In 1746, Charles Hamilton, a doctor, married Mary Price in Wells, England. Hamilton was a traveling doctor, selling patent medicines and dubious medical advice, and had met Mary when staying in a rented room. After the wedding, Mary joined Charles in traveling and selling cures for a couple of months until suddenly, she decided she no longer wanted to be married – and to get out of the relationship, Mary went to the local court and reported that her husband Charles Hamilton was, in fact, a woman. The revelation that Hamilton was assigned female at birth but lived their life as a man enchanted the public, and, as much as something could in the 18th century, went viral. Hamilton’s story was then immortalized in a fictionalized story called The Female Husband. Thus, the concept of a “female husband,” or a person assigned female at birth but living as a man, including serving as a husband, entered into the consciousness of the Anglo-American world. The history of female husbands like Charles Hamilton and many others prove not only that queerness has always existed, but that gender itself has always has been messy, flexible, and contested.
Female Husbands, or People Have Always Transed Gender
Written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Produced and Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD
Sarah: In 1746, a quack doctor named Charles Hamilton married Mary Price in Wells, England. Hamilton was a traveling doctor, selling patent medicines and dubious medical advice, and had met Mary when staying in a rented room in her aunt’s boarding house. After the wedding, Mary joined Charles in traveling and selling cures for a couple of months until suddenly, she decided she no longer wanted to be married. To get out of the relationship, Mary went to the local court and reported that her husband Charles Hamilton was, in fact, a woman.
Averill : The revelation that Hamilton was assigned female at birth but lived their life as a man enchanted the public, and, as much as something could in the 18th century, went viral in newspapers and scandal rags. Hamilton’s story was then immortalized in a fictionalized story by the well-known satirist Henry Fielding – who would later go on to write the much more famous The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – in a pamphlet called The Female Husband. In this sensationalized story, Hamilton is depicted as a frustrated lesbian who was rejected by a female lover in favor of a man. According to Fielding’s version, this rejection and frustration drove the fictionalized Hamilton to begin presenting as a man in order to have greater sexual access to women.
Sarah: With this pamphlet, the concept of a “female husband” – term used between the late 18th c and early 20th c to describe a person assigned female at birth but living as a man in the role of ‘husband’ entered into the consciousness of the Anglo-American world. The history of female husbands, and other people assigned female at birth who lived as men like Charles Hamilton, proves not only that queerness has always existed, but adds further weight to the claim that gender is a constructed and unstable category. Female husbands and others who transed gender who lived their lives as men, performing duties associated with manhood – marrying and supporting a wife, serving in the military, practicing a trade – demonstrated that the category of ‘man’ could be entirely divorced from the biological sex markers.
During this series of episodes, we’re picking up on the themes presented in our beloved Averill’s first book, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972. Averill’s work is an important addition to the burgeoning field of the history of sexuality, which seeks to unearth suppressed and/or hidden-in-plain-sight histories of queer and gender non-conforming people. Today, in that same spirit, we’re considering the history of female husbands in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
I’m Sarah
And I’m Averill
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig
Averill : We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Judy, Lisa, Karl, Karen, Jessy, Maria, Denise, Edward, Lauren, Colin, Susan, and Alissa! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.
Sarah: As we do at the top of each episode, I want to start by acknowledging our source material. While some of our episodes are pulling on a field – in other words, on several books published on the same historical topic – this episode is one that is reliant on the work of just one historian. In this case, it’s Jen Manion’s pathbreaking book Female Husbands: A Trans History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This isn’t the only history of trans or gender non-conforming people by a longshot. If you’re interested in the topic, a good place to start is with the work of Susan Stryker, particularly Transgender History, published first in 2008 and revised and republished in 2017. That book, though, is a synthetic history, meaning that it’s fairly broad. It also begins in the mid-19th century and focuses largely on 20th and 21st century trans history, particularly on the gay and trans liberation movements.
Instead of this broader overview, Manion’s Female Husbands digs really deeply into the specific category of the ‘female husband,’ which emerged in the mid 18th century. In total defiance of the idea – often embraced today – that transing gender is a new phenomenon, or that it wasn’t something people even talked about in the past, Manion shows us that female husbands were a relatively common and oft-discussed part of life in the United States and United Kingdom for centuries.
Averill : Let’s start by talking a little bit about methods and language. Because the dominant culture (what we nerds sometimes call hegemonic culture) did not allow for gender non-conformity, most people who lived with a gender expression other than what they were assigned at birth lived under the radar. That means they infrequently left behind a lot of historical documentation or sources of their lives and experiences. We know a lot about certain people in history – it probably goes without saying that that means mostly elite white men – because they were documented in lots of stuff, like tax documents, wills, deeds, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, military records, etc. But people who had to live on the margins of society or who had to deflect attention away from themselves to stay safe didn’t generate that kind of material, whether on purpose (to stay incognito) or because the power structures around them kept them out of the places, spaces, and institutions where those kinds of documents could be created. So, where I’m going with this is that those individuals often are only visible in the historical record when something bad happened. Averill’s work is a great example of this. Many Irish men who had sex with other men only become visible in the historical record when they were arrested for public indecency. That’s when we can ‘see’ them as same-sex desiring men – otherwise, they’re often invisible or incognito. Take Charles Hamilton as an example – Hamilton only became ‘visible’ as a female husband when their wife turned them into the court for investigation. Thus, Hamilton became historically ‘visible,’ but at a moment of pain, stress, and oppression. Because of this, Manion’s book necessarily uses this anxious moments as entry points, but then works to read against those negative moments to reconstruct the lives and experiences of female husbands.
