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Thursday, June 12, 2025 - 15:00
Yes, once again I'm blogging an article that largely duplicates material that was covered more extensively in a different publication. Sigh. The work of a historian is not always exciting.
But what is exciting is that I'm coming up on publication #500. I'm currently searching the set of all publications that I haven't yet blogged that I have in-house to see if I can find something Significant And Meaningful for the occasion. Feel free to suggest your favorite publication relevant to lesbian history. (Though you might want to search the site to see if I've done it already.)
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Oaks, Robert F. 1978. “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England” in Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, No. 2: 268-281
As with several other articles I’ve blogged in this run of American-themed publications, this one covers material that I’ve already discussed in more detail in a previous entry. (Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “"The Cry of Sodom": Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in <em>The William and Mary Quarterly</em>, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286)
As the title notes, the general subject is the legal and social treatment of sodomy (generally defined as same-sex relations) and buggery (most often applied to bestiality) in 17th century New England. Oaks notes that court records are the most important data source for this topic, but that this can skew our understanding as it only tells us about cases where offenses were identified and prosecuted. Even so, the legal records is valuable at the very least to correct myths, such as that sodomy usually received the death penalty.
The article notes that sodomy laws only applied to men, except for one New Haven code briefly for ten years starting in 1655 when female same-sex relations were included. Despite the theoretical harshness of the laws, the actual case outcomes show that sodomy was not punished more severely than other types of sex crimes, and that the death penalty was applied very rarely (and never to women). This leniency increased toward the end of the 17th century.
In relating the most commonly cited f/f case, that of Mary Hammon and Sara Norman for “leude behavior each with other upon a bed,” the article adds that Norman was also accused of “divers Lasivious speeches,” which may explain why her sentence required a public confession while Hammon was “cleared with admonision” which I read as telling her not to do it again. If the lascivious speeches were specifically in connection with this incident, then we may imagine that they may have specifically concerned f/f sex, though a later note indicates that Norman was also brought before the law for m/f sexual offenses in at least one case.
The latter part of the article is focused in great detail on accusations of bestiality.
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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 - 07:00
Once again, I have an article on a topic covered much more extensively in a publication I already blogged. Though in this case, by a different author. Thomas/ine Hall reminds us of the ways in which historic fixation on binary gender complicate the question of categorizing interactions as "same-sex" or "opposite-sex". There are several topics that I'll be discussing in the book version of the Project where it's inaccurate to characterize the topic as "lesbian" but that shed useful light on how historic societies would have viewed lesbian activity. Probable intersex people are one of those categories in the same way that transgender people are.
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Vaughan, Alden. 1978. “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86: 146-48.
I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)
The article opens with a discussion of how Colonial courts seemed to be fond of inscribing penalties for crimes (especially moral crimes) onto a person’s visible presentation, noting that the “scarlet A” that is central to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was only one of a variety of alphabetic penalties in Massachusetts law. He connects this practice with the unique penalty applied to Thomas(ine) Hall in Virginia in 1629. Hall’s offense was not one of commission but of existence: being intersex and failing to choose one binary gender presentation and sticking with it. (Please see Brown 1995 for the details. Vaughan’s discussion is more scanty and less analytic.) Hall’s sentence was to wear clothing that combined male and female garments, as a visible sign of their transgression. Note that although Hall presented variously at times as male and female, when they had a sexual relationship with a woman, it was when presenting as male.
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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 - 07:00
This is largely a "teaser article" for Jen Manion's book on female husbands. Since it largely duplicates material I've already blogged, I've just linked that write-up. But it does quote a medical journal article written by Joe Lobdell's psychiatrist, which includes some interesting points of language.
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Manion, Jen. “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Legacies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 6–11.
Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
The current article starts with a discussion of Charles Hamilton/Mary Hamilton’s career as an itinerant doctor in the Colonies, supplemented with their background in England which was fictionalized in Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband. The details provided are essentially identical to what is in Female Husbands, so I won’t repeat them here.
The second example presented in this article is Joseph Lobdell/Lucy Ann Slater who spent various stints toward the end of their life in Pennsylvania (though the majority in other locations—so the tie-in for this periodical is somewhat tenuous). I’m going to cheat a little, since Lobdell’s life history is provided in much greater detail in chapter 5 of Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. So I’m not going to re-iterate it here.
The major addition that the current article provides is an extensive excerpt from the medical case study published about Lobell, based on their sessions with a doctor at the Willard Asylum for the Insane. (Wise, P.M. 1883. “Case of Sexual Perversion,” in Alienist and Neurologist: A Quarterly Journal of Scientific, Clinical and Forensic Psychiatry and Neurology, vol 4, no 1: 87-91.) The doctor uniformly genders Lobdell as female, but has an overall sympathetic tone, within the context that Lobdell clearly had mental health issues. Although the doctor describes Lobdell’s gender-crossing as a “form of insanity” he does appear to distinguish between the psychological issues that landed Lobdell in the asylum (depression and mania) and their gender identity.
Also of interest is the language the doctor uses.
“During the few years following her [i.e., Lobdell’s] return from the West, she met with many reverses, and in ill health she received shelter and care in the alms-house. There she became attached to a young woman of good education, who had been left by her husband in a destitute condition and was receiving charitable aid. The attachment appeared to be mutual and, strange as it may seem, led to their leaving their temporary home to commence life in the woods in the relation of husband and wife. The unsexed woman assumed the name of Joseph Lobdell and the pair lived in this relation for the subsequent decade; ‘Joe,’ as she was familiarly known, following her masculine vocation of hunting and trapping and thus supplying themselves with the necessaries of life. An incident occurred in 1876 to interrupt the quiet monotony of this Lesbian love. …”
I want to call attention to the three bolded items. The doctor recognizes the marital nature of their relationship, though he clearly distances it from “real” marriage. Although describing Lobdell’s presentation and activities elsewhere as “masculine” he calls Lobdell “unsexed.” This is a characterization that appears regularly from the later 18th century on to describe women who move away from or reject stereotypically feminine things. Sometimes it is neutral or positive, in a sense of “stepping free from the restrictions of gender roles” but more often it has a negative tone. But the third item is quite fascinating as it gives us an 1883 citation for the phrase “Lesbian love” in an unambiguous sense of “a romantic and erotic relationship between two women.” Of course, one of the things I regularly harp on is that this sense of “lesbian” is much older than the myth of “invented by sexologists,” but solid citations are always useful.
