had sex with men — but no one whose identity was defined by their
sexual preference or the sexual acts in which they engaged. In its temporal
limits, the Castro memorial implicitly supports such views.
This
dispute over whether it makes sense to troll through the past for queer
ancestors was a foundational question for the early history of sexuality,
creating a division between “essentialists” who argued sexual identities were
transhistorical and “constructivists” who contended they were socially
constructed over time. The dispute also struck at the relationship between
queer history and activism, namely the question of to what extent is queer
history one of recuperation, of discovering lost ancestors who might serve as a
model for queer people in the 21st century?
These
questions clearly loomed large for Jen Manion as she wrote Female Husbands: A
Trans History, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. A
self-described “lifelong LGBTQ rights advocate” and professor of history at
Amherst College, Manion created not only a strikingly original portrait of
individuals who, as she puts it, “transed” gender in the 18th and 19th
centuries, but also an impassioned cri de coeur for trans rights. In writing
the history of “female husbands,” Manion walks a fine line between identifying
those individuals as ancestors of trans people today and insisting that they
were not, in fact, themselves trans. But in walking this knife’s edge, the book
does not come down firmly on either side, leaving readers without an answer to
the question of whether queer history is, or even if it can be, an exercise in
the recovery of lost ancestors. In another sense, are the projects of recovery
and historicization in harmony or conflict?
The very
language Manion employs in Female Husbands reveals how careful she was in
walking the tightrope between recovery and historicization. Instead of calling
her figures, female-assigned individuals who lived as men, “trans,” she refers
to them as individuals who “transed” gender, indicating that they crossed
commonly understood lines of binary gender identity and presentation.
Similarly, she refuses to assert their gender identity, eschewing masculine and
feminine pronouns for they/them/theirs. Doing so, Manion contends, “allows me
to minimize disruption and avoid a false sense of stability when writing about
a person over a long period of time, marked by varied gender expressions.” The
book’s subject, she insists, is not trans people, but rather “female husbands,”
a term in circulation in the 18th and 19th centuries that described
female-assigned individuals who lived as men and married women.
The
career of the female husband began on July 16, 1746, when one Charles Hamilton
wedded one Mary Price in southwest England. Hamilton worked as a traveling
apothecary, selling remedies to common ailments. They had been renting a room
in the house of one Mary Creed, where they met Creed’s niece, Mary Price. But
after just two months of marriage, Price denounced her new husband to the
police, telling them that Hamilton was, in fact, a woman. Hamilton was tried
under the 1744 Vagrancy Act, a flexible statute that ostensibly punished lack
of employment and fraud, though, as Manion explains, “people were arrested
under charge[s] of vagrancy for a wide range of activities.” The court seemed
particularly perturbed by Mary Price’s account that her husband had “entered
her Body several times” in so convincing a manner that she had not initially
suspected anything out of the ordinary. The community of Glastonbury, where the
trial was held, petitioned the court for a severe punishment. The court
responded with a sentence of six months hard labor and public whippings in four
towns. It was a severe punishment, Manion explains, and a reaction specifically
to Hamilton’s “ability to engage in sex with a woman as a man,” which “exposed
the instability of sexual difference and the imitability of heterosexual sex.”
In the years after their punishment, Hamilton’s story spread in the United
Kingdom and the American colonies. Eventually, they came to be known as “the
female husband” — the first female-assigned person who had lived as a man and
married a woman.
Hamilton's
story is one of brutal persecution for the “crime” of having transed gender. It
fits well with what we might think of as the lachrymose theory of queer
history, the idea that the history of gender and sexual heterodoxy is primarily
one of persecution. Hamilton, who had enjoyed a relatively successful life as a
traveling doctor, was suddenly deprived of their career, freedom, and very identity
after being publicly exposed by their spouse. Other female husbands met similar
fates, denounced by wives, relatives, and neighbors. And, as the science of
sexology arose and grew in the 19th century, Manion asserts, “[d]octors,
psychiatrists, and psychologists developed elaborate and official means by
which to stigmatize, criminalize, isolate, and torture those assigned female at
birth who stepped beyond the confines of appropriate gender and sexual
behavior.”
But
there were other modes of existence that afforded female-assigned individuals a
more comfortable — and accepted — life as men. Manion notes the long tradition,
for instance, of female-assigned people enlisting as soldiers or sailors. These
individuals, while not all female husbands, certainly transed gender and were
often rewarded or praised for it.
On May
20, 1782, Robert Shurtliff enlisted in George Washington’s Continental Army,
intent on helping the revolutionary cause. Shurtliff would serve until the end
of the war, whereupon they settled in Massachusetts to work as a farmer.
Several months later, they donned women’s clothing and began to live under the
name Deborah Sampson. They later married Benjamin Gannett and had several
children. Years later, Herman Mann “approached them with an offer to write
their biography.” It appeared in 1797 under the title The Female Review: Life
of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier in the War of the Revolution, and
Shurtliff grew in fame as newspapers around the country picked up their story.
In 1805, the federal government decided to award them a pension for their
service in the Revolutionary War. Thanks to Mann’s biography, Shurtliff became
something of a national celebrity. Unlike female husbands such as Charles
Hamilton, Shurtliff exemplified a different tradition, that of the female
soldier and the female sailor. Whereas contemporaries found Hamilton’s
transgression of sexual norms appalling, they praised Shurtliff, in the words
of an 1851 article, as “an humble girl of seventeen inspired with an ardent
patriotism and resolution to stand forth in the defense of her injured
country.”