Sarah: We also have to talk a little bit about language and terminology. One of the challenges inherent in queer history is one of language – like, can we label someone who lived hundreds of years ago a ‘trans’ person, when that category didn’t exist? In that case, most historians agree that when we do that, we’re sort of applying a way of being, of understanding oneself, that didn’t exist for that person at that time. We also see this in Averill’s work when she chooses to use categories like “men who had sex with men” instead of labeling those individuals “gay men.” Gay is a modern category that has a certain meaning to us today – but it had an entirely different meaning in the early 20th century. Then again, those modern categories do allow us to see and make sense of people in the past that perhaps we might have overlooked or understood differently. All this to say, this makes finding the right language to talk about female husbands complicated. For this reason, Manion does not call these individuals “trans.” Instead, Manion uses the word “trans” as a verb rather than a noun – you may have even noticed that we’ve used that formulation a couple times already here. When a person assigned female at birth chose to live as a man, that was an action – and we can identify that action without applying that person to a category or making assumptions about the way they identified. To quote here from Manion, “to say someone transed or was transing gender signifies a process or practice without claiming to understand what it meant to that person or asserting any find of fixed identity on them.”[1]
Averill : Similarly, the language that we choose to use can, intentionally or unintentionally, contribute to our assumptions about gender and sexuality. For instance, by referring to a female husband as a “woman” before they chose to live as a man identifies them according to a socially constructed category that they were expected to be, rather than reflecting the fact that they chose to not enter that category. Instead, Manion refers to their subjects as assigned female at birth, which captures the power associated with gender categories (that it was applied, rather than chosen) and that it is mutable or changeable. Further, Manion chooses to use they/them pronouns for historical actors even though it’s not always clear what pronouns each of the female husbands used for themselves. That’s because, to use Manion’s words here, “‘they’ is a powerful, gender neutral way to refer to someone whose gender is unknown, irrelevant, or beyond classification. By using gender neutral language in writing about their lives, I am acknowledging that gender is “a set of practices” that contains and defines what is possible for any given individual or group of people.”[2] Choosing what pronouns to use for someone in the past is also an expression of power, right? It’s saying that we – historians living in the future – have the power to determine what pronouns apply to someone. Using “he” or “she” pronouns, even when you might bounce back and forth between them, reinforces the gender binary. Using “they” helps us to see possibilities and ways of being that transcend that gender binary.
Sarah: Now that we’ve got that foundation, let’s talk about female husbands. We started by talking about Charles Hamilton, who was outed when their wife turned them into the court in an effort to end their marriage. Hamilton was raised in Scotland, and at some point around the age of 14, Hamilton began wearing their brother’s clothes and living as a male. As a teenager, Hamilton spent time as an apprentice with two different doctors to learn the trade of the traveling doctor, then set off on their own, making a living as a medical man. Hamilton, like the doctors they apprenticed with, was not a doctor in the modern sense, but something more like a quack, or to use the 18th century term, a mountebank, a charlatan who sold mostly junk medicines. (I am a historian of medicine and serve as the secretary of the American Association for the History of Medicine and had never heard the word mountebank! So Jan Manion just teaching me all sorts of things.) This may sound like Hamilton was some kind of con man, but this was a real job, and a position that many people took seriously and relied on. Plus, the job gave Hamilton freedom that they could not have experienced as a girl – Hamilton could travel as they pleased. It also afforded Hamilton a certain amount of safety – not living in one place reduced the possibility that they might be revealed.
Averill : But that safety didn’t last forever. As we already know, Hamilton met and married the niece of his landlady, Mary Price. We don’t know how the relationship came about. This is something I really appreciate about Manion’s book – they allow for what we can’t know and the various possibilities that exist. Maybe Mary Price found Charles Hamilton exciting and charming. Or maybe her aunt saw an opportunity and pressured Mary into a marriage that might be financially advantageous. And for some reason, a couple of months later, Mary, according to her own testimony, anyway, wanted out of the marriage on the grounds that she didn’t know that Hamilton was assigned female. But her testimony relied on evidence from their sexual relationship. How was that possible? Well, it’s very likely that Mary was sexually naive (very very possible in an era where sexual education did not exist), but it’s also very likely that she enjoyed the sex they were having. In Manion’s words, “Hamilton did something that made Mary feel so good that she did not question Hamilton’s manhood for two entire months.” Whether her shock was realistic or not, the court seemed to agree that this was a serious violation, and a potential threat to other young and Hamilton was jailed awaiting trial.
