Pioneer Cross-Dressers by Caroline Lawrence

Cross-dressing Caroline Lawrence

We've been having some fun discussions about cross-dressing here at the History Girls blog over the past four weeks. We have talked about cross-dressing in historical fiction, cross-dressing in TV tropes (including manga), cross-dressing in real life, sometimes even cross-dressing in our own lives, (usually as tomboys mistaken for real boys or dressing up for "research" purposes.)

My current passion is America in the second half of the 19th century.

It was an age of pioneers, visionaries & non-conformists. My own maternal ancestors headed west in the 1860s and spent subsequent decades in Utah, then Nevada, then Washington and finally California.

It was a period when pioneer women often travelled thousands of miles under unimaginably harsh conditions, wearing whalebone corsets, narrow bonnets and hoop skirts that could easily catch fire. It was a period when pregnancy was considered something almost shameful and never an excuse to rest from chores.

It was a period when thousands of men went off to war, leaving the women to run their stores, farms and businesses while continuing their normal female duties.

It was a challenging time to be a woman. The stories of female fortitude never fail to humble me.

hoping the men are making the right life-or-death choices...

The 2011 film Meek's Cutoff shows us female fortitude under unusually constrained conditions. The story follows three pioneer families and their guide on the Oregon Trail. Stephen Meek is an arrogant "guide" full of bluster and bravado. He has suggested the eponymous shortcut and now the pioneers seem to be hopelessly lost. The women have to work hard at cleaning, cooking, mending and knitting while Meek and their husbands ride ahead and gaze off towards the horizon, making life or death decisions.

They movie is a clever piece of storytelling. When the lights in the cinema first go down, the curtains part all the way, but the film occupies only the middle of the wide screen. Why would the filmmaker do that? Kelly Reichardt is showing us the world from the women's point of view: blinkered by their bonnets.

Later, the audience has to strain to hear what the men up ahead are saying. Why did the filmmaker do that? Why didn't she make the sound quality better? Once again we realise that Kelly Reichardt is showing us how bonnets could muffle your hearing as well as restrict your vision. And how the men aren't concerned with what the women think anyway.

Miss Frances Clayton

Is it any wonder that some women rebelled against constricting clothes and restricting social mores? Is it any wonder that some women craved the freedom that men enjoyed?

In my research, I have come across several types of real-life cross-dressers from this period. They are invariably women who chose to dress as men, not vice versa.

First are the women who dressed as men for a few hours at a time at the melodeon or music hall. (For more on British Music Hall cross-dressers, check out Essie Fox's recent History Girls blog.)

Then there are the women who pretended to be boys or young men in order to enlist in the Civil War. Unwilling to "stay at home and weep", many of them wanted to actively take part. Some kept up the ruse for months or even years. Some were only discovered after being wounded or killed. Others were never found out. Many of them, like Frances Clayton (above) could spit, swear and drink as well as any other soldier. You can read more about these women soldiers of the Civil War HERE.

Something strange about that driver...

But the most astonishing breed of pioneer cross-dressers were the women who passed most of their lives as men.

Some of these women will never be known, for they kept their secret to the grave.

But one of them is quite famous.

Charlie Parkhurst came to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and found his calling as a stagecoach driver. Charlie wore an eye-patch, smoked cigars and packed a pistol. He once fought off an outlaw called Sugarfoot and his gang while driving the passenger-filled stagecoach at breakneck speed. He performed other acts of bravery and skill and boasted that no passenger was ever injured on his watch. But "One-Eyed" Charlie was an eccentric. He slept in the barn with the horses, liked to bathe alone in streams, never drank on the job and never visited the "girls upstairs". Finally, after thirty years on the job, rheumatism forced Charlie to retire to Watsonville, California. Later he got cancer but refused all medical treatment.

Charlie died in 1879 and when a routine autopsy was performed, imagine everyone's surprise when it was discovered that he was a she! Charlie's real name was Charlotte. She had been a horse-loving orphan who came west to start a new life. And boy, did she have a new life; I haven't told you the half of it!

As always, history often comes up with stories more amazing than anything we could invent.

The hero of Caroline Lawrence's first Western Mystery is P.K. Pinkerton, a 12-year-old private eye and master of disguise (i.e. cross-dresser par excellence). The Case of the Deadly Desperados is available in hardback, kindle or audiobook format. 

