5
After meeting physician and surgeon Dr James Barry in the Crimea, Florence Nightingale described him as ‘the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the army.’1 Barry worked for more than 40 years around the world and went on to become Inspector General of the Medical Department of the British Army. His wishes that his body remain clothed after death went unheeded, and it was discovered that he was female, including marks on his body indicative of past pregnancy.2 Through cross-dressing, Barry had managed to pursue a life and career out of bounds to women, including Florence Nightingale, whose work as a sanitation reformer and statistician was heavily restricted because of gender. After service in the Crimea, her professional work was conducted from the ‘private sphere’ of her home. In another embodied revelation, amidst the American Civil War, Clara Barton was at Antietam tending to a soldier’s chest wound when she discovered that her patient was a woman named Mary Galloway.3 In her memoir of that war, Emma Edmonds, who herself served in disguise as a soldier, provided a teasing commentary that included the double-entendre story of a dying cross-dressed female soldier who begged Edmonds to make sure that she was buried without being detected.4
With roots extending far back in time and across cultures, cross-dressing continued in modern history as an important archetypal theme for heroines. For example, stories such as Hua Mulan’s cross-dressing in order to take her father’s place as a Chinese warrior were recast through the centuries. Giving rise to intense interest, for heroines who cross-dressed in disguise, it was after they were uncovered that their stories became known. These women often passed as men so that they could engage in actions and activities out of bounds to women. They came to attention when ‘caught’ and put ‘on trial’ for transgressing their place in society. Capturing the public imagination, their stories were told and reproduced through a wide range of literature and performances, including plays and ballads. Importantly, they offer a window into a non-binary past.
Seafarers in disguise
In the early Anglo-American modern era a group of heroines often dubbed ‘cross-dressing’ or ‘transvestite heroines’ dressed as men to become crew in the masculine zone of seafaring. As Dianne Dugaw argues, particularly with the lower classes, the ‘female sailor bold’ was an enduring and ‘engaging, if enigmatic figure – a gender confounding ideal of womanly behaviour which defies simpleminded explanations of human sexuality and gender identity. Surprising and subversive, she brings us to confront some of our deepest assumptions.’5 Ballads about these heroines appeared as an antidote to gender constructions of feminine frailty and women’s place as in the home. For example, James Gray (Hannah Snell 1723–92) was a British sailor and soldier who inspired the popular ballad The Female Soldier.6 From a family of seafarers, Snell enlisted in order to find her husband and between 1745 and 1750 served as a marine until being discovered and discharged. She was given a pension for her service and took to public performances, cashing in on her novelty and telling stories that included being wounded in the groin and operating on herself to avoid detection.7
Cross-dressing was infused through Mary Anne Talbot’s tough life that Julie Wheelwright writes was ‘beset by chronic illness and the poverty that plagued most single, working class women of late eighteenth-century London.’8 Illegitimate, as a child she was abused by her guardian, who in 1792 took her to the West Indies disguised as his footboy. When he died she ‘began her own career at sea,’ was wounded, imprisoned for 18 months by the French and a year after returning to London in 1796 escaped a press-gang by revealing that she was a woman.9
While their reasons for doing so were as varied as the women themselves, this chapter suggests patterns and characteristics for cross-dressing heroines through history. With the exception of some super-womanly heroines for whom femininity was all-important, cross-dressing, both openly and in disguise, is a feature for many heroines. Importantly, in joining a liberal masculine sphere by dressing as men, they crossed over from women’s deemed feminine place and lower status in society, leaving behind their female world. As put by Wheelwright, modern cross-dressing involved ‘women’s desire for male privilege and a longing for escape from domestic confines and powerlessness.’10 Their bid for higher status was often grounded in a liberal notion of women becoming equal with men through becoming like men. Dressing in masculine costumes such as military uniforms, flying suits and trousers was literal ‘power dressing’ in order to claim men’s employment and authority. It enabled access to men’s work and leisure spaces and greater freedom to travel without attracting attention as women. Overall, underlying heroines’ cross-dressing was an ethos of escapism from restrictive gender roles and living as women. Throughout modern history, women have increasingly dressed in men’s clothes in order to engage in previously men’s work and lives. By the 21st century, women’s wearing of gendered men’s clothes was mainstream in many cultures, especially in careers previously reserved for men. It was men wearing gendered women’s clothes that remained more confrontational and considered ‘cross-dressing.’
Historians Martha Vicinus and Joan Wallach Scott highlight the vital importance of context in cross-dressing.11 Scott emphasises the importance of historicising ‘sex itself … as the product of social and cultural discourse.’ Under such a framework the idea of an essential difference in the sexes is considered as ‘produced by culture as culture’s justification – it was not an independent variable, nor an ontological ground, nor the invariant base on which the edifices of gender were constructed.’12 The important potency of cross-dressing for heroines was that the dress they assumed at particular moments challenged accepted norms.
Contributing to the discussion, Anne McClintock has argued that cross-dressing was not just about ‘gender ambiguity,’ but was also intersectional and involved race, class and ethnicity.13 For example, feminist heroine Sylvia Pankhurst avoided detection by disguising herself as a working-class Londoner in ‘poor clothes’ and carrying a bundle of newspapers as a fake baby.14 Exhibiting theatricality and disguise amidst the violence, another woman was dressed as Emmeline Pankhurst to provide a decoy and was mistakenly arrested as she emerged from her flat. Avoiding being recalled to prison, Annie Kenney was smuggled into a meeting in the London Pavilion in a large hamper and managed to make a speech before the police arrived.15
Such suffragette pragmatic cross-dressing was part of an heroic pattern through time of heroines cross-dressing for safety. Back in the 12th century, as a woman of very considerable wealth, the recently divorced Eleanor of Aquitaine was considered newly available and ‘a magnificent catch’ for the men who tracked her as she travelled and literally chased her with the intention of forcing her to marry them for her resources.16 With women’s place firmly in the home, women in public stood out and were particularly vulnerable when travelling. Even with an escort, a masculine disguise was a way to avoid unwanted attention.