Wise’s case history is also interesting in that it concludes with a discussion of the theories of Krafft-Ebing about same-sex desire which perhaps provides a basis for the doctor’s more clinical approach to Lobdell’s life history. He writes of Krafft-Ebing’s work that he “suggests they should be excepted from legal enactments for the punishment of unnatural lewdness; thus allowing them to follow their inclinations, so far as they are harmless, to an extent not reaching public and flagrant offense.” A somewhat mild endorsement since Wise continues with a discussion of Lobdell’s condition as insanity. (Note that neither Krafft-Ebing nor Wise are clearly distinguishing cross-gender presentation from same-sex desire in their discussions.) Wise concludes with, “The subject possesses little forensic interest, especially in this country, and the case herewith reported is offered as a clinical curiosity in psychiatric medicine.”
Of course, as the century turned over and the sexological view of homosexuality became more widespread in the public consciousness, the idea of considering it a “curiosity” gave way to greater persecution.
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Monday, June 9, 2025 - 07:00
This is a very useful and detailed article comparing references to same-sex activity in Colonial-era religious opinions, legal codes, and popular opinion, all of which could be quite different in degree.
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Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286
While this article is (necessarily) focused primarily on m/m history, it does have useful details of the early legal history of female same-sex relations in America. I’ll be focusing on those details and so this summary won’t cover the article as a whole. The general approach is to compare the “official” (church and state) position on same-sex erotics with the evidence for how specific individuals were viewed within their communities, including some startlingly lax responses to men notorious for their sexual interest in other men.
Official discourse did not consider the issues of desire or specific orientation, being concerned only with the specifics of the acts and whether they were approved or forbidden. In Puritan-influenced areas of the colonies, sex outside of marriage of any sort was in the “forbidden” category, but to some extent equated with other moral concerns such as drunkenness.
In contrast, non-official records indicate a recognition that certain individuals had a specific inclination toward same-sex behavior. Without applying an anachronistic concept of sexual orientation, this does lean more towards a perception of “identity” rather than a focus only on “acts.” Furthermore, communities had a variety of attitudes towards sodomy accusations and were often unwilling to apply the (theoretical) official penalties, as long as essential social harmony was not badly disrupted. Sodomy was not approved, but might be considered less significant than other aspects of a person’s contributions to the community.
Clerical and legal references to f/f sex as a parallel with m/m sex were inconsistent. John Cotton (1641) referred to “unnatural filthiness…of man with man, or woman with woman.” This phrasing including “woman with woman” was also used by Thomas Shepard (1664), Charles Chauncy (1642), and Samuel Whiting (1666). In general, New England opinions on the definition of sodomy focused on the same-sex aspect rather than a definition of anal sex, which could be enacted between a m/f couple.
Legal codes, in contrast with clerical opinions, focused almost exclusively on m/m sex. Codes from Plymouth (1671), Massachusetts (1641), Connecticut 1642), and New Hampshire (1680) only penalize m/m sex. A draft Massachusetts law by John Cotton in 1636 included women, but this was not adopted. Only New Haven (1655) identified f/f sex as a capital crime. (All of these law codes specifically cited biblical language as the justification for considering these crimes.) The New Haven law was, in general, much broader in the sexual crimes it covered, including m/f anal sex, sex with prepubescent girls, and public masturbation as well as any non-procreative acts.
The article notes only two instances of women being charged in courts for sexual activity with each other. Elizabeth Johnson received a whipping and fine in 1642 in Essex County for “unseemly practices betwixt her and another maid.” [Note: “maid” here presumably means two unmarried women rather than a reference to employment?] Another case, commonly cited in the literature, was in 1649 in Plymouth Colony, against Sara Norman and Mary Hammon for “leude behaviour each with other upon a bed.” In neither case was the activity labeled as “sodomy” in the record. [Note: I believe from other sources that they received a warning only, but I’m not finding a clear citation.]
Only two men (and specifically men) are known to have been executed for sodomy in the colonial era, and in both cases this seems to have been motivated not only by the number of occasions they transgressed, but because they non-consensually targeted boys. In contrast, several cases are discussed where a man’s habitual sexual interest in other men was known to and tolerated by the community, even over a significant period of time, if the community felt that the situation was being adequately addressed by social pressure and a whisper network. (This topic gets a lot of discussion and details, but is not relevant to the Project.)
The article notes that during this same era, London was developing a subculture catering to men who had sex with men, including the distinctive culture of the “molly houses” that included cross-dressing and role-playing, creating a popular connection between sodomy and effeminacy. But this culture was relatively restricted to London and has not been identified either outside that metropolis in England, or in any of the developing cities in the colonies. Nor is there any evidence that the colonies associated cross-dressing with sodomy. Even so, there is at least some evidence for an understanding in the colonies of something resembling an orientation toward m/m sex. (There is insufficient data on f/f relations to conclude anything.)
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Sunday, June 8, 2025 - 18:00
By what appears to be random coincidence, I have a handful of articles coming up that are preliminary versions of material I've already covered, or in one case, material more thoroughly covered by another article I'm about to blog. So there's a certain amount of "for completeness' sake" happening on the blog in the next week or so.
But hey! I've finished the substantial revisions to the Skinsinger stories. Only a couple of technical editing passes to go plus figuring out book formatting. How hard could it be?
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Faderman, Lillian. 1978. “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3: 309-332
[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]
Faderman considers the portrayal of women’s same-sex love in three mid-to-late 19th century novels by well-known (male) American novelists: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Holmes’s A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and James’s The Bostonians (1885). The main thesis of this analysis is the inappropriateness of applying post-Freudian sexual theories to the characters in these works, and rather considering them in the context of normalized women’s same-sex intimate relationships in the 19th century, as explored for example by Smith-Rosenberg (1975) (https://alpennia.com/lhmp/lhmp-292-smith-rosenberg-1975-female-world-lov...).
She sets out four reasons for 19th century American tolerance for these relationships.
- Women’s lack of economic independence which meant that their same-sex relationships would not interfere with marriage. [Note: While this may be an accurate high-level generalization, increasing economic opportunities for middle-class American women in the later 19th century created the context for phenomena like “Boston Marriages” which clearly overlapped the era when such relationships were considered acceptable.]