Cross Dressing: Trying To Be George - by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine I never wore a dress or a skirt if I could help it, and certainly not if my best friend was around - we always wore shorts or trousers (then termed 'trews').  We were tomboys (or we liked to think we were): we were keen on outdoorsy things.  We both had brothers: together we made rafts out of oildrums and bits of wood and tried to sail them on the River Wharfe; we fought the boys in the playground and got told off; we went up on Ilkley Moor with another friend who HAD A PONY: we hid in the wooden hut shelter by Ilkley Tarn and made ghost noises as old ladies went past.  We looked for adventures.

Actually, though, I was really a wuss.  I couldn't manage to climb up into the roofspace of the hut.  I could climb a rope, ride a bike, and do a rising trot on a pony, but I was otherwise useless at all sports.  Despite the raft, I couldn't swim.  (Did our parents have any idea what we were up to?) I did wear skirts if my friend wasn't around - and panicked about what she would think if she happened to see me.  And I was a complete bookworm - and so, I suspect, was she.

We may have been trying to channel George.

Now I assume you all know who George is, but I'll tell you just in case: George is the tomboy heroine of Enid Blyton's immensely popular 'Famous Five' series, 21 books in all, which have never been out of print since 'Five On  A Treasure Island' was published in 1942.  Her real name is Georgina, but she refuses to answer to any name but 'George': she dresses like a boy and has cropped curly hair, she is 'as brave as a lion', never tells a lie, and is also, enviably, the owner of faithful Timmy, the gang's devoted dog.  By strangers (especially stuffy new tutors and shady criminal types) she is generally mistaken for a boy, a mistake she takes as a compliment.

George was a great relief  to my generation.  She was usually in the forefront of the action, even in the illustrations, thus:

If there was a secret tunnel to be crawled down, or a midnight mission to embark upon, George would be there, with Timmy at her side always ready to have the essential scrawled message pinned to his collar: Trapped on Mystery Marsh.  The maths tutor is a German spy.  The submarine will surface at midnight.  Call Scotland Yard!   George was fiery, too.  She had a temper and she used it.  She got into trouble for being rude: yet her instincts were always right.  While Julian, Dick and Anne would shake their heads over the tea-table, George, banished to her room, would be spotting the mystery lights winking from the moor.  Who would not want to be like her? - especially when the alternative looked like this:

This soppy girly is Anne, mistaking a train for a volcano...

"I'm as good as a boy, any day!" was George's defiant cry: and so she was.   But why did she have to dress as a boy to prove it?

I think one of the reasons for the popularity of cross-dressing in children's fiction - and unless for comic effect, it's always girl to boy, not the other way around - is because girls needed so badly to read about adventurous heroines, and for some reason the adults writing for them were unable to imagine the possibility of having adventures in skirts.  The default assumption was that women and girls did NOT have adventures; were hangers-on in history; led boring lives.

Thankfully, this attitude has changed, but I'm talking about my childhood in the 1960's - not so very long ago really, but old habits died hard. You only have to look at the school stories packaged separately, as they were - 'The Bumper Book for Boys', 'The Bumper Book for Girls'.  The boys would get tales of historical derring-do, swordfights, brawls, sea-stories, war stories, plus practical tips on collecting hawk-moth caterpillars, how to make a compass with a cork, a magnet, a needle and saucer of water, and how to find your way in a forest by observing the moss on the north sides of trees.  The girls' books would involve tales about  flower fairies, the Girl Guides and Brownies, rivalries at hockey, lacrosse, and the ballet, how to make a Welsh rarebit, crochet a pretty mat for the table, and fold linen napkins into waterlilies or swans.

No wonder we wanted to be boys. No wonder we wanted to be George.  And since boys also read 'The Famous Five' - in droves - George was our ambassador: incontrovertible if fictional proof that girls could have adventures too.