The first time Joan of Arc cross-dressed was as a peasant boy in order to travel safely to Chinon. In the early 19th century Korean traveller Kim Guem-Won found it best to travel disguised as a teenage boy. She later travelled as an accompanying wife.17
As it became more acceptable for women to travel clothing played an important part in crafting the identity of the lady traveller heroines of Chapter 4. Ambiguity was necessary to dampen down the societal challenge posed by openly cross-dressing women pursuing masculine heroic activities. For example, Menie Dowie (1867–1945) explored Central Europe dressed as a boy, but wanted it known that ‘I am not a woman’s rights women [sic], in the aggressive sense; that I do not rejoice in ugly clothes … and that I am not desirous of reforming the world, or doing anything subversive.’18 While the press also portrayed her as advancing gender roles through her travels, Mary Kingsley wore conservative clothes in public consisting of ‘an old-fashioned high-necked blouse, black skirt and small sealskin bonnet.’ Dea Birkett writes that ‘She always adopted when lecturing, the voice and mannerisms of a middle-aged, middle-class lady, neither of which she strictly was.’19
Isabella Bird was reported in the British Times to have ‘donned masculine habiliments for greater convenience’ while traversing the Rockies. This contrasted with her elaborating in the second edition of A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains on a ‘Hawaiian riding dress’ that was described as ‘the American Lady’s Mountain Dress,’ ‘a half-fitting jacket, a skirt reaching to the ankles, and full Turkish trousers gathered into frills which fall over the boots – a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough travelling in any part of the world.’20
Previous chapters have demonstrated the important construction of binary identities for heroines as either super-womanly or honorary male. Did cross-dressing serve to challenge or reinforce that division? The term ‘cross-dressing’ implies dressing as ‘the other’ and often considered ‘opposite’ sex. Especially ideologically, the past was often a biologically determined, heterosexual binary place. Furthermore, gender identity was considered synonymous with the male and female sexes, with clothing inflexibly and essentially allocated to each sex. In Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber outlines the heterosexual binary division that was often sumptuary law. For example, in the Christian Bible, Deuteronomy 22:5 states that ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.’21 However, Garber argues that people have always cross-dressed. In agreement, Julie Wheelwright argues that ‘women had been breaking the laws of men and outraging the decencies of nature for a very long time.’22 In short, cross-dressing without disguise, or if discovered, challenged the gender order of society and subverted identity. Judith Butler’s influential work on gender and sexuality as socially constructed, rather than biologically determined was demonstrated by heroines’ cross-dressing.23
Embodied change
At its most radical, cross-dressing, then, posed a challenge to compulsory heterosexuality. It enabled same-sex relationships, which were only revealed when they came to public attention. In addition, cross-dressing could subversively introduce sexuality as a continuum, the likes of which has led to 21st-century LGBTQ+ identities. For some heroines in history, changing their costume was about following inner feelings regarding their sexuality and gender orientation. As Julie Wheelwright has argued ‘Some were lesbians who bravely risked ostracism and punishment by symbolically claiming the right to women’s erotic love through their assumption of male clothing.’24 In parts of the world they risked being cast as psychologically unwell and devious ‘sexual inverts.’25 For some, masculine dress was part of asserting transgender orientation and was related to their soul. Motivated by deeply personal factors, they lived as men because they felt like a man of their time and place. As discussed for other heroines in this chapter, they came to attention if outed.
For example, Colonel Victor Barker (Valerie Arkell-Smith) married Elfrida Haward in Brighton, England, in 1923. As Wheelwright uncovers, as the Colonel he could pursue the freedoms of life as ‘an officer and a gentleman’ enjoying opportunities for work and leisure that included access to men’s private clubs.26 ‘The Colonel’ came to attention six years after his marriage after arrest on a bankruptcy charge. Discovered while on remand in prison, he was charged with perjury for his illegal marriage. Found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison, the judge minimised the Colonel’s existence, considering the case to be ‘of an unprecedented and very peculiar nature.’ But he was also keen to make an example of the Colonel’s behaviour strongly asserting that ‘You have profaned the House of God, you have outraged the decencies of Nature and you have broken the Laws of man … You have set an evil example, which, were you to go unpunished, others might follow.’27 Author of the 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness Radclyffe Hall identified as ‘a woman with a masculine psyche’ yet distanced herself from the Colonel.28 The element of disguise and trickery was likely a step too far for her to agree with, at least in public. The same year, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, featuring a fantastical gender-changing heroine, raised both the freedoms of cross-dressing, as well as the restrictions of patriarchal society.
In the 21st century, the Colonel can be considered transgender. And while in the past various institutions strongly opposed and punished such identity, as demonstrated in the Colonel’s treatment, there could be a strong public interest that, while slightly mocking, was not always hateful. Rather, it could salaciously lap up for its entertainment what it viewed as unusual and edgy gender performativity. Such fascination included positioning exposed transgender people as unhinged, rebellious folk heroes. They were cast as confidence tricksters, evoking the shapeshifting trickster archetype identified by Joseph Campbell.
