This volume covers 1817 to 1824: Anne Lister lived from 1791 to 1840 at Halifax in West Yorkshire, England. Born one of six children, to an upper class family, the deaths of her four brothers enabled her to inherit Shibden Hall where she then lived with her Uncle James and Aunt Anne (unmarried siblings) from age 24 on, leaving her parental home. Finances were difficult at first but she seems to have had a talent far careful management and eventually had sufficient funds to travel.
19th c
LHMP entry
At the time of the earliest journal entries, Marianne has already married and her husband has intercepted their correspondence, which included speculations on Anne and Marianne forming a household together after the (much older) husband's death. At this point Anne begins using her cipher in the correspondence for key passages, as well as in her journals, But relations with Marianne were becoming strained from the separation and Anne's thoughts turned once more to an earlier lover, Tib (Isabrlla Norcliffe), who was part of the York social circles of her youth.
This chapter comes from the angle of racially-targeted immigration restrictions. Gendered dress comes into the subject, but in an oblique way. One illustration: a Chinese woman who cross-dressed to stow away on a ship to San Francisco in 1910 was charged with violating immigration law, but not with cross-dressing offences. In the context of immigration law (and especially laws targeting Asian immigrants), cross-dressing came into the rationale, not as a charge against specific individuals, but as a categorical basis for exclusion involving gendered aspects of racial stereotyping.
[Note: I think the first two paragraphs here actually belong with chapter 4, I lost my section marker somehow.]
In contrast to many of the “decency” laws that disproportionately targeted minorities (such as anti-prostitution laws), cross-dressing prosecutions tended to ignore members of racial minorities unless some other significant factor were involved. This falls naturally out of the framing of normative gender as an inherently “white” possession. Therefore transgression against normative gender can only be done by those who had access to it in the first place.
This section summarizes the connections and intersections of legal and social attitudes toward non-normative bodies, whether involving gender, sexuality, race, or disability. These “problem bodies” provoked a combination of fascination and hostility which was resolved by instituting legal regulations to create a “safe” public space for those fitting into normative paradigms while permitting marginal existence to others as long as it served those in power.
Transgender individuals were the group most seriously affected by both the anti-cross-dressing laws and the intense scrutiny required to enforce them. Enforcement of something as subtle as whether the clothing being worn matched an approved body wearing it required both the police and those supporting their efforts to look closely at suspects and interpret a variety of clues. The crime, after all, was “public visibility”--if a viewer couldn’t detect the transgression, in theory it didn’t exist.
This chapter surveys specific examples of prosecutions for cross-dressing from the archival record. The examples show that although there were a wide variety of contexts in which the law could have been enforced, from those living transgender lives to feminist dress reformers to young people of both sexes cross-dressing for a night on the town, in fact arrests tended to be used tactically, following their underlying purposes. Two different categorical distinctions emerge that the law was trying to address: men versus women, and typical versus atypical gender identity.
In 1857, a woman arrested for cross-dressing successfully challenged the charge on the basis that there was no law against what she had done. Six years later, that legal absence was altered. The anti-cross-dressing law was the result of three stages of logic: that cross-dressing, prostitution, and a variety of other activities constituted indecency; that indecency was a social problem that needed to be addressed; and that local laws were an appropriate solution to that problem.
This chapter lays out the historic and cultural background of cross-gender behavior in mid-19th century California, and in San Francisco in particular. The demographic effects of the Gold Rush, with its sudden and overwhelming immigration of miners (primarily male) is the most obvious, but this came hard on the heels of the forcible transfer of California from Mexico to the United States, with resulting upheavals in the balance of power between various racial, economic, and religious groups.
In the second half of the 19th century, a number of U.S. cities instituted laws against cross-dressing. Past studies have tended to investigate this topic from a context of gender transgression or sexuality, seeking to claim that piece of history variously for gays and lesbians or for transgender people, or simply for gender non-conformists in general.
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