In spite of the obvious real-life historical examples of women like Grace Darling, Flora Macdonald or Florence Nightingale, writers stuffed their female leads into breeches if they were to do anything exciting.  Geoffrey Trease, a writer of highly popular and well-written historical adventure stories for both boys and girls, nearly always provided a cross-dressing heroine.  There's  'Kit Kirkstone' aka Katherine Russell, in 'Cue For Treason', running away from an arranged marriage, falling in with a group of players, becoming Shakespeare's Juliet, and ending up helping to foil a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth I.  There's Angela D'Asola in 'The Hills of Varna' - a young Venetian scholar who - disguised as a boy - assists in the rescue of a priceless Greek manuscript from destruction at the hands of barbarous and ignorant monks. The trouble with these stories - and with Enid Blyton's George - was that they fostered in my mind and that of my friend the unconscious belief that to be adventurous or lead an interesting life, girls had to resemble boys.  Which not-so-subtly suggested girls per se were still somehow inferior.

I was interested to read the author's notes at the back of my copy of  'The Hills of Varna' - which is still a blooming good read, by the way.  Trease claims his characters

... are no stranger than the real people who lived in the Italian Renaissance.  One has only to think of girls like Marietta Strozzi, who broke away from her guardians at the age of eighteen, lived by herself in Florence, and had snowball matches by moonlight with the young gentlemen of that city; and Olympia Morata, who was lecturing on philosophy at Ferrara when she was sixteen.


Stirring stuff!  I thought I should look them up.  And if the whole truth is not quite as romantic as Trease makes it sound, it's more complex and in some ways far more interesting.  Here is Marietta Strozzi, in a bust by Desiderio da Settignano: she looks a cool and self-possessed young lady, who was said to be the greatest beauty of Florence.

You can find an article about her here: and despite the snowball fight (which wasn't a spontaneous street-corner affair between a gamine and a group of boys, but a piece of elaborate pageantry with political undercurrents) her life was bounded by the necessity to marry, and the limitations of being fatherless and "therefore" probably "stained".  The young man who wished to marry her was dissuaded from doing so.

As for Olympia Morata, whose picture is here, it's true she was a remarkable woman. Her father was tutor to the dukes of Ferrara, and - aged about twelve or thirteen,

already fluent in Greek and Latin, she became the friend and companion of the the young princess Anna D'Este. The court had protestant sympathies, and by sixteen Olympia was lecturing on Cicero and Calvin, writing books and translating psalms. In her early twenties she married Andreas Grunthler, a German Protestant who had come to Ferrara to study medicine. Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to Schweinfurt in Germany to evade the Roman Inquisition, but were caught in the middle of war. Schweinfurt was occupied by the soldiers of the resplendently-named protestant Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, Albrecht Alcibiades: and Olympia and her husband lived in dangerous conditions, at one point taking refuge in a wine cellar. Ultimately, the city was sacked and burned by Albert's enemies. In a letter to Cherubina Orsini, written on August 8, 1554 from Heidelberg, Morata describes her difficult escape from Schweinfurt:

Vorrei che aveste visto come io era scapigliata, coperta di straccie, ché ci tolsero le veste d'attorno, e fuggendo io perdetti le scarpe, né aveva calze in piede, sì che mi bisognava fuggire sopra le pietre e sassi, che io non so come arrivasse.

I wish you had seen how dishevelled I was, dressed in rags, because they had taken away our clothes, and in fleeing I lost my shoes and nor had I socks on my feet, so I had to flee over the stones and the rocks - I do not know how I made it. 


(Translation courtesy of Michelle Lovric.)

Shortly after arriving in Heidelberg, her husband accepted a position as professor of medicine at the university and the indefatigable Olympia began tutoring students in Greek and Latin. However, a fever that she had caught in Schweinfurt never really subsided, and a few months later she died. She was not quite 29 years old.

Which is sad, but not unusual for that place and time. What was truly unusual about Olympia was her intellect, which would have marked her out in any age. I think my point, however, is that these two sixteenth century women lived, by any standards, colourful, adventurous and energetic lives - and neither of them had to dress in boys' clothes to do it.




On a totally different historical subject, I'm also to be found blogging about Saint Brendan this morning on Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

REFLECTIONS ON TWO DIFFERENT MUSIC HALL ACTS

By Essie Fox


My novel, The Somnambulist, opens up in a Victorian music hall – in Wilton’s to be precise – a hall which is situated in Grace’s Alley in London’s East End and which still opens its doors for productions today. I really do recommend a visit, especially for one of the conducted tours which tell all about the hall’s history. And do prepare to be utterly charmed by the crumbling beauty of the place in which you can very almost ‘taste’ the glamour and 'bang’ of a bygone age.