- People did not seriously consider the possibility of f/f sex, and assumed women “merely tolerated sex” and only for procreation. [Note: This dodges two inconvenient considerations: that the myth of the sexless woman has many heterosexual exceptions, and that f/f erotic activity was not always considered to be “sex.”]
- Medical professionals did not recognize female homosexuality until the end of the 19th century. [Note: I think this only holds if you restrict it to “homosexuality by that name” because there are certainly earlier cases that were considered to be medical conditions.]
- In the 19th century it was assumed (once recognized at all) that female homosexuality was limited to those with a masculine physical attributes. [Note: I would quibble again, but I’m getting repetitive.]
The underlying consideration regarding women’s relationships was “does this threaten society” and the answer to that question changed around the turn of the century and became very different in the period after WWI.
There’s a brief historical review of laws and attitudes toward f/f sexuality, including colonial era laws against sodomy, only one of which included women. In contrast, you have individuals like Deborah Gannett who fought in the Revolutionary War as a man, had romantic relations with at least three women during that time, was honorably discharged on discovery, and even was granted a Congressional pension for her heirs after her death. Similarly two women both serving in male dress in the Civil War had an “intimacy” but this aspect was not disparaged when their gender was discovered.
The article also cites an 1863 publication referencing four cross-dressing women serving in the Civil War including one who was married to another woman for 34 years, however the description of the case is that of James How, who lived in 18th century England, not 19th century US, so I’m skeptical of the accuracy of this particular citation. (And a bit disappointed that Faderman didn’t spot the error.)
Lucy Ann Lobdell is cited as the first case of such a woman being classified as “sexual perversion” (in the 1880s), supporting the position that earlier cases were not so classified. Faderman quotes a 1896 article from the American Journal of Insanity that states that until recently (i.e., the 1890s) insinuating that there was anything improper about women’s intimate relations would have been considered an outrage. The article goes on to note that the author was aware of a case somewhat earlier but had not recognized it as a type of perversion.
Faderman cites Smith-Rosenberg’s argument that whether or not 19th century women had genital relations is asking the wrong question, because that was not a dividing line between categories of relationships at the time. But Faderman continues with the assumption that grated on me when reading her book , that “it would probably be safe to assume that most of these relationships seldom involved genital contact—simply because the middle-class Victorian woman seldom engaged in genital contact outside of marriage.” I have always thought that Faderman bought in too deeply to the myth of the sexless Victorian woman.
But she notes that the concept of “being in love” was focused on intense emotional responses, rather than sexual desire. So there was no stigma attached to being “in love” with someone of the same sex and, indeed, given homosocial forces, the type of emotional intimacy associated with being “in love” was far more available with someone of the same sex than the opposite one.
[Note: we then get the old error of taking the OED at face value in asserting that the word “lesbian” in the sexual sense didn’t exist until the 20th century. Take my rant on this as given.]
Anyway, now we move on to analysis of the novels themselves, which illustrate the principles discussed above. Each of them depict a female couple who are clearly in love with each other, and where that relationship was socially acceptable or even praiseworthy. The apparent exception in The Bostonians, where the male character clearly views his target’s same-sex relationship as problematic becomes less clear when—as Faderman points out—the male character is rather clearly depicted as a controlling anti-hero whose victor over his rival will result in his future wife’s misery, not a happily ever after.
Literary critics of the 20th century, she asserts, who find Freudian character flaws in these three novels are bringing in anachronistic interpretations and assumptions that distort the stories that are actually on the page. (I have condensed down a great deal of detailed analysis here into only the conclusions.)
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Sunday, June 8, 2025 - 08:32
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 316 - On the Shelf for June 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/06/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for June 2025.
I’d say something about Pride Month, but here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, every month is Pride Month. Even so, I’ve committed to blogging a publication every day this month, just because.
Publications on the Blog
I’m still in the middle of a thematic series on research relevant to US lesbian history. After my somewhat distracted time in April (when, if you’ll remember, I was frantically preparing for retirement), May saw me covering three books and one article on that theme. Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States was mildly interesting, although it was primarily interested in situating queer history within larger social movements. Wendy Rouse’s Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement was absolutely amazing and I’m recommending it as essential background reading for anyone interested in lesbian history in the late 19th and early 20th century. Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past looks at cross-dressing (broadly defined) in the “Wild West” and how those individuals were erased or explained away in the popular understanding of American history. I also blogged a journal article by Boag discussing how that book came to be written and some of the logistical difficulties of the research.
Stuck in the middle of this thematic series was Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, as background for a podcast last month.
I don’t know if I’ll have enough American material to continue the theme all month, but it’s a good excuse to get caught up with that set of topics.
News of the Field
As one of my retirement projects, I plan to put up more bonus content for Patreon subscribers. This will largely be content only available to paying patrons, because I want to see if I can grow the support for the Project in a meaningful way. Currently I’ve put up the outline for the book project and am brainstorming for other material patrons might be interested in.
I’ve also re-started my author newsletter, which will have interesting news and maybe even some special offers related to my own fiction writing. You can sign up through a link on my website, which you can find in the show notes, assuming you didn’t find the podcast directly through the website in the first place.
I’m still settling into my expanded activities, now that I don’t have a day job. Or at least, now that I don’t have another day job besides writing and the Project. So expect things to pick up gradually.
Book Shopping!
In May, of course, I went off to the annual Medieval Congress in Michigan, which used to be a good opportunity for book shopping, but we seem to be in a several-year lull in queer history publications—at least, in terms of what the publishers have on display at the Congress. I did pick up the latest volume of Medieval Clothing and Textiles, plus a book on Tudor and Stuart cookery, but nothing for the Project.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
Fortunately, there’s no lull in the release of new lesbian and sapphic historical fiction. This month I saw another dozen or so books in cookie-cutter series that I suspect are AI generated and have chosen not to promote. Plus one book that not only smells of AI-generation but where other books by the same author are non-fiction about using AI for writing. I mention this so that listeners are aware of what’s going on out there in the publishing world. Be aware of what you’re consuming and how those choices are supporting or undermining the field.