Sarah: The couple’s sex life made up the centerpiece of the case. The court didn’t really seem concerned that Hamilton presented themselves as a man when they were assigned female. Instead, it was the fact that Hamilton had seduced a woman, married her, and had sex with her – and, what’s more, had penetrative sex that led Mary to believe (at least for a time) that Hamilton was a man. Hamilton was a threatening, immoral fraud. Yet, Hamilton was ultimately charged with violating the 1744 Vagrancy Act, which focused on using deception to make money, but was often used as a catch all to discipline people who violated the social order. Hamilton shared the jail with other men who were charged under the code, like William Weeks, who had fathered a child out of wedlock, and Thomas Reynolds, who abandoned his family, rendering them impoverished. But Hamilton’s sentence was harsher than those given to other men and was focused on fully outing Hamilton as someone assigned female living fraudulently as male. In addition to six month of hard labor, Hamilton was also sentenced to four public whippings (stripped to the waist) in each of the four villages they had traveled through in the surrounding county.
Averill : Not unlike today, true crime was a big market, and Hamilton’s story circulated in newspapers both in the UK and the American colonies. The reports, though, revealed that Hamilton’s case didn’t fit easily into the existing British law. As one newspaper reported in 1746, the courts had a “debate of the nature of the Crime, and what to call it, it was agreed that [Hamilton] was an uncommon, notorious cheat.” Unsure how else to charge Hamilton, the newspaper suggested that the court had to do some work to find a way to force Price’s allegations into something that could actually constitute a crime under the existing British law. These kinds of newspaper reports weren’t uncommon, but the aspect of sexual deviance provided an additional scandalous layer that made it enticing to the writer and satirist Henry Fielding. In a society where playing with the bounds of gender expression was excitingly risque – after all, masquerades where women could go unchaperoned and dress as men were a common form of entertainment – but living as an alternate gender was not an option and scientific and medical thought was increasingly cementing women’s biological inferiority, the case of Charles Hamilton presented a perfect story to turn into a satirical, provocative pamphlet entitled, The Female Husband, or the Surprising History of Mrs. Mary alias Mr. George Hamilton.
Sarah: Fielding turned Charles Hamilton into George Hamilton. This Hamilton had not chosen to live as a man as a teenager, but instead had lived as a woman into adulthood. When the fictional Hamilton’s female lover cheated with a man, George Hamilton became hysterical and irrational with jealousy. “But she was no sooner informed of it, than she became almost frantic, she tore her hair, beat her breast, and behaved in as outrageous a manner as the fondest husband cou’d, who had unexpectedly discovered the infidelity of a beloved wife.”[3] Angry and jealous, the fictional Hamilton began to live as a man in order to have better access to women. Throughout, Fielding had the fictional Hamilton marry over and over again, then be repeatedly outed as assigned female. One young wife exclaimed, “Have you not married me a poor young girl, when you know, you have not – you have not – what you ought to have. I have always thought indeed your shape was something odd, and have often wondered that you hadnot the least bit of beard; but I thought you had been a man for all that, or I am sure I would not have been so wicked to marry you for the world.”[4] What’s interesting is that Fielding was hyperfocused on his fictional Hamilton’s inability to perform sexually as a man, which led their wives to repeatedly leave – but part of the evidence against the real Hamilton was that they had successfully had a penetrative intercourse with their wife, Mary, before she chose to end the relationship.