The entrance doors to Wilton's hall

When I entered Wilton's entrance doors for a performance of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, I was entirely seduced by such an intimate theatrical space, where the frieze-fronted balcony of papier mache is supported by brass sugar-barley-twist posts.

Inside Wilton's music hall

Sitting in the darkened hall and seeing those metal posts sparkle when reflecting the glint of the stage lights, I imagined them as mirrors into the past, and however blurred and distorted those reflections might happen to be, I wondered what stories they might have to tell – what glorious pictures they might have to show from Wilton’s in its heyday.

One of Wilton's most famous faces - and one who appears in my story too - was the singer George Leybourne whose career really took off when he co-wrote That Daring Young Man on his Flying Trapeze, a song based on the acrobat Jules Leotard who was also quite a star, and after whom the item of sports clothing - the leotard - was named.

Jules Leotard

But it was the song, Champagne Charlie that really brought George Leybourne fame, when he appeared as a West End swell, very elegant in his topper and tails and carrying a silver-topped cane in his hand. Soon he was being sponsored by the champagne producer, Moet and Chandon – thereafter almost always seen with a bottle of Moet in his hand. which probably did more harm than good as George died in his early forties from what might well be described as a surfeit of the ‘the high life’ and 'the phizz'.

Wilton’s would have hosted many different kinds of act – from performing dogs to acrobats – and to continue with this month’s blog theme of ‘cross-dressing’ I’ve no doubt there would also have been ‘Drag Kings’ – acts in which women dressed up to imitate men such as Leybourne which (despite the sense of the Victorian age being one of repression and prudery) was always a popular turn – as were many of the songs  performed, full of 'sauce' and double entendre.

Two of my favourite Victorian male impersonators, or ‘mashers’, are the fictional Nan King and Kitty Butler from Sarah Waters’ wonderful novel, Tipping the Velvet which, whilst being very entertaining and providing a vivid picture of the Victorian music halls, is a fascinating commentary on gender and sexual acceptance, as well as the politics involved on the road to social justice and suffrage.

Vesta Tilley in drag costume 

One such real life character was Vesta Tilley who was born into a theatrical family in Worcester, England, in 1864. Vesta often appeared on stage as a child and from very early in her career preferred to play a boy or a man, saying, ‘I felt that I could express myself better if I were dressed as a boy.’ Vesta’s attention to the detail of her stage costume was such that she became a fashion icon for men. But, the females in her audience also adored her – enjoying the wry nods to illustrate men’s foibles and eccentricities to which her songs often alluded. 

She performed as a swell, a judge, a clergyman and a soldier – and to such acclaim that when she retired in 1920, nearly two million people signed the People’s Tribute as a mark of their thanks and respect. 

I think it both ironic and somehow rather touching that this woman who preferred to act as a man had a husband who went on to receive a knighthood, which meant that Vesta Tilley was thereafter known as 'Lady’.

Vesta Tilley as 'herself'




www.essiefox.com
www.virtualvictorian.blogspot.com

Cross Dressing and the Chevalier D'Eon by Imogen Robertson

I haven’t had a chance to use him in a novel as yet, but I can’t let cross-dressing month go by without reminding everyone of the wondrous story of the Chevalier d’Eon whose gender was a national obsession in 18th century Europe and who remains, I reckon, one of the most fascinating mysteries of the time. Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont was born in Tonnerre in 1728 and having received a standard masculine education, became a bit of a star among the diplomats of Louis XV. He did particularly well in the Court of the Empress Elizabeth in Russia. He became a Captain of the Dragoons on his return to France and was wounded during the Seven Years War. 1762 saw him in London, but although he did well in his negotiations with the government here, he got into trouble with the French Court. He was eventually granted a pension by the French government (possibly to buy his silence over his spying activities) but continued to live in England.Where the rumours about his sex began, it is difficult to say. Kirkby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum of 1820 suggests that he might have disguised himself by dressing in female clothing when he wanted to disappear from time to timeduring this period. Anyway, by the mid 1770’s large sums of money were being wagered on his gender. His attitude appears to have been one of ‘no comment’, but in 1777 one of these bets resulted in a court case in London. A Mr Hayes demanded payment of seven hundred pounds and produced witnesses who swore under oath that they knew for certain d’Eon was female. D’Eon did not take part in the trial, and swore that he himself stood to gain nothing from the bets placed. Then he returned to France and declared he was, in fact, a woman. Louis XVI said in that case he must dress and behave as one. D’Eon was at this point 49 years old.