Having gotten that out of the way, I want to mention a February book that almost slipped past me. When I interviewed Margaret Vandenburg about her recent release Craze, she mentioned that Cleis Press would be re-releasing her previous book, An American in Paris. This part of the story gives the background to the main character in Craze.
“In the States, celibacy had never been my strong suit. In Paris, it was a crime against nature—a mortal sin.” With this cheeky response to her new city, Henri Adams—recently released from the tyranny of Prohibition and freshly appointed as an art correspondent for En Vogue magazine—sets out to discover the literary, artistic, and more unmentionable pleasures of Paris during the Roaring Twenties. Welcomed with open arms by Gertrude Stein (and somewhat more soberly by Alice B. Toklas), Henri hobnobs with expatriate luminaries—Natalie Barney, Picasso, Colette, Romaine Brooks, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes—and unleashes her Yankee curiosity, only to find herself entangled in an avant-garde art theft ring and the shackles of Paris’ sapphic underground.
Several April books only just came to my attention. First up is Whispers of Love Beneath the Hidden Manor by Aiyo Sa.
A forbidden bond. A deadly secret. A journey toward freedom.
In the grand, shadowed halls of a noble house, Pinfa arrives as the fourth wife—on the very day the first wife mysteriously dies. Behind the perfumed tea and silk-draped corridors, whispers of betrayal and poison weave an invisible web.
Amid suspicion and hidden grief, Pinfa meets Lalin—an elegant wife with a smile like soft rain and eyes that conceal unspoken storms. As their hearts begin to entwine, Pinfa finds herself torn between uncovering a killer and surrendering to a love she was never meant to have.
When trust shatters and death creeps closer with each passing day, Pinfa must choose: Expose the truth and destroy everything, or grasp the fragile, forbidden happiness that blooms even in the darkest soil.
Set against the haunting beauty of old Siam, Whispers of Love and Poison is a slow-burn, girl-love historical thriller of yearning, secrets, and a love fierce enough to defy fate itself.
Caitlin Crowe offers us a high-society romance in The Ladies.
Lady Emily, a wealthy young woman in Victorian England, is expected to marry advantageously to secure her family's fortune. She unexpectedly finds herself attracted to Lady Victoria, a bold and unconventional woman who defies societal expectations. Their secret courtship begins with stolen moments in secluded gardens and hidden corners of London, their love blossoming despite the rigid social norms of the time. However, their relationship faces significant challenges as gossip spreads amongst London's high society, threatening their reputations and the standing of their families. Lady Emily is pressured to marry a suitable man, while Lady Victoria grapples with her own desires and the fear of public condemnation.
Just as I sometimes have to make my best guess on sapphic content, I sometimes have to make guesses to track other types of representation. The Eye of the Water: Between Creek and Roots by Stephanie Hager-Lyons appears to feature Black characters, based on the cover illustration.
When Jo McBrayer steps into the creek behind her family’s Louisiana farmhouse, she doesn’t expect to step back in time. But that’s exactly what happens—just long enough to see a house that shouldn’t be standing, fields full of workers long gone, and a woman with eyes full of recognition.
Her sister Liz, a practical academic, dismisses it as one of Jo’s wild tales—until Jo brings back a journal. Leather-bound. Dated 1906. Written by a woman named Marcella McBrayer who, according to family records, never existed.
As Jo slips deeper into the past, drawn back again and again by the mysterious pull of the land, Liz begins to uncover long-buried secrets—of love and erasure, of bloodlines severed and rewritten. At the center of it all is a child named Clara, hidden from history, and a symbol carved into oak, stone, and memory: an eye surrounded by crescent moons.
There’s one new May book that I found: A Soft Place to Land by Kelsey Kranz.
After an unexpectedly intimate encounter in the fall of 1950, best friends Virginia and Elaine part ways to each follow their dreams—Elaine to medical school, and Virginia to find a husband. When Elaine returns, and Virginia turns up in the middle of the night, the two realize their mutual youthful crush has evolved into much deeper romantic feelings. But in an era when widespread fears of communism produce immense pressure to adhere to rigid social norms, there is no path for two women to fall in love. Together, they must learn how to protect their relationship—and each other—from the consequences of choosing love.
As usual, the new releases for the current month of June are dominated by books from mainstream presses, which tend to have better advance publicity than indies. This month, they’re also a bit heavy on the historic fantasy, starting with Lady's Knight by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner from Harper Collins.
Gwen is sick of hiding—hiding the fact that she’s taken over her father’s blacksmithing duties, hiding her attraction to girls, hiding her yearning for glory as a knight.
Meanwhile, Lady Isobelle of Avington, queen bee of the castle, has never once considered hiding who she is—until now. She’s been chosen as the grand prize in the Tournament of Dragonslayers, to be given to whichever knight can claim her hand. And for the first time in her life, she can’t talk her way out of trouble.
When Isobelle discovers Gwen’s knightly ambitions, they hatch a scheme together—Gwen will joust in the tournament, disguised as Sir Gawain. Winning means freedom for Isobelle, and glory for Gwen. Losing means… well, let’s not go there.
One thing’s for sure: Falling in love was never the plan.
But the best laid plans…are often trampled all over by dragons.
I’ve heard very interesting things about Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race from Little Brown, which is set in an alternate Tudor England.
The king has been appointed by god to marry six queens. Those six queens are all that stand between the kingdom of Elben and ruin. Or so we have been told.
Each queen vies for attention. Clever, ambitious Boleyn is determined to be Henry's favourite. And if she must incite a war to win Henry over? So be it.
Seymour acts as spy and assassin in a court teeming with dragons, backstabbing courtiers and strange magic. But when she and Boleyn become the unlikeliest of things - allies - the balance of power begins to shift. Together they will discover an ancient, rotting magic at Elben's heart. A magic that their king will do anything to protect.
I’m not sure whether Daughter of Doom by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem from Levine Querido has overt fantasy elements or simply includes period-appropriate belief in gods and fate.
Denmark, 870 AD. Yrsa knows her place in the village of Mimir’s Stool. Though she was born with a crooked foot, she’s never let anyone underestimate her; after all, she’s the daughter of Toke the helmsman and granddaughter of the fearsome warrior Gudrun the Torch (who, according to legend, stood before the walls of Paris, splattered in the blood of Frankish warriors). And no one else in the village shares her ability to see what the Norns, the three weavers who live under the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, and craft people’s fates, have in store for them.