Averill : While Fielding’s pamphlet never entered the literary canon in the same way that his later novel, Tom Jones, did, it did do something really important: it launched the concept of the ‘female husband,’ the category that many people assigned female at birth but who lived as men would be placed in by Anglo-American society. From this point, numerous individuals who were outed for one reason or another would be described by the media as “female husbands” in the same way that we might refer to those individuals today as “trans men.” But not all people who lived as men were technically serving in the position of husband. But some, like Hamilton, nevertheless had their stories go old-timey viral. One of the most famous types of ‘viral’ story about people assigned female at birth who transed gender were those who did so in order to serve in the army or navy. Take William Chandler as an example. Chandler was born in 1740 in Wickham, England. Their parents were not wealthy, and Chandler had an active, outdoorsy childhood. They later wrote in their autobiography, published in 1773, “I never liked to be within doors, and if I could get out with the young child, I thought myself happy; for if I staid within doors, I was idle, and studying what mischief I should do; so that my thoughts were never inclined to any good for myself.” Chandler always knew that they were not destined for a quiet, domestic life. Life as a man seemed like a way to achieve the lifestyle they felt most suited for, and Chandler later wrote that “On the first day of May, 1759, about six o’clock in the morning, I set off; and when I had got out of town into the fields, I pulled off my cloaths, and put on mens, leaving my own in a hedge, some in one place and some in another.”[5]
Sarah: Returning to their previous life was not an option. “To go home again,” Chandler wrote, “was death to me.” They lived rough until they were invited by a group of other men to work on a ship. That’s when they adopted the name William Chandler, a composite of their father’s name and mother’s maiden name. Key to passing successfully as a man on the ship was acquiring the right clothes. Chandler had taken some of their father’s and brother’s clothes before leaving home, and was given another set of clothes before embarking. But Chandler also knew that their wardrobe was to be made available to the ship’s captain for inspection, and they still owned a shift, a part of women’s underclothing. Chandler managed to find another sailor who would sell them his shirt (a man’s underclothing) so they could ditch the shift and have a safer wardrobe for inspection. While stories of female husbands used the responsibility and duty of the ‘husband’ role as proof of manhood, stories of sailors and soldiers pointed to physical strength and flirtatious sexuality. While fictionalized, ‘viral’ accounts of Chandler suggested that they struggled to keep up with the tough manual labor of being a sailor, historical research has shown that Chandler was often placed in extremely physically demanding roles, first in the British Navy and then again as a shipwright’s apprentice. Further, Chandler’s autobiography hinted at sexual relationships, or at least alluring proximity to men and women and openly described a number of people who pursued them, including the wife of Chandler’s shipmaster. This woman relentlessly pursued Chandler. According to his autobiography, Chandler recalled “While I was laying the cloth, my misteress would stroke me down the face, and call me a clever fellow, which behaviour often put me to blush.” Later, the shipmaster’s wife cornered Chandler into a liaison with her and another woman. “To have refused would be hazarding a discovery of my sex,” Chandler wrote, and spent the night (apparently clothed!) with the two women.
Averill : Chandler is also an interesting example of someone who transed gender because they made the later choice to live again as a woman. After many years serving in the navy, then many more years on land working as a shipwright, all while living as a man, Chandler became ill and no longer able to earn a living. At this point, Chandler began again presenting as a woman. At this point, an acquaintance, another shipwright named Josiah Slade, came back into Chandler’s life. Chandler wrote, that Slade “had not seen me before in women’s apparel, yet having heard of my metamorphosis, he enquired kindly after my health.” Though Chandler attested in their autobiography that they had intended to remain single, “a real and mutual affection” formed between the two, and they married in 1772, and remained married until Chandler died in 1801. We find this particularly fascinating, because Slade knew Chandler as both man and woman, Chandler’s relationship with gender underscores that gender was – and is – malleable and cannot be fully understood in binary terms.
Sarah: While Chandler proved their manhood by wearing the right clothes, being flirtatious with women, and proving their strength in a trade assumed to only be accessible to men, others were ‘proven’ to be men through the very act of having married a woman and served as a husband. But unlike Chandler, who used their transing of gender to become something of a public persona in an autobiography, most female husbands relied on never being made the center of public scrutiny. As Charles Hamilton’s story demonstrated, though, that couldn’t always be avoided – as James Allen’s widow soon learned.
Averill : James Allen and Abigail Naylor married in St. Giles’ Church, London, in 1801. They had known each other for at least three years, while they both worked in the same home. After they married, the two worked – sometimes together, running a pub, and sometimes in separate trades – to make ends meet. After twenty-one years of marriage, however, tragedy struck in 1829 when James was crushed and killed by a falling piece of timber while working as a shipbuilder. Almost immediately, James’s body was taken to a coroner for an inquest into the cause of death. This was likely mostly because it was a workplace death, and James’s employer, Mr. Crisp, might have been held liable. The body was remanded to the coroner, Thomas Shelton, who then handed it over to a surgeon, Dr. William Green, and a medical student, John Martin. As part of Martin’s training, he was observed performing the autopsy. He quickly observed that James Allen’s was unsurvivable, but then made a more startling discovery: James Allen was anatomically female.
Averill : The story soon got out around the hospital and Shelton took over. While Martin had declared, “the deceased is a woman” while conducting the autopsy, Shelton seemed a little more confused. He referred to Allen using male pronouns, and explained himself, saying: “I call the deceased ‘he’ because I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.” Allen’s role as husband – James and Abigail had been legally married for over 20 years – was persuasive evidence to Shelton that Allen had to be a man, even when Martin had revealed female genitalia. Shelton, who served as the representative of the Crown in inquests, ruled that Allen was a man and maintained that it was not the Coroner’s role to conduct any further questioning into the matter – their role was only related to the cause and manner of death. Further, when rumors began to spread that ‘resurrection men’ (body snatchers) were on the prowl for this interesting body, Shelton had Allen’s body moved to a private vault at St. John’s Bermondsey, rather than allowing it to be interred in a potter’s field where it more likely would have been buried. No one would have any more access to Allen’s body. As Manion writes, “This was a remarkable dignity rarely allowed for people of indiscriminate sex or gender. For this, we have Coroner Thomas Shelton to thank.”[6]
Sarah: Abigail, James’s widow, was now left in a terrible position. For decades, she and James had both labored, hard, to keep themselves afloat, but remained essentially impoverished. Now, without James, and without James’s income, Abigail was in an incredibly vulnerable position. James Allen had been dutifully paying into a group life insurance scheme, but the group didn’t want to pay Abigail because of James’s deception. Likely because the press was somewhat sympathetic to Abigail, reinforcing her as a good, honest, and hardworking woman, the group relented and paid out. Even they had to acknowledge that, in spite of the evidence that James Allen was assigned female, they had done all of that was required of a man by working hard, paying those insurance dues, and faithfully upholding their marriage vows. Being a female husband, then, was at least tacitly understood as real category, acknowledged by a government office as well as thie laborer’s group.