Significantly, heroic cross-dressing stories often operated at the confluence of fact and fiction. As Julie Wheelwright has argued ‘Sexual inversion as a widespread form of cultural play in literature, in art and in festivity has served to disrupt and ultimately to clarify often fluid or evolving concepts of sexual difference.’29 Positioning transgressive cross-dressing when temporarily performed by actors in theatres as ‘fiction’ cast it as playful and alluring, rather than dangerous. In on-stage cross-dressing, Lucy Chesser emphasises the importance of historical context, examining ‘the popular culture of the time, to track down the discourses that related to cross-dressing and sexuality and to explore as many other sites of cultural production as possible.’30
New Zealand’s ‘most celebrated and energetic confidence trickster’ was Amy Maud Bock (1859–1943). She arrived in New Zealand from Australia during the 1880s and assumed a number of disguises. Her most famous was as Percy Redwood. Charming and ingratiating to employers as a governess and teacher, she came to the attention of the courts on multiple counts of petty theft, larceny and fraud. Fiona Farrell notes that Bock was ‘not an especially successful confidence trickster.’ In court, Bock would confess her crimes before the judge. Farrell contextualises Bock as similar to Europeans who at that time were coming to the attention of doctors Risch and Krafft-Ebing. These women were considered ‘typically highly intelligent, romantic and articulate,’ yet they were diagnosed as ‘the “sexually confused” victims of the disorder pseudologica phantastica.’ New Zealand was tolerant and Bock was ‘regarded merely as an eccentric.’31
In 1908 Bock appeared in Dunedin as wealthy sheep farmer Percival Leonard Carol Redwood. Within weeks of staying at a Port Molyneux boarding house in South Otago he was engaged to the landlady’s daughter Agnes Ottaway. Four days after their April 1909 wedding, Bock was arrested and in court was convicted ‘on two counts of false pretences and one of forgery.’ The marriage was annulled and Bock spent the rest of her life in and out of jail for petty theft. She also married a man.32
Jenny Coleman has pondered the motivation behind Amy Bock’s cross-dressing. She argues that seeking economic independence and social mobility ‘By the turn of the twentieth century, it was not at all uncommon for women to dress as men to gain access to male social privileges, to escape poverty by entering a male profession, and to travel safely.’33 Coleman notes that ‘After all, male power still resided in trousers, ties and short hair cuts’ and rationally, trousers were physically enabling. Redwood smoked a pipe and more generally women smokers ‘symbolised their intention to interact with men on equal terms.’34
FIGURE 5.1 Amy Bock.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID KXJ898: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-amy-bock-confidence-trickster-171276036.html
Was Bock’s dress indicative of an ‘inner identity or sexual or erotic desire’? Was she lesbian or transgender? She did, after all, adopt a ‘masculine style of dress’ after her release from prison in 1912.35 Can it be considered that she was casting off ‘the assigned female role,’ and seeking masculine freedoms and an urge to express sexual desire towards women? Akin to all heroines in history, representations of her life and motivations have changed through time. The press in 1909 pragmatically cast her as a shapeshifting opportunist whose ‘programme was not fully mapped out when she first donned trousers’ to woo her bride.36 One hundred years on, Coleman considered Bock a ‘confidence artist’ and ‘the consummate performer and entertainer.’37 However hapless, can her public construction and appeal be at least partly explained because she tapped into Joseph Campbell’s form of hero the trickster and enacted new, subversive gender performances?
A theme through this chapter is that for heroines, cross-dressing encompassed both socially radical and conservative intentions. As Anne McClintock has argued, cross-dressing can ‘be mobilized for a variety of political purposes, not all of them subversive.’38 The actions of heroines who dressed in disguise contained the potential to change the existing social order. However, if undetected, the radical impact of those in disguise was effective only on an individual level. Importantly, as Julie Wheelwright states, cross-dressing ‘often remained a process of imitation rather than a self-conscious claiming of the social privileges given exclusively to men for all women.’39 Wheelwright asks ‘Was women’s real oppression challenged by these heroines who felt only capable of grasping an individual liberation?’ The lady travellers of Chapter 4 are indicative of such ‘gloriously selfish’ underpinnings. Marjorie Garber reveals that while Gertrude Bell might have behaved in a progressive way that broadened horizons for other women, she did not consider her work as advancing women’s status and lives. As Garber notes, ‘For her the body, and the costume, were separable from the mind, and from the construction of a social, intellectual, and political persona.’40
Regal conservative cross-dressers
Numerous heroines in history have regularly cross-dressed without disguising themselves. Prominently, the exceptional warrior Queens introduced in Chapter 3 were part of the status quo and did not actively seek to change society, but rather to uphold traditional masculine power. Ironically, their cross-dressing could set precedents and become mainstream, detracting from their exceptional allure. And while not primarily motivated by feminist intentions, these icons could become feminist role models for social change.
There are plenty of examples of traditional regal heroines in history openly cross-dressing in masculine clothes. In power by default as military leaders, their cross-dressing was to pragmatically assert their authority and exceptional status. Symbolically, as heads of states and armies, military dress indicated a masculine strength and vitality normally reserved for men. For example, it was important for warrior Queens to be portrayed in armour – a masculine fighting costume.
In the 12th century, as Queen of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine is said to have ridden on a white horse while dressed in a white warrior costume. Elevated above the men, she spurred them into action as they were sent off to the Second Crusade. Evoking older heroic mythology, there was a story that Eleanor’s ‘Amazonian ladies’ donned armour with her. Warrior Queens riding on horses to stir the crowds and rouse men to action would recur as a tactic employed by heroines including Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great.