From that point until her death she dressed in female clothing. It was said that her father had been so disappointed on the birth of a daughter, he had decided to bring up Mademoiselle D’Eon, as she was now called, as a man. Plenty of stories circulated as to how she was finding behaving as a female difficult. She could not be properly modest, refused to wear rouge and curtsied ‘in the rustic fashion’.She came back to England in 1785 after getting into trouble with the French Court for trying to serve again in the army. Her finances seemed precarious, but she gave various exhibitions of her fencing skills including one against Chevalier Saint George (another star of the age) at Carlton House on April 9th 1787.

In 1792 having sold all of her goods in London she petitioned the French Assembly to be allowed to take up arms again, saying that although she had now worn the dress of a woman for fifteen years she had never forgotten that she was formerly a soldier, and she demanded instead of her cap and petticoats, her helmet, her sabre and her horse. ‘I have been the sport of nature, of fortune, of war and peace, of men and women, of the malice and intrigue of courts. I have passed successively from the state of a girl to that of a boy from the state of a man to that of a woman. I have experienced all the odd vicissitudes of human life. Soon I hope with arras in my hands, I shall fly on the wings of liberty and victory to fight and die for the nation the law and the king.’

The petition was warmly applauded, but applause was all Mademoiselle received.

She died in poverty in London in 1811 having been cared for in the last years of her life by a widow called Mrs Cole… and the morning after her death was found to have been a man after all.

A number of surgeons were called and Mr Kirby reports the following statement was circulated:

So why did he dress as a woman? Kirkby believes it is because he stood to make money from the bets on his sex. Perhaps, but for 33 years? Transvestite? Transgendered? I wonder if it might be that during his years in Russia he learnt that he rather liked dressing as a woman. The Empress held regular cross-dressing balls and apparently looked very good in male costume. You can see what is very probably a portrait of her in male dress by following this link. The article is fascinating too. I don’t think anyone has the answer, but the reactions to the Chevalier at all stages of his life shed a fantastical light on gender attitudes in the 18th century, just as the glittering reflections from the chandelier in the Empress’s ballroom over the splendid transvestite costumes of her guests.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, (coughs and looks at shoes), I’m delighted to say my latest book, Island of Bones has been short listed for the CWA Ellis Peters Award. Fingers crossed.

The Lady of the Mercians: Sue Purkiss

When Caroline Lawrence first suggested that we might have a cross-dressing theme going on this month chez The History Girls, I didn't at first remember that there is an instance of a girl dressing as a boy in any of my books. But there is. In Warrior King.Athelfled (she's called Fleda for short in the book) dresses up as a boy, because when her father, Alfred, flees the Danes to go into hiding in the marshes of Athelney, she feels he needs her there with him. As far as he is concerned, she is to go into hiding with her mother and siblings: they will be safer away from Alfred - he's the one Guthrum, the Danish leader, is after. The only way she can go with him is in disguise.

Generally, I think that cross dressing in historical fiction occurs because, as Marie-Louise Jensen has explained, as 21st century writers, we want our girls to get up to all sorts of things which would have been difficult in a long dress. After all, it wouldn't be much of a story if it went: Got up. Helped Mother make breakfast. Did some weaving. Had dinner. Walked in garden. Did some more on tapestry. Had supper. Played the harp a bit. Went to bed. And of course the social and cultural contexts played a part: quite apart from the practicalities, girls weren't expected to do much beyond the domestic. (Or so we believe... I do so distrust generalisations.)

But this wan't why Fleda had to borrow some of her brother's clothes and sneak in among Alfred's small band of riders. No - it was to do with point of view.