Averill : And while James’s body was safely interred in that vault, the news of the Coroner’s office’s discovery spread fast. Abigail had a decision to make that might dictate the course of the rest of her life. If she owned up to the knowledge the Allen was assigned female, Abigail would appear deviant – if she acted as though she didn’t know Allen was assigned female, she could maintain her public appearance as ‘normal.’ While we can’t know exactly why, Abigail saw the only way forward to be to swear that she did not know that her husband was assigned female in the hopes that it would allow her to retain some grip on public respectability. With the help of a local man with connections, Abigail was able to sign a legal affidavit that read: “I was entirely ignorant of the fact of the said James Allen being female, until that circumstance was communicated to me by the woman who undressed the body after death.”[7]
Sarah: A legal affadavit might seen a little over the top here, but – as the other cases we’ve discussed here – this story became the subject of popular media. These popular stories and broadsides were obsessed with imaging James and Abigail’s sexual relationship. One pamphlet by J.S. Thomas suggested that Abigail was sexually voracious, overwhelmingly and grotesquely attracted to James, who in this version was depicted as almost cartoonishly male, marked by excessive tobacco use. Another broadside imagined that the couple was in fact sexless, with this bit of poetry: “This poor woman had a husband/That had nothing at all/Twenty years she liv’d a married life/Still a maid she may remain/But we trust she’ll find a difference/if she ever weds again.” In real life, Abigail allowed people to believe they had never been intimate, testifying that Allen had been ill on their wedding night and did not pursue sex with her. Again, what would the consequences have been for her to reveal if they’d had a satisfying sexual relationship? It helped her maintain the claim that she didn’t know about James Allen’s birth gender if she cautiously maintained that they had not been intimate.
Averill : We want to quote Manion here, because the way that they unpack this question about the couple’s sexual relationship is really worth reading in its entirety: “From the perspective of queer and trans history, acceptance of the notion that these relationships were asexual had a devastating function by erasing the significance of sexual intimacy and emphasizing a husband’s inability to satisfy their wife. Even without sex, however, female husbands are deemed legitimate subjects of a queer past because of their gender. Female wives, however, are never granted this standing, largely because of how the accounts of their lives have been written. We can only imagine that Abigail may herself have been the instigator of sexual intimacies, the lover of female masculinity who lured James close to her. What if Abigail pursued James, persuading James that she could see them and would love them for who they were. What if their life and love together was her idea? In this case, the erasure of her role in shaping their relationship would be even more painful.”[8]
Sarah: I think this is really powerful, because it speaks to both the challenge and the beauty of doing this kind of history. Should we just assume, based on this affidavit – one most certainly was drawn up and signed under duress – that Abigail didn’t know that James was assigned female? After all, they knew each other for several years, lived in the same home, then married, and then lived together as husband and wife for twenty-one years. It’s certainly possible this as an asexual marriage – those are real and legitimate! But it’s also reasonable to conclude that they shared a sexual relationship – and allowing for that possibility adds richness and agency to our queer past.
Averill : Let’s shift our focus now to how the ‘female husband’ existed in the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century, as we’ve discussed many times here at Dig, women’s roles and rights were in flux. The market revolution, which removed much of men’s work from the household economy and put it into the market, also meant that women were left behind in the home. Women’s role became closely associated with the domestic sphere – work they had been doing for generations (like, say, sewing, laundry, childcare, etc) that had been previously considered important labor that kept the household economy chugging, now was seen as not labor but instead an extension of women’s nurturing nature. Starting around 1820, the ways that Americans thought about gender shifted significantly. In the case of James Allen, we saw how serving in the role of ‘husband’ made them, (in death, at least) a man in the eyes of the law. In the mid-19th century, what it meant to be a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ was now less linked to specific roles (like ‘wife’ or ‘husband’) but instead was understood to arise from nature. Women were naturally more moral, more nurturing, more submissive, sexually pure and sexually passive. And because of the market revolution, men and women seemed to be increasingly existed in different worlds – men in the public, women in the private or domestic. This is what many historians have referred to as “seperate spheres.” Now, we know that separate spheres is a little overly simplistic – those spheres were never completely separate, and many women (women of color, impoverished women, rural women, indigenous women, etc) could never actually access that idealized ‘domestic life’ expected of white, middle-class women.