One day the men return from a raid with a high-ranking hostage, Sister Job, and though the two girls couldn’t be more different, they look out for one another. And when one of the villagers viciously assaults Sister Job and she and Yrsa mortally wound him in self-defense, they’re forced to take to the sea to escape the wrath of the warriors of Mimir’s Stool, and worse, the wrath of the gods. Can either of them escape their fate? Do they even want to?
The next book up is by this month’s featured author. A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell from Berkley Publishing Group is a charming Regency romance involving amateur archaeology and with a non-binary love interest.
Elfreda Marsden has finally made a major discovery—an ancient amulet proving the Viking army camped on her family’s estate. Too bad her nemesis is back from London, freshly exiled after a scandal and ready to wreak havoc on her life. Georgie Redmayne is everything Elfreda isn’t--charming, popular, carefree, distractingly attractive, and bored to death by the countryside. When the two collide (literally), the amulet is lost, and with it, Elfreda’s big chance to lead a proper excavation. Now Elfreda needs new evidence of medieval activity, and Georgie needs money to escape the doldrums of Derbyshire. Joining forces to locate a hidden hoard of Viking gold is the best chance for them both.
Marsdens and Redmaynes don’t get along, and that’s the least of the reasons these enemies can’t dream of something more. But as the quest takes them on unexpected adventures, sparks of attraction ignite a feeling increasingly difficult to identify as hatred. It’s far too risky to explore. And far too tempting to resist. Elfreda and Georgie soon find that the real treasure comes with a steep price… and the promise of a happiness beyond all measure.
Rachel Ford’s Meredith and Alex Thatch mystery series has a third installment, Murder by Proxy. The cover copy focuses on the mystery and takes for granted that you know that Alex Thatch is in gender disguise for the sake of her marriage.
Murder is one thing, but quiet Fenwood-On-Sea is simply not prepared for Aunt Anne and her love affairs. After an unexpected revelation from her latest paramour, Aunt Anne’s happy world is thrown into disarray. In despair, she seeks refuge in Fenwood-On-Sea with Alec and Merry. Unfortunately, murder follows her. Or so it seems. Someone is killing, seemingly without rhyme or reason – and the only link between the victims is their connection to Anne herself. As the bodies start to stack up, Alec and Merry race to find the killer – before he or she gets to them.
I had to wait for some early reviews to confirm the sapphic content in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab from Tor.com. The early reviews were also my first clue that it has vampire content. As a general tendency, vampire novels don’t tend to fit my parameters for historical fiction, unless the historic setting is a strong part of the plot, as in this case.
This is a story about hunger. 1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.
This is a story about love. 1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.
This is a story about rage. 2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.
Other Books of Interest
I’m putting two titles in the “other books of interest” section. The first one, Damsels and Dinosaurs by Wren Jones, gets classified here because it sounds like the sapphic content may be restricted to an ex-girlfriend. But hey, at least there are dinosaurs?
The Fletcher family honey business teeters on the brink of bankruptcy as shipments from their eccentric matriarch's farm grow scarce. But Poppy refuses to let her family become destitute and she will do anything to get to the bottom of the mystery. However, on her aunt’s strange island, Poppy finds more questions than answers. The bees defy expectations, the farm is full of ancient creatures, and her aunt’s secrets run deeper than she originally suspected.
Meanwhile, her imminent arranged marriage to the heir of a prominent tea company, Giuseppe, jeopardizes her investigation. Their meddling families are relentless in making the marriage a swift reality – even if that means sending Giuseppe and Poppy’s grumpy ex, Athena, to retrieve her.
Athena knows the reunion will be awkward, and getting the stubborn Poppy to do anything will be difficult, but she can’t resist the promise of the island. If she can win over Poppy’s mysterious aunt, she might finally get the opportunity to pursue her dreams.
Giuseppe just wants to draw, drink tea, and avoid all the drama. But he supposes he must go along too. It is his future wife, after all.
On an island where the scandals are bigger than the dinosaurs, a group of Regency aristocrats search for their second chances and rewrite history as we know it.
The second title is placed in this section because, although it’s clearly sapphic, it isn’t clear how much of the content would count as historic. But I figure my listeners might have an interest in sword-lesbians in general, which are the main theme in By Her Sword: A Sapphic Fantasy Romance Anthology edited by Erin Branch from Sunset Wave Press.
A fiery mage tracks down the swordswoman who escaped with more than just a magical relic. Across the stars, ex-lovers get a second chance on a dragon-infested planet. In a different galaxy, a confident gladiator must melt the frozen heart of an ice princess. During the distant past of feudal Japan, a traveler with a Jinn inside her faces the challenge of her life. This fantasy collection features twelve swashbuckling adventures spanning a variety of settings, from the distant magical past to the speculative galactic future.
What Am I Reading?
And what am I reading? Despite all my new free time, I haven’t managed to finish a single novel in the last month, though that was largely due to getting sucked in by Ada Palmer’s history book Inventing the Renaissance. Palmer is also a science fiction author, but this book comes from her primary career as a historian. It’s a delightfully readable (if very long!) explanation of why everything you thought you knew about the Italian Renaissance is probably wrong, but that the reality was far more fascinating.
Author Guest
As mentioned previously, we have an interview this month with Joanna Lowell.
(Transcription will be added when available.)
Show Notes
Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.