I wanted to write about Alfred for all sorts of reasons. I won't go into them here - if you're interested, you can go and have a look on my website, where you'll be warmly welcomed. But there was a difficulty. This was to be a book for young people, and so it needed to be written from a young person's's point of view.

This was no problem at all for the first part of the book, which is about Alfred's childhood - Alfred himself was the viewpoint character. But then I wanted to skip over the intervening years and write about his epic struggle with Guthrum - and in particular, his remarkable feat in emerging from Athelney, when surely no-one would have put the smallest denomination of Anglo-Saxon coinage on him regaining his crown: wiping the floor with Guthrum - and then, astonishingly, instead of executing his foe, converting him to Christianity and making a peace.

The problem was - who was to be my viewpoint figure? At first I toyed with the idea of the narrator being someone in Alfred's household. I tried it out - but it didn't really work for me; I wanted to keep the focus on Alfred, not on some new character. Then I wondered about Alfred's children. How old would they have been?

His son, Edward, was too young to be taking a very active part in things - from memory, he was about seven. But his oldest child was a daughter, Athelfled, and she would have been ten. Perfect! She could go with Alfred into exile in Athelney - she would be his inspiration and his chronicler. But he would not take her knowingly into such danger; hence the cross-dressing.

Interestingly. Athelfled did not spend the rest of her life making cakes or sewing tapestry. She was married at a young age to the King of Mercia. She had a daughter, but no son. When the king died, the people chose to be their leader not a noble thegn or a trusted warrior - they chose Athelfled, who became known as the Lady of the Mercians. The Lady, with her brother Edward, by now King of Wessex, defended their peoples against new Viking attacks.

Whether she wore a dress or trousers, history sadly does not record.

More Cross Dressing by Marie-Louise Jensen

Taking up Caroline Lawrence's theme again, I'd like to look at the reasons behind cross dressing in historical fiction. I think this will at least partly answer the point that's come up in the comments; why do we have plenty of girls dressing up as boys but so few boys dressing as girls?

In three of my books, the girls wouldn't dream of dressing up as boys. None of these main characters has any need to step outside her female role, though they might push at the boundaries of what that role allows. But in The Lady in the Tower, Eleanor dresses as a boy once in the story; to take part in a tournament.

This is a very practical necessity. Women weren't permitted to joust, so she needed to be in male disguise. And secondly, you needed to wear armour to do so. With the best will in the world, a Tudor dress wouldn't fit inside a suit of armour. Eleanor has no particular desire to be a man, but she wishes to do something that men do. It's been her dream. So cross dressing is born of a desire to take part in a forbidden acivity.

In my forthcoming novel, The Girl in the Mask, there is a lot more cross-dressing going on. Early Georgian costume for the wealthy (like Tudor dress) was a way of showing status. It proved you could afford a dressmaker, the latest fashions and the costliest of materials. BUT and it's an important but, above all, it proved that you were too weathly to need to work. Because women's gowns were utterly impractical. You were laced tightly so that breathing was difficult; any kind of exertion became problematic. The gown and petticoats were heavy and bulky, so it was difficult to move about. And the fabrics were often brocade silk, satins or velvet so they weren't easily washable. So you couldn't risk playing, climbing, running, sitting on the ground or a hundred other things you might want to do. You could decorate a drawing room or grace a ballroom, flirt with your fan, or if you were very daring, show off your gown at the promenade - which was paved so there was less risk of dirtying your hems.

How can any girl possibly have adventures that are exciting to the modern reader while confined in this way? My character Sophia wants to climb out of her window, roam the city at night, climb out over the city walls and commit highway robbery. She can do none of those things in a brocade silk gown, hoop and layers of petticoats.

Try reversing this. What was there in a woman's world, that a man might be desperate to try out? Um. Absolutely nothing. He could do all of it - more easily - as a man. Nothing was denied to men but fainting and the vapours and they were caused by costume and hardly enviable.

This perhaps explains the lack of cross dressing by men in historical fiction. I'll just mention two exceptions, both from the novels of Georgette Heyer. In The Talisman Ring, Ludovic Lavenham dresses as a French maid to avoid capture by the Bow Street Runners. And Robin Tremain in The Masqueraders becomes a lady to evade capture for his Jacobite past. The former is made comic, as several people have described. But the latter is serious; it is a life-and-death disguise. Even so, Robin is described as 'humilitated' when his disguise is seen through by a friend. But it is only the need for disguise for their own safety that makes this cross dressing even remotely acceptable.