Sarah: Unsurprisingly, at the same time, many women were questioning these apparently “natural” gender traits and increasingly demanding increased opportunity and political equality. Women had been writing and thinking and working for increased women’s rights for ages, but the new gender ideology of the mid-19th century added increased urgency, particularly in the United States. The women’s rights movement was born out of the abolitionist movement, which introduced like-minded people to one another – and became a more formalized movement in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. While the movement spread across the United States, it was centered in upstate New York. Early women’s rights activists in the area discussed, debated, and demanded expanded political and social rights for women. How did this new wave of women’s rights activism affect the role of the female husband?
Averill : Manion uses the story of John Smith to explore this new era of female husbands. Smith was a tinsmith in Albany, New York, a career that allowed them independence and mobility. Like Charles Hamilton’s job as a traveling quack doctor, this career meant Smith controlled their own destiny, set their own hours, and could move away if necessary. It also allowed Smith to work independently, meaning they didn’t need to work alongside other men in a situation that might raise the stakes of their ability to pass, avoiding the pressure that sailors like William Chandler had to deal with. In 1842, Smith married a widow and single mother named Mrs. Donnelly in the North Methodist Church. We don’t know anything about how this relationship came to be – we have no way of knowing if they knew each other for long, if they were sexually intimate, or anything other than it was a marriage conducted legally and in the church. But it didn’t last very long. Also like Charles Hamilton’s experience, Smith’s wife chose to end the marriage by essentially outing her husband. Donnelly stated to a friend, Michael McGuire, that Smith “didn’t do the thing that was right.” We can see here a social shift that took place between Hamilton’s case and Smith’s case. While Hamilton’s wife was explicit about what Hamilton did and didn’t do with her in the bedroom, Smith’s wife was extremely euphemistic and private in making this claim, understanding that in mid-19th c., women openly discussing sex (even socially appropriate, married sex!) was unacceptable.
Sarah: Donnelly shared this discreetly to a friend, yes, but also strategically – she shared this information with an adult male acquaintance, knowing that McGuire could take action on her behalf that she herself could not. McGuire took it upon himself to get to the bottom of Donnelly’s claim and physically assaulted John Smith. McGuire grabbed Smith , yelling “Madam, yes I will, and I’ll know whether you are one or not,” and tore away their clothes until they were exposed. This made for a shocking scene, and again, it caught the attention of the press. In James Allen’s case, the press was fairly generous to Allen’s widow, Abigail, and gentle with Allen, describing them as a hardworking husband despite being assigned female. Not so with John Smith. Smith was described as “the faithless swain,” the “deceitful jade,” and “her ladyship.” They described Smith as a liar and con, “hanging out false signals – being not exactly what outward appearances would lead honest and unsuspecting persons to believe – sailing under false sails.”[9] Smith was arrested and thrown into jail.
Averill : And again, as we’ve seen time and time again, the courts were befuddled. While the local magistrate did make an attempt to try Smith, the law didn’t have quite the right statute to control what Smith had done. According to one newspaper, “She has been discharged from custody, there being no law in the State against such a deception.” Another wrote, “As there is no law in the state which covers the offence, the gay deceiver was released after the examination before the magistrate.”[10] The lack of a law to try Smith under is further proof that this was a moment of shifting gender ideology in the United States – there was no law against cross-dressing in the United States yet, and even when someone was arrested for cross-dressing (on whatever charges the police determined would work, like disturbing the peace or whatever) society wasn’t quite sure they thought it was appropriate. One newspaper, responding to the arrest of a person assigned female being caught dressing as male in Troy, NY, wrote: “A woman was arrested and committed to prison in Troy; in other places, the women are allowed to wear the breeches and nobody objects.”[11] In other words – who cares?
Sarah: Further, the case of John Smith marks another shift in the way that people thought about the female husband – that women’s rights activism created brazen, unsexed, masculine women to the extent that they might actually try to usurp the rights and roles of ‘real’ men. Women taking on a public, political role was understood by many as transgressive – women’s nature was to be submissive and domestic, so if they took a public and political stance, it meant that they were defying their God-given nature. For instance, when women abolitionists began writing petitions to criticize slavery, Southern politicians referred to them as “mannish” and suggested that such political work “unsexed” them. Even those known for their open mindedness and liberalness believed that women should not take on public and political stances and should instead embrace their own womanly nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, when asked to speak at a woman’s rights convention in 1850, replied, “I imagine that a woman whom all men would feel to be the best, would decline such privileges if offered, & feel them to be obstacles to her legitimate influence.” Later, he wrote that “the ‘masculine’ woman is not so strong in influence as the lady.”[12] Reverend W. W. Gardner expanded on this in trying to explain why women wouldn’t be included in the concept of ‘natural rights,’ those inherent rights that the so-called founding fathers made so much of. “[Women] may have a natural right to practice physic or law… [but] the harmony of society demands that she occupy the proper sphere of action which nature has designed for her.”[13] While they might generally support the idea of women having ‘rights,’ the actual reality of having a woman giving speeches, working in politics, or medicine or law, or being generally being in the public sphere threatened to ‘masculinize’ women in a discomfiting and distasteful way.