A famous example of regal rulers as conservative cross-dressers is Elizabeth I’s appearance at Tilbury. When a Spanish invasion was expected in 1588 the legendary story goes that to see off Drake’s British fleet Elizabeth mounted a horse and wore armour, connecting her to warrior Queens through the ages.41 According to Susan Frye, Elizabeth was aware of her gendered position and cross-dressed to emphasise her masculine side and strength as a military ruler. Importantly, playing on gender constructions, it was at Tilbury that she uttered her famous words that cemented her power to rule and added to her charisma, ‘I have the body of a feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king.’42
Later on, around 1762, after managing to disassociate herself from a coup in which her husband Peter II of Russia died, Catherine II put on a green and red military uniform, and said that she needed a man’s outfit for a man’s work. Suitably cross-dressed, she appeared on a grey stallion and ‘drew her sword with her long-flowing hair beneath her black three-quarter length hat decorated with oak leaves the symbol of victory.’43 Her cross-dressing was viewed as connected to her many displays of public and private masculine behaviour as ‘She loved like a man, and worked like a man.’44 Regarding her sexuality, historians have considered her as sexually voracious as a Tsar might be, a loose woman who took snuff and drank coffee and wrote ‘Nothing in my opinion is more difficult to resist than what gives us pleasure. All arguments to the contrary are prudery.’45 She was considered a powerful manipulator of the men, who likely associated with her in order to garner power. For example, Grigory Orlov was part of the coup and then was on the scene for ten years. Grigory Potemkin was involved for 15 years and was put in control of the expansion of the kingdom.46
FIGURE 5.2 Catherine II in military uniform during 1762 coup.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID GGDBA2: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-catherine-ii-supported-by-the-army-at-st-petersburg-russia-in-1762-113390986.html
Queens in military costumes continued into modern times. In the 1850s Queen Victoria cross-dressed for military review. Elected women leaders continued the practice, donning suits and military uniforms. On a visit to Northern Ireland following Louis Mountbatten’s death in 1979, Margaret Thatcher dressed in British parachute regiment costume. Such transfiguration through costumes, according to Fraser, evokes ‘an element of chivalry which the woman in a man’s world traditionally evokes.’47 Yet as it enforces women’s difference and their otherness from a male sphere of politics, cross-dressing was only ‘useful’ as long as women remained exceptions in leadership. And furthermore, it was a visible sign of joining a masculine elite, rather than fashioning a new community.
Warrior heroine cross-dressers
While the warrior Queens donned male costumes to emphasise their power, their military costumes were ceremonial and they remained largely absent from the battlefront. On the contrary, cross-dressing could enable heroines to engage in activities usually out of bounds to them. As Chapter 3 has argued, violent, warrior activities were considered masculine and fighting heroines needed to cross-dress in order to equip their bodies for warfare.
There was a public fascination with one-off performative warrior actions, battle events that created heroines of women who saved the day by passing as men in rank. For example, Rebecca and Abigail Bates became famous heroines as the ‘Lighthouse Army of Two.’ With the United States and Britain at war, in September 1814 in Scituate on the coast of New England, the young women were in charge of the lighthouse while their father Simon was away. When marines from an English Man-of-War landed the women found a fife and drum and marched up and down playing loudly, fooling the marines into believing that the militia were there. Their actions evoked the story of the Welsh women of Fishguard in 1797 and, in particular, Jemima Nicholas (Jemima Fawr/Jemima the Great), who captured 12 invading French soldiers with a pitchfork. The legend goes that the women dressed in their traditional scarlet tunics and tall black felt hats were mistaken for British army Redcoats.48 Importantly, these heroines were no threat to overall gender order and were called to action in the absence of men, part of the ‘reserve army of labour’ discussed in Chapter 3.
The heroine who simultaneously evoked the power and danger of cross-dressing and set the stage for modern history was Joan of Arc. A fighting costume was a necessity for her on the battlefront. In hiding her femininity, it also served as a form of protection for her pure status. Demonstrating its dangers, cross-dressing played an important part in discrediting Joan of Arc. One of the accusations at her trial was that her masculine dress was contrary to the laws of nature and that she was immodest. Joan of Arc’s trial from 9 January to 30 May 1431 consisted of a large tribunal composed of ecclesiastics and lawyers, with sometimes more than 70 men present. Suspected of heresy and allied witchcraft, in the custom of the time, she was not formally charged until after the cross-examinations had taken place. At Joan of Arc’s trial it has emerged that she was adamant on two accounts. One was that she was divinely inspired by the truthfulness and heavenly origins of the voices that spoke and counselled her. The second was her loyalty to cross-dressing.49 A source at her trial composed by those loyal to her included downplaying masculine traits and behaviour and instead presenting her as meek, prudent, feminine and hence more respectable. Joan’s loyalty to her male costume was incredibly subversive at the time. It signalled her honorary male warrior status and marked her as a woman out of her place. With women and men considered opposite sexes, and with women inferior, to dress as a man challenged the order of society and was a crime.
