This chapter focuses on an individual who story is relevant to a transitional period in US history with regard to trans identities. In 1883 a man named Samuel Hudson showed up in the small town of Waupun with two children, and claimed that Frank Dubois, who had recently married Gertrude Fuller, was actually his wife and the mother of the children. It’s a tribute to the speed of communications and the extensive network of local newspapers that the story broke simultaneously, not only in the local paper, but throughout the US.
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LHMP entry
In many ways, Emily Skidmore’s True Sex picks up where Jen Manion’s Female Husbands left off with a few minor differences. Skidmore is only looking at US history, while Manion covered both the UK and the US. Manion, in theory, focused on transing gender in the context of marriages or marriage-like relationships, while Skidmore doesn’t have that as a specific focus (although many of the people she covers did marry). In terms of methodological approach they look at much of the same types of data, especially the spread of trans stories in news publications.
LHMP #332 Stehr 2018 Tragic (but Interesting & Very Short) History of Sodomite, Lesbians, & Sapphics
I’m doing this publication out of order because it doesn’t take very long to say, “Don’t touch this book with a ten foot pole,” and I want to get that out of the way and never look at it again.
Manion identifies the end of the 19th century as a period when the meanings of gender and the various ways in which women pushed back against the restrictions of gender expanded enough that the category of female husband became less coherent. Transing gender had been an individual solution to the various social restrictions of gender roles, but feminism and other societal shifts were now offering systemic solutions to some of the same problems. Same-sex relationships between people presenting as female became more visible and included a range of gender expressions.
This chapter begins with a discussion of the social and legal systems that operated to police gender expression and identity. The post Civil War era involved an expansion of official police intervention with regard to moral and social crimes, not only crimes of violence and property. These systems operated overtly against the transing of gender in small everyday ways, not only those cases where complete gender crossing was involved.
The feminist movement of the later 19th century tackled questions of the differences and similarities between the genders, however feminism had an uneasy relationship with transing gende, due to the use of gendered criticism of both feminist ideals and feminists themselves. It was a common tactic to accuse feminists of being masculine. Both for philosophical and practical reasons there was a sense that gender crossing undermined their arguments for the equality of women.
While the first half of Manion's book focuses primarily on female husbands in England, the second half moves across the ocean to the United States. People who transed gender in 19th century America for economic reasons operated not only within the binary of male and female, but within a racial context that largely categorized work along racial lines.
This chapter looks at the experiences of the people fulfill like the role of wife to a female husband. The first case is that of James Allen who was killed in an industrial accident in 1829. Allen’s wife Abigail then had to deal with the fact not only of her husband’s death, but of public knowledge that her husband was a person assigned female. They had been married for 21 years.
PAF transing gender to join the military or go to sea were common both in life and popular culture, with a wide variety of motivations. In isolated cases those who performed well before being unmasked might be celebrated and even rewarded, such as James Gray, William Chandler, and Robert Shurtliff whose (somewhat fictionalized) autobiographies helped ensure their fame. Common knowledge of stories such as theirs kept trans possibilities in mind, although there were significant barriers to success.
Manion begins by introducing several of the historic figures who will feature in this book: Charles Hamilton in 18th century England, George Wilson in 19th century New York. These are just two of the many individuals collected under the category “female husbands,” who claimed a male role in society including the right to marry a woman.
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