Averill : So masculinity became the criticism launched at women who became politically active, making the accusation of mannishness a slur and a justification for dismissing women’s rights activists. In turn, early feminists wanted to not only to avoid the accusation but to reject female masculinity entirely – meaning that ultimately, they reinforced a binary gender system when they insisted that they were women and that women who did embrace some aspects of masculinity weren’t welcome. For instance, Mary Grove Nichols, a radical feminist who embraced free love, also embraced the idea that women were the weaker sex, insisting that “bold, masculine women” weren’t wanted in the movement. Another example is dress reform, the movement to change women’s clothing to allow for greater movement by trading the large, hoop-supported skirts popular in the era for large ‘bloomers,’ or puffy pants, covered by shorter skirts. First introduced in 1851, wearing the ‘bloomer’ style immediately marked you out as a women’s rights activist in a way that sparked quick, gendered scorn. One illustration that Manion includes summarizes this well: it depicts two Bloomer-dress wearing women walking down a busy city street, both wearing masculine shirts, ties, and coats and puffing on cigars. They both have masculine-looking faces – all sharp angles and exposed throats. One even has the hint of an Adam’s apple. In front of them, a group of boys jeers, while behind them, two lovely, traditionally attired women (with fashionably round, feminine faces) look back at them in disdain. This pushback led women’s rights activists to reject dress reform pretty quickly. Amelia Bloomer, who is forever associated with dress reform, wrote, “We all felt that the dress was drawing attention from what we thought of far greater importance.” But the idea of the bloomer-wearing radical women’s rights activists was forever embedded in the minds of the critical public, linking masculine dress with unacceptably radical gender politics.
Sarah: So when Albert Guelph was discovered to be assigned female at birth in Syracuse (in the heart of upstate New York radicalism), they were understood within this context, and Guelph was seen as manifestation of dangers of masculinizing women that the women’s rights movement fostered. Guelph had a backstory – they had married a young woman in England in 1852, only to be revealed as assigned female at birth. The marriage, of course, ended, and Guelph took off, moving to upstate New York. In 1856, Guelph married again, this time a young Miss Lewis, in an Episcopal church in Syracuse, New York. It seems that Guelph was somewhat open with Miss Lewis and a network of family and friends about the gender identity – they dressed alternately in women’s and men’s clothes, and sometimes went by Albert and othertimes as Nancy. But Miss Lewis’s father, Mr. Lewis, seems to have been out of the loop, and feeling suspicion about his daughter’s groom, demanded to speak privately with Guelph. Lewis interrogated Guelph, who insisted that they were “a man.” But later, Guelph gave in and stated that they were “female.” I loved the way Manion unpacked this: “It is interesting that the articles used the words ‘man’ and ‘female’ rather than ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ or ‘male’ and ‘female.’ It was true that Guelph was both a man and a female, though.” Then, Mr. Lewis and a cop inspected Guelph and decided that Guelph was a “woman disguised.” Guelph was arrested and jailed over the objections of their young wife, who had no objections to Guelph’s biological sex. One newspaper reported that Miss Lewis “still clings to her woman husband,” and that when they visited at the jail, they “embraced each other with the greatest marks of affection.”[14] From that point, Guelph refused to play along, refusing to answer any questions about their sex.
Averill : A judge declared Guelph to be “partially deranged,” and sentenced them to 90 days in jail on vagrancy charges. The judge did not require that Guelph wear women’s clothing, but did say that he hoped Guelph would choose to dress as a woman in order to “win back the confidence and respect of the community.” Guelph fought back, hiring a lawyer who argued that Guelph had not actually broken any law. After all, there was no law that said that person could not dress as the opposite gender. The only law that spoke to how a person presented themselves was related to wearing facepaint or masks, a 1845 law designed to target anti-rent activists who were wearing distinctive, leather masks. Wearing pants instead of a hoop skirt was not the same thing. Guelph’s attorney was successful and Guelph was released from jail. That interpretation of that law might have worked for Guelph, but for well over a century, that 1845 anti-mask law would be used to police gender expression, and was one of the justifications used for the infamous raids on queer hangouts like the Stonewall Inn in New York City.