It's not cool for boys to play at being girls. It's not aspirational. Wheras the other way around, cross dressing opens up a world of freedoms and opportunites. As the saying used to go; boys have all the fun. We can be glad that has changed.

CROSS DRESSING by Mary Hooper

Before anyone imagines the History Girls all sitting down to write booted and suited in pinstripe, just let me say that cross-dressing is the topic that Caroline Lawrence has kindly set this month, knowing that most of us have, somewhere or other, a reference to this in our historical fiction.




In THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TIMES OF ELIZA ROSE, Eliza and Nell Gwyn (with whom Eliza is working as a maid) dress as boys to attend an evening of revelry at Foxhall Gardens. They wear dark velvet doublets slashed with gold and short breeches; with Nell’s being cut daringly high to show off as much of her shapely legs as possible, for she hopes to catch the eye of Charles II, the “Merry Monarch”. Nell Gwyn sometimes played boys on stage, too, clad in a lot less than she’d have to wear as a girl.

In THE BETRAYAL, which is the last book of a trilogy set at the court of Queen Elizabeth, my main character, Lucy, puts on a lad’s clothes to attend a performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and, on the way out, gets spotted as a fine-looking boy. She is asked to join the company and play a small female part in the next play they are to perform. So then I have a girl, disguised as a boy, disguised as a girl. This was great fun to write, especially when the other players, thinking Lucy is a boy, comment on her marvellously natural feminine charms.

Lucy herself, for once unencumbered by corset, bodice, layers of petticoats and so on, loves the freedom that being dressed as a boy offers:

Dressed and capped to my satisfaction, the thought of the small adventure I was about to embark on put me in such high spirits that I couldn’t resist acting the lad all the way to the Curtain Theatre. Much to Sonny’s dismay I knocked off his cap, chased after a dog and even spent some time looking in the window of a barber-surgeon’s shop, pondering aloud whether or not I should go in and be shaved.

Historically speaking, for a girl to dress as a boy is regarded as sexy, daring and a bit naughty, but the circumstances have not so far risen in any of my books where it has been necessary for a boy to don a girl’s clothes. Shades of Danny la Rue: it just doesn’t have the same appeal that way round, does it? In the book I am currently writing, however, (no title yet) it will becomes necessary for the main male character to disguise himself as a woman - and I am hoping I can make it work without the whole thing degenerating into farce.

Did the Tudors do it? Cross dressing and all that

Barbara Mitchelhill

OK Caroline Lawrence, so I admit it. I have thought about cross dressing. Not for me, of course. There’s hardly a need as I’m rarely out of trousers. I just thought how much easier it would be if my girl characters could dress in boys' clothes. Stepping back in time, boys had so much more fun, didn’t they?

In my first historical novel, Run Rabbit Run which is set in 1942, I steered clear of cross dressing. I wasn’t tempted. But I had to keep reminding myself that my lead character, Lizzie Butterworth, wouldn’t be cavorting around in jeans and trainers, she would be wearing a skirt and sensible shoes. And I had to remember that during the bitterly cold winter, she wouldn’t have nice woolly tights to keep her nether regions warm. Chapped knees, for sure. And when that north wind blew… Oh dear.

My next historical novel was different. Road to London

(out in April 2012) is a rollicking adventure set in the Tudor period when girls wore bodices and kirtles and petticoats. How inhibiting! How grubby! Your hem would drag in the muddy streets unless you grabbed hold of it and lifted it clear. Luckily there was a solution for my heroin, Alice. (Yes! Here comes the cross dressing!) After a traumatic episode involving a particularly nasty apothecary who hacked off her hair, Alice ran away dressed as a boy and joined her friend, Thomas, in Shakespeare’s acting troupe at the Curtain.