In this episode we talk about:
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Bronski, Michael. 2012. A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History). Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807044650
- Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
- Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
- Boag, Peter. 2011. “The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West” in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 3: 322-339
- Brown, Judith, C. 1986. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-504225-5
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- An American in Paris by Margaret Vandenburg
- Whispers of Love Beneath the Hidden Manor by Aiyo Sa
- The Ladies by Caitlin Crowe
- The Eye of the Water: Between Creek and Roots by Stephanie Hager-Lyons
- A Soft Place to Land by Kelsey Kranz
- Lady's Knight by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
- Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race
- Daughter of Doom by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem
- A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell
- Murder by Proxy (Meredith and Alex Thatch Mystery #3) by Rachel Ford
- Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
- Other Titles of Interest
- What I’ve been consuming
- Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
- This month we interview Joanna Lowell and talk about:
- Working with historical language and issues around characters who don’t fall neatly in the gender binary
- How her previous books connect together
- Actor Charlotte Charke as an inspiration for the character of Georgie
- Theater as a place for queer themes
- Avoiding being locked into incorrect historical tropes
- How the novels of Alexis Hall and Sarah Waters work differently with gender
- The difficulty of getting away from modern identity categories
- Books Joanna has recently enjoyed:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Joanna Lowell Online
- Website: https://www.joannalowell.com/
- Instagram: @joannalowellauthor
Major category:
LHMPSaturday, June 7, 2025 - 08:55
It's common to discover that my publication database includes preliminary versions of research that are later incorporated in a book. I often cover these out of order. (To the extent that I have any order at all.) But in this case, the present article discusses some of the background considerations for Boag's book and adds to understanding it, rather than being redundant. (I have a few articles coming up that ended up being redundant and I've largely simply cross-referenced them to the more complete versions.)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boag, Peter. 2011. “The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West” in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 3: 322-339
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
The general topic is “women who dressed and lived as men and men who lived and dressed as women in the nineteenth-century American West.” One of the central questions he wanted to address was why, given the number of such cross-dressers, the popular imagination does not include them in its understanding of the West, beyond superficial images such as fictionalized versions of Calamity Jane. Even as historians have begun looking under the surface of Western myths, they have largely been silent on this topic.
One of the issues Boag addresses is his search for appropriate terminology, given that some—but not all—cross-dressers would likely be classified as transgender today. But given changing conceptions of sex and gender, applying modern terminology is not only anachronistic, but can be as inaccurate as using terms like “sexual inversion” that were actually in use at the time. The classification of certain behaviors, emotions, and social presentation as uniquely “masculine” or “feminine” led sexologists to create theories that assumed the presence of one gendered attribute necessarily presupposed other gendered attributes. Hence the blanket term “inversion” to cover a wide range of situations that today would be distinguished as separate identities. Just as social theories had gradually shifted from viewing cross-dressing or same-sex desire as isolated moral failings to viewing them as personality traits, so in the 20th century, there was a gradual shift from viewing same-sex desire as being caused by an “inverted” gender identity, to distinguishing between gender identity and orientation of desire. Boag explains why he settled on “cross-dress(er)” as the most neutral term for the phenomenon he was studying, as well as clarifying his approach to pronoun usage in the book.
While there has been increasing interest in collecting archival data on gender and sexuality, it is focused primarily on the 20th century. Research in the 19th century faces many hurdles, especially in terms of identifying the records of interest in the first place. Arrest records (which unfortunately are some of the most prevalent for the purpose) will sometimes blur the nature of the concern, as when a record that originally cites “sodomy” is visibly changed to “indecent exposure.” Prejudices that result in higher arrest rates for marginalized people skew the apparent incidence of queer behaviors. For various reasons, women’s same-sex encounters rarely came under official scrutiny unless at least one of the women was also transgressing gender presentation, again skewing the understanding of the topic.
Newspapers are another rich source of data about queer history, with caveats. And increasing digitalization is making more sources easily available—as well as side-stepping the gate-keeping of manual indexers (as well as the bias toward indexing only major papers, while smaller local papers were more likely to have queer “human interest” stories). This shifts the research expertise to figuring what keywords to search for.
Historical writing, even while increasing the focus on women’s and gender history, has not kept pace on the examination of gender identity and sexual orientation among cross-dressing women in the West. Anthropologists have analyzed cross-gender systems in Native American populations, but rarely connect this with similar phenomena in the white population.
Overall, the collective memory-erasure of the presence of cross-dressing in the history of the West connects (per Boag) to two phenomena around the end of the 19th century: the perception that the “frontier” no longer existed, and the development of sexological theories of gender and sexuality. Boag’s book focuses closely on how these forces worked together to re-categorize and explain away cross-dressers such that they were no longer part of the central myth-making of the American frontier.
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Friday, June 6, 2025 - 07:00
The concluding chapter of Boag's book on cross-dressers on the American frontier uses the case study of Joseph (Lucy) Lobdell to illustrate how stories of gender-crossing began being turned into stories of psychological illness. Lobdell was right on the cusp: considered a "curiosity" at first but then pathologized. (Though it doesn't help that Lobdell seems to have suffered from genuine mental illness, separate from their gender and sexuality.)
Tomorrow I start with a run of shorter articles, though it turns out that several of them repeat information covered in more detail elsewhere.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
Chapter 5 – “Death of a Modern Diana”: Sexologists, Cross-Dressers, and the Heteronormalization of the American Frontier
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York. But Lobdell had been running ahead of discovery before, and had even published a feminist treatise under his birth name, Lucy Ann Lobdell, complaining of an abusive husband, of the wage discrimination faced by women, and arguing that if women were being forced to step up to be the primary support of their families, then society should accommodate them.
[Note: Lobdell’s story shows the difficulty in trying to apply modern identity labels to historic individuals. While Lobdell lived most of his adult life as a man, the autobiographical treatise not only was written under a female name, but from a female social identity—very emphatically.]
After returning to New York, Lobdell continued living as a man and became a music and dance teacher. At one point he became engaged to one of his female pupils, but a rival suitor dug up Lobdell’s background and was planning a tar-and-feather party. The fiancée got wind of this and warned Lobdell and he was on the run again. Ill health led Lobdell to return to a female identity in order to live in a charity house.
In the same area, one Marie Louise Perry, abandoned by the unsuitable lover she had eloped with (though additional details are confused and conflicting) also ended up in the same charitable institution. Perry and Lobdell took a shine to each other and left the institution together in 1869, found a preacher to marry them, and started an itinerant, somewhat feral lifestyle with Lobdell hunting and doing odd jobs as they tried to live off the land. They spent several stints in jail for vagrancy or more nebulous charges, with Lobdell’s sex being a point of contention when discovered. Despite a mistaken report of Lobdell’s death, he ended up in an insane asylum in 1880 due to what appears to be genuine mental illness (depression and dementia), but exacerbated by attitudes toward his gender presentation.
Various dates for his eventual death in the asylum are given, ranging from 1885 to 1912. After Lobdell’s commitment, his wife continued to live on their farm for a while, then returned to Massachusetts until her death in 1890. A newspaper interviewed her about her “strange” relationship with Lobdell, at which she argued that there was nothing strange in two women living together. [Note: Once again complicating the question of Lobdell’s gender identity.]