The treatment of cross-dressing was always contextual. Kirk Ambrose writes of ‘female cross-undressing’ in medieval art and literature. He argues that
women who dress like men feature in a substantial number of saints’ lives and romances from the Middle Ages. The disguise typically enabled a woman to flee an unwanted marriage, enter religious life as a monk, or both. A handful of these stories contain a climactic episode in which a female cross dresser, falsely accused of rape, must remove her clothes at a trial in order to prove her innocence.50
Another medieval heroine for whom chastity was a theme in her cross-dressing was Saint Wilgefortis. The legend first appeared in stories and prayers around 1400 and told of a Portuguese pagan princess who converted to Christianity and refused her father’s command to marry the King of Sicily. Imprisoned, and in some accounts tortured, she prayed to God for transformation ‘in such a way that she will become physically unattractive to her would-be husband, so that she might remain a virgin bride of Christ alone.’51 Wilgefortis miraculously grew a full beard, and her angry father had her crucified. On the cross, she requested deliverance for all those who prayed to her. Lewis Wallace argues that ‘gender crossing and gender blending (gendered transformations) were central to her emergence as a powerful symbol in the late Middle Ages, and that her representation as a bearded woman influenced how and for what she was venerated.’
Remaining popular into the modern period, it has been argued that the bearded virgin martyr represented a ‘desire on the part of those who venerated her to pray to a feminine Christ or to an androgynous figure.’52
Further highlighting the importance of historical context, in Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-Dressing in Medieval Europe Valerie Hotchkiss notes that many of the authors of these legends were male and that some of the women in question may have seen their own piety as womanly or female even when the male authors presented them as male-identified. Such representations were built on misogynistic elements of early Christian history that gendered Christian behaviour as the domain of men.53
Many warrior heroines in the footsteps of Joan of Arc have cross-dressed while retaining their identities as women. These women challenged both cultural and gender norms. For example, from the Aceh–Dutch early 20th-century conflict, Jacqueline Aquino Siapno has found accounts of the Dutch colonial police shooting ‘women in men’s clothes’ or ‘armed women disguised in men’s clothes.’ Being viewed through colonial eyes, this was likely because they wore black trousers and not the dresses of Dutch women. Telegrams between 1905 and 1930 mention Rentjong (Achenese knife) women in trousers attacking the Dutch. Rather than by their own names, the women were listed as wives and daughters of men.54
Irish heroines of the Easter Uprising Constance Markievicz and Margaret Skinnider wore male clothing to assist with their work. Dressing as a boy in a Fianna uniform allowed Skinnider to join in ‘with the Na Fianna Eireann boys singing nationalists songs and harassing British Soldiers.’ Skinnider also dressed as a boy when passing messages. Both women put on a military uniform when involved in combat. As Skinnider wrote ‘for the work of war can only be done by those who wear its dress.’55
Manchu Princess Aisin Gioro Xianyu was a warrior heroine who dressed in military uniform. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 as a child she was sent to Japan and grew up in a family focused on forming a new Manchu nation. She returned to China in 1927 and in 1932 Manchukuo came into existence as a Japanese controlled state.56 Xianyu had a large media profile in both the east and the west. In China she was portrayed as ‘a dangerous, cross-dressing monster and femme fatale.’57 In 1937, after spending five days getting to know Xianyu, travelling American graduate student Willa Lou Woods wrote a 30-page book Jin: The Joan of Arc of the Orient. Xianyu appeared in the book as ‘an orphaned tomboy who fled to Japan after narrowly escaping assassination by “revolutionaries.”’ Her cross-dressing was explained as being necessary for a woman to be successful in society. The ‘tomboy princess’ was written about to suit a western imagination as an active and independent, liberated woman who enjoyed bicycling, dancing and horse riding. She was also portrayed as an intriguing political activist, who mixed with Manchu activists.58
In March 1948 Xianyu was found guilty by China of spying for Japan. She appeared at her trial dressed as a man. In her defence she said that she was fighting for a Manchu State.59 Xianyu’s western allure was considerably more glowing than her often derogatory Chinese reputation, which has cast her as frightening during wartime, and then as ‘a freakish traitor and more recently as a victim of the Japanese.’ Louise Edwards reveals how by the end of the 20th century she was cast as a ‘pitiful victim’ rather than ‘dangerous vamp’ and concludes that ‘Victimhood prevents the traitorous woman from languishing in the historical record as an evil, despicable slut.’60
In a similar vein to the conservative warrior Queens and lady travellers, Xianyu’s cross-dressing was pragmatic and power-seeking, rather than symbolic of advancing women’s equality. She was reported as saying that she was uncomfortable with Japanese women copying her cross-dressing.
I had no other choice but to adopt men’s clothing in order [to secure] my life (work). Why should young Japanese girls upset the natural order of yin and yang? Cutting their hair, wearing men’s clothing and spouting equal rights for men and women, there is no reason for this behaviour.