Sarah: The parallels between Guelph’s gender expression and the women’s rights movement was not lost on the press in Syracuse. One newspaper published that “Syracuse NY is a great place for Bloomerism and Women’s Rights. This latter delusion has been carried to such a pitch, recently that a woman not only assumed the garb of a man, but went so far as to marry another woman, claiming to be a man.”[15] Women’s rights presented a slippery slope: granted women increased political and social rights was clearly the first step toward deviancy. The Syracuse Standard wrote, “A couple of dashing Bloomers promenaded our streets yesterday afternoon. We thought we recognized the features of our former acquaintance, the ‘Man Woman’ under one of the bloomer hats, but perhaps we are mistaken.”[16] Yet, others saw Guelph as exemplifying the kinds of personal liberty that the women’s rights movement called for. One woman wrote a letter to the editor in Syracuse arguing that the decision to wear men’s clothes was a private matter that should not be the concern of any figure of authority. This writer went so far as to say that for some people, clothing might be a “matter of choice,” while for others it might be a “matter of necessity.”[17]
Averill : As the nineteenth century wore on, laws against cross-dressing became more and more common. According to Manion, “sixteen cities adopted laws against the practice between 1843 and 1866….From 1873 to 1920, another thirty-five cities followed, chiefly in the west and throughout the South.” In 1876, New York City added a new clause to their vagrancy law to outlaw assemblies in “public houses or other places of three or more persons disguised.” At the same time, ideas about science and pseudoscience shaped ideas about gender, and cases of female husbands were seen as potential case studies for scientific and psychological research, coming under the purview of physicians. These physicians interpreted gender “inversion” as the result of sexual ‘perversion’ – in other words, that women who were sexually attracted to other women might become inverted because of the unwomanly power of their aberrant sexual desire. People didn’t present themselves as the opposite sex because they were motivated by gender, according to public opinion, but rather their sexuality. After all, as Manion writes, “Heterosexuality was fragile..”[18]
Sarah: By the early 20th century, the category of the ‘female husband’ disappeared, overtaken by the focus on homosexuality. While there were still a large number of individuals assigned female who were revealed to be living as men during this era, the public’s focus centered on their sexuality, not their gender-bending. Newspapers like the National Police Gazette, a notorious scandal rag, featured sensationalized stories about people who transed gender complete with titillating illustrations. As Manion writes, “Same-sex relationships became more visible and included women who embraced a range of gender expressions.”[19] There were also more examples of women who wore men’s clothing but didn’t present themselves as male, did not have intimate relationships with women, and who were more or less socially accepted. One example is Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, for instance, a former Civil War surgeon and Medal of Honor winner. Walker had never presented herself as male but wore men’s clothing and hairstyles for the majority of her life. By dressing in men’s clothing without presenting as a man, and by avoiding any hint of sexual ‘perversion,’ such women helped to unlink masculine dress from the idea of transing gender. At the same time, women who didn’t meet social requirements for women now had different options – while gay marriage would not be legalized in the United States until 2013, there was a tolerance for what was often termed “Boston marriages” or “female marriages,” a category of relationship between two women that was generally understood to be based on friendship rather than sexuality. And while there were more tolerated options, those who persisted in transing gender faced far worse consequences: they pathologized and controlled using institutionalization, incarceration, therapies, and later medications.
Averill : Of course, this is not to say that people assigned female at birth but who lived as men disappeared, but rather that the idea of the ‘female husband’ became less useful, and many people found other ways of living that helped them avoid scrutiny. Indeed, Manion ends their book with the story of Dr. Alan Hart, who was assigned female at birth but who used the name Robert and referred to themself as a boy in writings. Hart graduated from the University of Oregon Medical School in 1917, and then pursued gender affirming surgery, lived as a man, and had two legal marriages with women. When a former classmate outed them in the media, Hart responded by saying, “For years I had been unhappy. With all the inclinations and desires of the boy I had to restrain myself to the more conventional ways of the other sex. I have been happier since I made this change that I ever have beenin my life, and I will continue in this way as long as I live.” Manion writes this about Hart’s decision: “For Hart, there was one binary: happiness v. unhappiness. They chose happiness.”[20]
Sarah: I sincerely hope that you will pick up Jen Manion’s book, because this has really only scratched the surface of both the important historical work that it presents and the beautiful way that it’s written. I want to end by again quoting Manion here to sum up why female husbands are so important to queer history: “If only each successive generation had not been denied access to these powerful stories – the history of their ancestors. If only they had known they were not alone but rather part of a movement against the conflation of sex with gender. If only we had known sooner what female husbands knew in their hearts all along: that gender was theirs for the making and that what makes a man is not the sex they were assigned at birth but the life they life, day in and day out, whether in 1746, 1906, or today.”[21]
Happy Pride.
Bibliography
Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
[1] Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 11.
[2] Manion, Female Husbands, 14.
[3] Manion, Female Husbands, 34
[4] Manion, Female Husbands, 35
[5] Manion, Female Husbands, 88
[6] Manion, Female Husbands, 109
[7] Manion, Female Husbands, 115
[8] Manion, Female Husbands, 119
[9] Manion, Female Husbands, 169
[10] Manion, Female Husbands,170
[11] Manion, Female Husbands, 170
[12] Manion, Female Husbands,175
[13] Manion, Female Husbands, 178
[14] Manion, Female Husbands, 184
[15] Manion, Female Husbands, 194
[16] Manion, Female Husbands, 194
[17] Manion, Female Husbands, 194
[18] Manion, Female Husbands, 263
[19] Manion, Female Husbands, 232
[20] Manion, Female Husbands, 272
[21] Manion, Female Husbands, 278
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