James Allen
was working for a London shipwright when he was killed by a falling piece of
timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty
years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body
anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’
because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.’
The marriage certificate convinced the coroner to ignore Allen’s anatomy:
social gender trumped biological gender. The rest of the community agreed.
Allen wore trousers, worked as a manual labourer, had a wife and was called
James. He was ‘sober, steady, strong and active’. Of course he was a man. Only
after Allen’s death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to
express different opinions: they’d always noticed his lack of facial hair, they
said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised
Allen in retrospect, another insisted on his masculine traits – a face
roughened by a life spent outdoors, large hands hardened by decades of work as
a groom and sawyer.
Female husbands had varied relationships to masculinity. Some transitioned to maleness early in adolescence, others much later; some lived as men for most of their lives, some only briefly and others moved between genders. In 1852, 17-year-old Mary Robins met the 32-year-old Mrs Panton, who claimed to be an illegitimate royal – born male but forced to disguise himself as female to avoid scandal. Mrs Panton dropped that disguise to wed Mary Robins as Albert Guelph. During the honeymoon, Mary learned that Albert was the mother of three children, and the marriage was annulled. Guelph resurfaced four years later in Syracuse, New York, when the father of his next bride reported him to the authorities, this time against his daughter’s wishes.
In both these books, gender has more to do with habit than biology. According to Manion, female husbands knew that ‘what makes a man is not the sex they are assigned at birth but the life they live.’ In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued for a form of knowledge he called practical: one learns to become a swimmer by swimming. One might say that a person becomes a man by living as a man. Mesch proposes that gender isn’t a label so much as a story, although judging by these accounts, it’s not just one story but many. The stories trans people told about themselves often collided with the way others understood them. Family members, neighbours, employers, spouses, lovers, police officers and doctors could make or unmake the tale and the teller.
Trans people encounter resistance not only because they challenge widely held notions about gender but also because they threaten society’s conformist tendencies. Dieulafoy, for example, found much more acceptance than Rachilde, because Dieulafoy’s masculinity served the French imperial state. The press lauded them as an ‘intrepid explorer’ whose Persian expeditions added treasures to the Louvre. The same holds true for some of Manion’s female husbands. Robert Shurtliff, an American soldier in the War of Independence, also known as Deborah Sampson, was celebrated for acting out of the ‘purest patriotism’ and without ‘any selfish motives’. When the British soldier James Gray revealed that he had once been Hannah Snell, he was treated as a hero. By contrast, the deliberately perverse Rachilde, determined ‘to be strange or nothing at all’, was denounced, censored and pathologised. When a judge found Albert Guelph guilty of vagrancy in 1856, he claimed that he had ‘harmed the entire community’.
As society’s ideas about gender changed, so too did attitudes towards female husbands. After the rise of feminism in the 1840s, female husbands became associated with the growing numbers of women eager to vote, go to college and work in jobs formerly reserved for men. The press began to fret that a once eccentric phenomenon might soon become widespread. In 1883, the New York Times announced that ‘many women ... if they had the opportunity, would select other women as husbands rather than marry men.’ Although reports of female husbands remained rare, agitation about gender-crossing intensified. With the rise of sexology in the 1880s, doctors and journalists began to see female husbands as lesbians, that is, as more female than husband. Sex, now considered a fixed biological essence, began to trump gender: no longer a person successfully living as a man, the female husband was a deviant woman.
Then as now, conservatives feared that the many would follow the few. In 1837, a religious conservative in Boston warned that what Manion calls ‘transing’ might ‘become universal’. In the 1860s, US states and cities began to enact laws that made it a crime for women to dress as men and men as women. If there was no widespread hysteria about trans people using public toilets, it was only because there were so few public toilets. Those that did exist were indeed sites of gender trouble. In 1870, for example, Fanny (née Frederick) Park and Stella (née Thomas) Boulton were arrested for disturbing the peace, then charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy, after using the Ladies’ Retiring Room in a London theatre.
Mesch and Manion correctly point out that feminist and lesbian scholars long disregarded or downplayed the self-definitions of people who had spent their lives insisting they were not women. Mesch cites Rachilde’s assertion that they were ‘not a feminist’ because they were ‘not a woman’. But the zeal with which Mesch and Manion take those scholars to task suggests that they believe lesbians and feminists to be especially hostile to trans existence. This is a view shared by many young people, who associate the term ‘lesbian’ with transphobic ideas about who is and is not a woman. It is far more common, however, for feminist organisations and individuals to support transgender rights. In 2019, more than seventy self-identified UK women’s rights advocates signed a letter distancing themselves from trans exclusionary activists. All the major feminist organisations in Iceland supported a 2019 law that allows people to legally change their gender without a medical diagnosis and created an option for a third gender on all official documents. The tensions among some lesbians, feminists, trans people and their supporters are real. But these groups also have common enemies and shared goals, beginning with liberating us all from the relentless gender policing that begins before birth.
More
Husband than Female. By Sharon Marcus.London Review of Books, June 17 2021
Website Jen Manion
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