She considered her actions to be exceptional and continued to say that women should serve their husbands and be good wives.61
In disguise to fight: American Civil War warrior heroines
In 1989 Lauren Cook Burgess participated in a re-enactment of the American Civil War Battle of Antietam, cross-dressed as a soldier. Seen emerging from the women’s toilets she was banned from participating as ‘inauthentic.’ Cook Burgess sued the National Park Service for discrimination and won. She also went on to prove that five women had fought in that battle, with two wounded and one killed.62
Estimates vary as to how many women cross-dressed to participate in both the opposing Union and Confederate regiments during the American Civil War. It is likely that at least 250 women joined the Confederate troops and that there were another 750 in the Union Army.63 Bonnie Tsui argues that
These women warriors represent an enduring historical trend of women posing as men to fight patriotically in battle, both in fact and popular fiction – from twelfth-century French (and later English) queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Joan of Arc to the American Revolutionary War’s Deborah Sampson to fictional heroine Sarah Brewer in the War of 1812.64
How were these soldiers able to go undetected? The answer partly lies in the ‘superficial’ physical exams upon enlistment. Lauren Cook Burgess suggests that at the time trouser-wearers were assumed to be men, and that there were lots of adolescent men in the army.65 Young people of all genders had a chance of falling into line as an androgynous, generic soldier. Following on from Clara Barton and Emma Edmonds’s discoveries mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, women in the army often risked being exposed and discharged after hospitalisation for illness or wounds. For example, Charles Freeman (Mary Scaberry) from Ohio was exposed when hospitalised with a fever and was discharged for ‘sexual incompatibility.’ Cook Burgess revealed six soldiers were found out when they gave birth.66
What were the motivations for joining the army? James M McPherson suggests that ‘motives ranged from patriotism and love of adventure to a desire to stay with husbands or lovers who enlisted.’67 Lauren Cook Burgess suggests that money was a motivation for women cross-dressing enlistees and a way for them ‘to gain a measure of economic, legal, and social independence unavailable to them as women.’68 For the three most famous cross-dressing heroines of the American Civil War, Bonnie Tsui argues that Emma Edmonds, Sarah Rosetta Wakeman and Loreta Janeta Velázquez ‘all boldly fled from dissatisfying family lives.’ More generally, she argues that in common with the typical male volunteer, the women soldiers were often young, poor and rural.69 Enlisting was a way of earning money and improving their lives.
In 1864 when Emma Edmonds wrote a memoir about her recent participation in the American Civil War she failed to mention that she had cross-dressed as a man during her military service.70 In 1867 she married and had three children who all died young, after which she and her husband Linus H Seelye adopted two sons. It was not until she needed to apply for a pension in 1886 that she disclosed more about her wartime activities. Edmonds succeeded in receiving a government pension of $12 a month for her military service and having a desertion charge dropped. She went on to lecture on her life story and in 1897 became the sole woman admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the Civil War Union Army’s veterans’ association. As further signs of her acceptance, she was buried in the GAR area of the Washington Cemetery in Houston and received full military honours in a second funeral in 1901. In 1992 she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.71
Born in New Brunswick, Canada, Emma Edmonds likely ran away from home aged 15 years to escape marriage, and in common with other heroines, assumed the identity ‘Franklin Thompson’ to enable safer travel. Sarah was reportedly inspired to ‘step into the glorious independence’ of masculinity by a book that she had read by Maturin Murray Ballou titled Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain, who dressed as a man onboard a pirate ship during the American Revolution.72 In 1861 she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry.73
In her 1865 book A Woman in the Hospitals, Camps and Battlefields, Edmonds focused on a narrative account of her adventures, rather than justifying or positioning her life and actions. The clothing she wore is often unclear and the reader is left to assume that she was dressed as a woman. Edmonds recalls that she left New Brunswick, Canada, because of ‘an insatiable thirst for education.’74 Decades on, after her cross-dressing was revealed, in the absence of Emma reflecting on her motives, a new publisher’s notice justified her cross-dressing. There was an emphasis on her ‘purest motives’ and ‘praiseworthy patriotism.’ The suggestion was that she had put her own ‘costume’ aside ‘and assumed that of the opposite sex, enduring hardships, suffering untold privations, and hazarding her life for her adopted country, in its trying hour of need.’75 The emphasis was on costumes signifying a range of gendered masculine and feminine wartime activities, to be put on and discarded as necessary. As the publisher wrote:
In the opinion of many, it is the privilege of woman to minister to the sick and soothe the sorrowing – and in the present crisis of our country’s history, to aid our brothers to the extent of her capacity – and whether duty leads her to the couch of luxury, the abode of poverty, the crowded hospital, or the terrible battlefield – it makes but little difference what costume she assumes while in the discharge of her duties. – Perhaps she should have the privilege of choosing for herself whatever may be the surest protection from insult and inconvenience in her blessed, self-sacrificing work.76
In her book, on reforming a friendship with a man who didn’t recognise her, she commented that ‘The changes which five years had wrought, and the costume which I wore, together with change of name, rendered it impossible for him to recognise me.’77 The constant violence of war appears through her book, and a Confederate woman, Nellie, whom Emma shot in the hand appears through the book as a motif for her hypocritical behaviour as a soldier towards a fellow woman.