The doctor who treated Lobdell in the asylum wrote him up as a case study in “sexual perversion,” referring to his relationship with Perry as “lesbian”—one of the earliest American case studies in the sexological tradition. Lobdell claimed at one point that he had “peculiar organs” that supported his claim to male identity. [Note: There’s no suggestion in the book that Lobdell might have been intersex, although that is mentioned in the context of an entirely different case study.] The doctor took this at face value and recorded it as the mythic “lesbian with enlarged, penetrative clitoris” which has haunted the historic record. The doctor drew connections between Lobdell’s mental illness and his sexual inversion in support of the theory that inversion could be a byproduct of some other medical or psychological misfortune (in contrast to another theory that inversion was always congenital).
When originally documented, Lobdell’s case was considered an anomaly. But as sexologists identified increasing numbers of cases in the 1890s, they concluded that some historical force was causing a rise in perversion. [Note: As opposed to the possibility that, having discovered the hammer, they were now going around identifying lots of objects as nail-like.] This just happened to coincide with the era when people were declaring the end of the Western frontier. It was—they concluded—the passing of the West that was generating a wave of sexual inversion. By this means, they could neatly erase the presence of queer people from the West itself by claiming that sexual inversion only arose as the West disappeared.
The chapter spends some time exploring the connections the sexologists made between inversion, “degeneracy” in both a moral and eugenicist sense, and the alleged decline of western civilization (primarily in the context of Europe). This image of degeneracy was in contrast to American ideals of progress and expansion. Sexual degeneracy might be contributing to the fall of Old World civilization, but America could stand firm and hold the moral line, thus avoiding the same fate.
Vigorous rural manual labor was the way to avoid the enervating effects of urban life that led people to the neurasthenia that caused inversion and other ills. (I’m doing some serious condensation of this discussion.) “Urban” life was also a dog whistle for immigrants, non-white communities, and the working class, all of whom were potentially susceptible to degeneracy. The frontier, the outdoors, (and whiteness) were the cure for these ills!
Conclusion—Sierra Flats and Haunted Valleys: Cross-Dressers and the Contested Terrain of America’s Frontier Past
This brief chapter sums up the main themes of the book, tying them together with examples of mid-19th century fiction (e.g., by Bret Harte) that reflect reality more than the later mythologizing Western fiction that erased queerness entirely.
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Thursday, June 5, 2025 - 09:00
This chapter returns again to AMAB stories, focusing on the way those stories were explained away from the "real history" of the western frontier.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
Chapter 4 – “He Was a Mexican”: Race and the Marginalization of Male-to-Female Cross-Dressers in Western History
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
The biography that kicks off the chapter follows Mrs. Nash, a woman of Mexican origin. An army captain had hired Nash as a laundress in New Mexico and then recognized her some years later in 1868 in Kansas when she was presenting as a man, which she explained she had done out of economic necessity to get work driving ox teams across the plains. The captain once again hired her to do laundry for his troop, enabling her to return to female dress. In addition to having a great reputation for her laundry skills, she was in demand as a cook, specializing in tamales and baked goods. She also did sewing and dressmaking, making all her own clothing.
Nash spoke of having had two children back in Mexico who had died, but did not much like sharing quarters with children, though she also turned her hand to midwifery. With all these side hustles, she brought in a significant income, which had the unfortunate side-effect of attracting mercenary men who married her then absconded with her money. (This happened twice, once with the man who gave her the married surname of Nash.) Her third marriage was more successful. But after 4 or 5 years of marriage, Nash fell ill with appendicitis while her husband was away. Knowing the end was near, Nash asked for a priest and requested that she be buried quickly in whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. But after her death, her co-workers wanted to honor her better. When they were preparing the body for burial, they discovered that Nash had male anatomy, much to the astonishment of the witnesses. The army surgeon confirmed this observation. When her husband returned from patrol, he was questioned about his wife but indicated that he knew her to be a woman. He implied that they had a sexual relationship. But he was mocked and teased so relentlessly about his marriage that a month after Nash’s death he committed suicide.
After that, stories began being invented to explain Nash’s cross-dressing, including the assertion that it was a disguise to escape consequences for a mass murder. News accounts asked the question that confronts the “progress narrative:” what practical benefit would there be for a man to masquerade as a woman, losing male privilege and economic opportunity?
Notable in the news accounts is how Nash’s ethnicity (Mexican) was emphasized and highlighted. Along with this, she was assigned negative stereotypes that should have been contradicted by the regard her associates actually had for her.
This was a common pattern in accounts of male cross-dressing: if the person was not white, their race was emphasized; if white, it was not mentioned. (In one exception, the cross-dresser was noted as being white in the context that he regularly associated with Black men.)
After her death, accounts of Nash claimed that there had been suspicion about her sex, referencing unusual facial hair (and her habit of wearing a veil across her face), a large build, and a low voice. But these later claims are at odds with the genuine surprise felt during her laying out.
One racialized motif that was particularly prevalent was the “Mexican bandit” who cross-dressed to evade the law, invoking a stereotype of Mexican men as simultaneously criminal, deceitful, and unmanly. “Indian blood” was another motif that was invoked, drawing from genuine Native traditions of cross-gender social roles.
The Mexican motif also worked in the opposite direction, depicting Mexican men as unmanly because they were prone to cross-dressing.
Non-whites, in general, were “de-masculinized” by denying them the rights accorded to white men in American society, such as the right to own property and to vote.
A strong example of this was the feminizing of Chinese men. Due to migration patterns and motivations, the male-to-female ratio among Chinese immigrants was enormous, even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 froze immigration. Combined with anti-miscegenation laws, this meant that Chinese immigrant communities were largely all-male. Other factors that contributed to the feminization of Chinese men was a tendency to sparse facial hair, the long, braided hairstyle (but see the political history of the Chinese queue), and loose, non-European clothing styles. The exclusion from land-owning and many white-coded occupations, combined with the general scarcity of women in the West, forced many Chinese men into female-coded occupations such as cooking, laundry, and domestic service.