Like Amy Bock, Edmonds was a shapeshifter and trickster who assumed multiple identities. The publisher’s notice makes mention of her multiple disguises in order to cross behind the enemy lines 11 times.78 For example, she went from her passing disguised as a male soldier to an ‘Irish female peddler’ (Hibernian).79 On another occasion she disguised herself as an African American.80 She wrote positively, if paternalistically about African American Soldiers.81 She observed ‘cheerfulness’ amongst African Americans, writing that ‘mothers tossed their babies with that tender pride and mother-love which beautifies the blackest and homeliest face.’82
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (1843–64) served in the Union Army under the name of Lyons Wakeman with Company H, 153rd New York Volunteer Infantry. Her story was pieced together through letters from the battlefield that relatives had kept and stored in the attic. Discovered many years later, they were assembled to tell her story. Impressively, when Wakeman died of chronic diarrhoea on 19 June 1864 his identity went undiscovered and he was buried as Lyons Wakeman in New Orleans.83 Wakeman’s family continued to refer to a ‘brother,’ according to Tsui in order to avoid explaining the cross-dressing.84
Written for a private audience, Wakeman’s letters provide an important glimpse into his army life. For example, near the beginning of his service on 5 June 1863 he wrote ‘I have good Clothing and enough to eat and nothing to do, only to handle my gun and that I can do as well as the rest of them.’ He says that he can take care of himself and knows his business and ‘I will Dress as I am a mind to for all anyone else [cares], and if they don’t let me Alone they will be sorry for it.’85
Janeta Velázquez (Harry T Burford 1842–1923), was supposedly born in Cuba, and later moved to New Orleans.86 By autumn 1860 her three children were dead and she was keen to join her husband in combat fighting with the Confederates. Thinking that the coarse drinking and swearing culture would scare her off, her husband let her cross-dress and took her out in Memphis. Burford was not dissuaded and had confirmed that she could pass as a man.87
After her army husband’s accidental death in 1861 while demonstrating a rifle, Burford became a Confederate soldier. She fought in three battles before she was discovered in New Orleans and discharged. In 1876 she wrote a book The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velázquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army.88 Bonnie Tsui considers her book ‘improbable.’89 The lines between fact and fiction are often blurred in Velázquez’s accounts. In it she opportunistically writes that ‘From my early childhood Joan of Arc was my favourite heroine.’ Her narrative is caught up in celebrating the prowess of warrior heroines. She considers that ‘When women have rushed to the battlefield they have invariably distinguished themselves.’90 Her book has appeared as tailored to correspond with other tales of heroines in history. As Sylvia D Hoffert has written,
Madame Velázquez maintained that she had always wished for the privileges and status granted to men and denied to women. Comparing herself to Deborah of the Hebrews and Joan of Arc, she explained her desire for martial adventures by asserting that her girlhood was spent ‘haunted with the idea of being a man.’91
In the 21st century, the cross-dressing soldiers of the American Civil War can be recast as heroes and trailblazers for transgender rights. For example, in St Louis in 2014 for Transgender Awareness Month Scott Angus held an exhibition ‘Forgotten Heroes’ featuring cross-dressing Civil War soldiers. Addressing the question of whether cross-dressing enabled an assumed identity in order to lead a masculine lifestyle or was part of sexual identity as lesbian, bisexual or transgender, Angus thinks it difficult to answer as the terms were not in common use at the time. He is confident that all would identify as feminists and reiterated a theme through this chapter that ‘Assuming a male identity allowed a degree of freedom unknown to women in the 19th century.’ He also makes the distinction between those ‘female-bodied soldiers who identified as male and lived as men’ after the war and those who lived as women.92
The story of Albert D J Cashier (Jenny Hodgers) lacks fictional or trickster elements and instead has a number of disturbing versions. Cashier was illiterate, but his story was revealed through military, hospital and newspaper records.93 Cashier was born in Ireland around 1843 and migrated to the United States as a young adult.94 He served in the American Civil War with the 95th Illinois Infantry. Stories for Cashier include service in Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama.95 After the war Cashier returned to Illinois, working at a variety of jobs, including farmhand. For many years he worked for one family, the Cheseboros and lived in a small cottage on their property.96 Not wanting to submit to a medical exam, he went years without claiming his pension.97 Scott Angus believes that ‘Today it can be determined she/he would be a transgender person.’98
There are different versions of how Cashier’s secret was discovered and the impact that it had on him. Tsui writes that it was during treatment for a broken leg in 1911 at the age of 67.99 Angus believes that it was when he moved to a home for old veterans that ‘his female anatomy was discovered.’ At that time he was diagnosed as mentally ill and transferred to another institution where he was ‘put in a straitjacket and made to wear dresses.’ There was a petition by fellow veterans for his release, but he died in 1915, before his case was heard. His supporters did manage to have him ‘buried as Albert Cashier, not Jennie Hodgers, in his soldiers’ uniform and with full military honours.100
Conclusion
The biggest change in cross-dressing for heroines across time and cultures was that their actions became increasingly acceptable and popular in modern times. Openly cross-dressing to take on ‘men’s work’ became widespread and mainstream. Women dressed in masculine costumes previously out of bounds to them in order to perform gendered masculine work. It was acceptable for women to don military uniforms as a ‘reserve army of labour’ during wartime, only to be put back in their place at the end of hostilities, expected to revert to flouncy clothing. Slight feminine adaptations of costumes involved fur for aviators and skirts for military auxiliaries. For these women cross-dressing was largely skin deep, enabling them to get a ‘man’s life’ and become equal with men. With the assumption that it was better to be male than female, such liberal cross-dressing ironically reinforced the overall inferiority of women. It also reasserted a strong binary relationship between the sexes. The success of heroines in disguise who lived alternative lives was measured in their anonymity and pursuit of the private life they desired. It is worth noting that many heroines became boys, and not men, when they cross-dressed in disguise, rendering them children, rather than adults, even if they gained male status. Despite cross-dressing’s binary emphasis, the possibilities it raised would lead to multiple identities and differences. Yet a sense of vulnerability remained and as powerfully rendered in stories from Joan of Arc to Albert Cashier, acceptance could rapidly change to persecution.
Notes
1 Sarah Burton, Impostors: Six Kinds of Liar: True Tales of Deception (London: Penguin, 2001), 139.
2 Burton, Impostors, 141.
3 Bonnie Tsui, She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War (Guilford, CI: The Globe Pequot Press, 2003), 113.
4 Emma S Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in the Hospitals, Camps and Battlefields, Originally 1865 WS Williams and Co (Hartford Conn, Jones Bros Cincinnati, J A Stoddard and Co, Chicago Il., 1865, Digital Scanning Incorporated, 2000), 271–3. Being detected was likely considered as causing shame and embarrassment to families.
5 Dianne Dugaw, ‘Female Sailors Bold: Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender and Class’ in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 34–54, 35.
6 Dugaw, ‘Female Sailors Bold,’ 38.
7 Matthew Stephens, Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine, 1972–1792 (Sydney: Ship Street Press, 1997, 2014).
8 Quoted in Burton, Impostors, 176–7.
9 Dugaw, ‘Female Sailors Bold,’ 43, Burton, Impostors, 174–7.
10 Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London, Boston, Sydney, Wellington: Pandora, 1989), 19.
11 Martha Vicinus has argued that theorists such as Butler and Garber have paid insufficient attention to historical context. Martha Vicinus, ‘Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?’ Radical History Review 60 (1994): 57–75, 62–3.
12 Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 7.
13 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 68.
14 Barbara Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 121–2.
15 Castle, The Pankhursts, 119.
16 George Duby, Women of the Twelfth Century, Vol. 3: Eve and the Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 12–3.
17 T J Kim, Korean Travel Literature (Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press, 2006), 13.
18 Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 201.
19 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 198.
20 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 197–8.
21 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 28.
22 Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), 6.
23 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York, Routledge, 1990/1999).
24 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 19.
25 See Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985) and Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985).
26 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 1–3.
27 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 6.
28 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 3.
29 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 7.
30 Lucy Chesser, ‘More Playful than Anxious: Cross-dressing, Sex-impersonation and the Colonial Stage,’ Australasian Drama Studies Vol. 52 (2008): 148–64, 150.
31 Fiona Farrell, ‘Bock, Amy Maud,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2b30/bock-amy-maud. (Date last accessed 18 August 2020).
32 Fiona Farrell, ‘Bock, Amy Maud,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2b30/bock-amy-maud. (Date last accessed 18 August 2020).
33 Jenny Coleman, Mad or Bad?: The Life and Exploits of Amy Bock (Dunedin: Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2010), 322–3.
34 Coleman Mad or Bad?, 324–5.
35 Coleman, Mad or Bad?, 323.
36 Coleman, Mad or Bad?, 245.
37 Coleman, Mad or Bad?, 326, 327.
38 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 67.
39 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 11.
40 Garber, Vested Interests, 324.
41 Elizabeth at Tilbury is mentioned in Garber, Vested Interests, 28.
42 Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.
43 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens, 254.
44 Dominique Maroger (ed), The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 20.
45 Fraser, The Warrior Queens, 250.
46 Katharine Anthony, Catherine the Great (London: Cape, 1926), 231.
47 Fraser, The Warrior Queens, 319.
48 https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Last-Invasion-of-Britain/ (Date last accessed 30 July 2021).
49 There are 15 accounts of the trial to have survived. See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 5.
50 Kirk Ambrose, ‘Two cases of female cross un-dressing in Medieval Art and Literature,’ Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring 2004), 7–14, 7.
51 Lewis Wallace, ‘Bearded Woman, Female Christ: Gendered Transformations in the Legends and Cult of Saint Wilgefortis,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Volume 30, No. 1 (Spring 2014), 43–63, 48.
52 Wallace, ‘Bearded Woman, Female Christ,’ 43.
53 Valerie Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-Dressing in Medieval Europe(New York: Garland, 1996), 15–16.
54 Jaqueline Aquino Siapno, Gender, Islam, Nationalism and the State in Aceh: The Paradox of Power, Co-Optation and Resistance (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 24–7.
55 Sikata Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914–2004 (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 90, 89.
56 Louise Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 92.
57 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 91.
58 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 100–1.
59 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 91.
60 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 93.
61 Edwards, Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China, 104.
62 Thomas Ayres, That’s Not in My American History Book: A Compilation of Little Known Events and Forgotten Heroes (Lanham: Tailor Trade Publishing, 2004), 72.
63 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 1. See also Larry G Eggleston, Women in the Civil War: Extraordinary Stories of Soldiers, Spies, Nurses, Doctors, Crusaders, and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2003), 23, 30.
64 Bonnie Tsui, She Went to the Field, 1–2.
65 Lauren Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wake alias Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–4.
66 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, xi–xii.
67 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, xi.
68 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, 2.
69 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 3.
70 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, 6, Tsui, She Went to the Field, 4.
71 http://www.michiganwomen.org/pages/history.htm (Date of last access 20 Sept 2021).
72 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 14.
73 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 23–4.
74 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 19.
75 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 6.
76 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 6.
77 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 99.
78 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 5.
79 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 148.
80 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 107.
81 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 383.
82 Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, 240.
83 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, 12, Tsui, She Went to the Field, 49–50.
84 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 50.
85 Cook Burgess, An Uncommon Soldier, 31.
86 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 23.
87 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 26–7.
88 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 34.
89 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 28
90 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 24.
91 https://www.historynet.com/madame-loreta-janeta-velazquez-heroine-or-hoaxer.htm (Date last accessed 29 July 2021).
92 https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/11/26/photos-civil-war-lgbt-and-feminist-heroes (Date last accessed 30 August 2019).
93 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 5.
94 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 52.
95 https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/11/26/photos-civil-war-lgbt-and-feminist-heroes (Date last accessed 30 August 2019).
96 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 57.
97 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 58.
98 https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/11/26/photos-civil-war-lgbt-and-feminist-heroes (Date last accessed 30 August 2019).
99 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 51.
100 https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/11/26/photos-civil-war-lgbt-and-feminist-heroes (Date last accessed 30 August 2019).