There was also a sexual element to the framing of racialized cross-dressers, as they were sometimes (whether accurately or not) accused of cross-dressing for the purpose of prostitution. Once again, this intertwined with white reactions to Native “berdache” traditions. (Although Native American alternate gender traditions also included women taking on a male social role, this does not appear to have become part of the official “story” about cross-dressed women.)
Another side of the fictionalization of Western masculinity was how it became a stand-in for what was perceived as an erosion of older models of masculinity. Becoming a “pseudo-cowboy” via reading and re-enacting Western literature created new models of manliness that were coded white. [Note: compare also the erasure of non-white “cowboys” from popular media.]
Overall, the narrative was: the West was “won” by virile (straight) white men. Non-whites were marginalized as villains, criminals, deviants, and effeminates, and queer men were subsumed to one or more of these. Thus “men” were all straight because anyone who wasn’t straight could be reclassified as “not a man.” Ideals of masculinity were equated with the “men of the West” which influenced even those not on the frontier to support and maintain these mythic archetypes as a historic reality that they could adopt as an image. [Note: see, for example, the “Marlboro man” which one could become by smoking the right brand of cigarettes.]
Touching back on the story of Mrs. Nash and her husband from the beginning of the chapter, the (white) husband’s sexuality was never questioned in the press, only his supposed gullibility (he didn’t know) or greed (he only cared about her income and cooking). He was normalized as a “regular man,” just as those who cross-dressed for dances or entertainment in all-male communities were normalized (regardless of their individual motivations).
There is a discussion of how the “progress narrative” (i.e., cross-dressing is done for social practicality) is gendered and breaks down when applied to men.
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Wednesday, June 4, 2025 - 08:00
History must not only be studied, but continually re-studied and re-surfaced. We have all seen how easy it is for something "obvious" to become memory-holed even in as short a time as the last five years. How much easier when the primary sources were shaky to begin with and the myth-makers have a social and political agenda that they may not be entirely conscious of themselves. How easy it is to re-write history "as it should have been" (a phrase that has always grated on me in the context of the Society for Creative Anachronism, regardless of the direction of one's "should").
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
Part Two – “The Story of the Perverted Life is Not Attractive”: Making the American West and the Frontier Heteronormative -- Chapter 3 – “And Love is a Vision and Life is a Lie”: The Daughters of Calamity Jane
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
Joe Monahan died of a sudden illness in rural Idaho in 1903. The friends who prepared him for burial were surprised that he had a female body and buried him quietly. But another local felt that Monahan had been done a disservice and brought the matter to the attention of a newspaper, extoling his ordinary, virtuous life. Few facts were known about him at that time and only a few more can be found in the archives. He was born around 1850, probably in New York, and had been living in Idaho since at least 1870. He was spotty about picking up his mail—but he did receive mail—and had voted in 1880. (Women did not have the vote in Idaho at that time.) An acquaintance noted that the letters he received were possibly from a sister in Buffalo New York, to whom he wrote occasionally. This friend wrote to an official in Buffalo hoping to locate his family (in part, to deal with his estate). This turned up a foster mother and foster sister, who confirmed that “Johanna Monahan” had gone West around age 14 and had corresponded regularly. Their letters were later found in Monahan’s cabin.
But searching the archives in Buffalo for a Johanna Monahan only added some further confusion about her birth family and identity. In any event, the foster mother reported that Monahan’s mother had dressed her in boy’s clothes and had her earn a living with jobs typically performed by boys. When her foster mother took Monahan in, he was sent to school. In her version, Monahan left in 1869 first to California, then to Idaho.
As the story made its way into the Idaho media, other people began adding details to Monahan’s history, including that many had suspected he was a woman but no one made a fuss about it. People in that region were aware of many cross-dressing women, for various reasons. Even in correspondence discussing this issue, Monahan’s associates used male pronouns for him.
All of this is backstory for how Monahan’s story was picked up in popular media. In the 1950s, Monahan’s story was revived in newspapers, theater, and eventually movies with the 1993 film The Ballad of Little Jo, all of which include a large amount of invention and no hint of queerness. Monahan is made fully heterosexual and “man troubles” are offered as the motivation for her transformation.
This framing was begun in 1904 when uneasiness about the sexual implications of cross-dressing led newspapers to “reclaim” Monahan as essentially feminine, including fake images in a hoopskirt and an invented romantic betrayal by a man. (The fiction is embellished by many details with no connection to Monahan’s actual history, including the addition of an illegitimate child.)
The chapter moves on to provide more examples of how the actual biographies of cross-dressing women were re-written in the late 19th and early 20th century to disarm concerns about gender and sexuality.
Existing fictional genres were adapted, such as the seduction motif in which the woman both flees and cross-dresses to escape her shame. Such a fiction was assigned to Charley Parkhurst when a post-mortem not only identified his bodily sex but indicated a previous pregnancy. (Motherhood was a strong motif for feminizing the subject.)
Dime novels of the 1870s were fond of using heterosexual relationships as the motivation for cross-dressing, as with fictionalizations of the life of Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane). The real life Canary rarely cross-dressed and identified as female, but her fictional twin is more cagey, implying either inversion or non-binary identity, and cross-dressing regularly in order to hunt down the man who betrayed her.
Several other fictional examples of “betrayal and escape” or “betrayal and revenge” are listed. Such stories solidly establish the heterosexual credentials of their heroines. Such overt inventions then sometimes were resurrected as “true” news stories.
Fictional cross-dressing narratives sometimes re-normalized their protagonists with marriage and a return to female presentation. Often this includes a return to the urban East, symbolically localizing cross-dressing to the peculiar logistics and needs of Western life.
Another subgenre involves a woman cross-dressing to join a male lover in criminal activities—a genre that has roots in a number of actual biographies. (Note: these are all cited from newspaper accounts, and it’s unclear whether the author considers them wholly fictional or simply sensationalized and “straightened.”)
Even as the fictional genre of cross-dressing women came to popularity, the acceptance of real-life cross-dressing women waned, with women in San Francisco and other locations facing arrest for cross-dressing by the early 20th century.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of whether cross-dressing destabilized gender or enforces it by aligning activities and characteristics rigidly with gender presentation. I.e., women could participate in the “Wild West” but only as men. This alignment must then be undermined by re-feminizing the participants once they were separated (by time, space, or reality) from the actual frontier.
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