This was a risky thing to do as girls and women were banned from acting and if she was found out, the punishment would be severe indeed. But Alice, being a game girl, tucked her sprouting bosom under a doublet, and learned to behave like a boy. In fact, she soon found that she was rather good at spitting and using her fists and oh, how much easier it was to run without the encumbrance of a skirt! When she had to sleep in a room with the other apprentice actors, there was no danger of her revealing her true identity. In contrast to TV’s sexy sagas, the Tudors were not likely to remove all their clothes before going to bed but slept in their under wear, and so Alice’s secret was protected. I did question how she would cope if the boys had a peeing competition as boys like to do. But I skipped over that one.

I obviously liked the idea of cross dressing because I went on to write a double cross dressing scene. Yes, really. Is this a record, Caroline Lawrence? In Road to London I have Alice pretending to be a boy, pretending to be a girl when she plays the part of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

It’s all good fun. We girls really do have the best of it.

Characterisation by Clothes? Theresa Breslin

It was one of those serendipity moments.

Seated by chance at a Society of Authors dinner with Naomi Tarrant, Head of the Costume Museum in Edinburgh, I had a wonderful conversation which made me think seriously on the importance of clothes in characterisation.

I was writing REMEMBRANCE, my book about youth in World War One, and wanted to know if it was true that the name of a new colour known as “munitions blue” had come into use then because of the blue overalls designed for women munitions workers to wear. We went on to discuss the huge change in fashion that took place during the first World War.

I commented on the raising of hemlines from which I managed to get a lighter note into a section of the book - quite difficult to do when writing about that War. Naomi said that it wasn’t the raising of hemlines that she thought made a significant difference in women’s lives but the widening of skirts. She asked me to consider how a modern woman is forced to walk if her skirt is constrained, for example wearing a long tight dress to a formal occasion. We take smaller steps, we move gingerly up and down stairs, off and on pavements etc, and, she pointed out, often you lean on someone’s arm (usually a man’s). Think of suddenly being able to walk along widely and freely pacing your steps. Good grief, you might actually run! Think of what happens inside your head when you’re doing this, of actions you can take and the many varying decisions you might make, and how this helped change women’s views and attitudes.

My aunt who worked as a land girl in World War Two said the very best part of it was that she got to wear trousers which meant that as an adult she could once again do a handstand in public! It was something she’d loved doing as a child but had to give up when she got older and wore stockings and suspenders with dresses and skirts.

As a writer I reveal character via their deeds and words - a story is character in action. In real life a person’s true character should not be defined by clothes, “A man’s a man, for a’ that” said Robert Burns. My more recent historical books have been set further back in time where clothes were seen to define a person in all sorts of ways.

THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECY takes place in sixteenth century France during the Regency of Catherine de’ Medici and the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre. In it the heroine, Mélisande, daughter of the court minstrel is forced to flee and disguises herself as a young man in order to escape. Partly this was the dictates of the plot as she would be safer and attract less comment if she travelled as a boy rather than a girl, but it did allow for some interesting developments.

Trying to climbing into cart with the other servant boys leaving the castle Mélisande shrinks away from their jostling and slapping of each other in the kind of rough play to which she’s totally unaccustomed.
 But then, terrified at being left behind, she copies their ways and grabs the arm of the boy nearest to her and shoves herself rudely in among the group. Although she knows she’s pursued and is in fear of her life she begins to recognise the freedom the disguise gives her: the access to knowledge, the ability to go where she pleases, to listen to conversations she wouldn’t normally hear. In order to speak to Nostradamus, the famous soothsayer and discover whether his prophecy about the Angel of Death refers to her own family, she travels to his home in Salon in the south of France. Here, in her guise of a young man, she flirts with the girl selling apples in the market. When the apple seller blushes and gives her the apple for nothing Mélisande is gratified by the power her new role affords her.

This is challenging for the writer. The character behaves differently from before, because, within the story, she has to act as a boy. But during this period her mindset would alter and thus her character accordingly. Therefore so should her reactions to future circumstances and situations.

As my story progressed the ramifications of the girl as a boy grew greater. The Governor of Salon, Lord Thierry, hears Mélisande playing her mandolin on a street corner. He appreciates musical talent and is moved by and attracted to the young player…

Theresa Breslin’s latest historical novel, PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION, has been shortlisted for the Young Quill Award & the Scottish Children’s Book Award, and was voted favourite book by the young people shadowing the Carnegie Medal Book Awards.

Cross Dressing History Girls

by Caroline Lawrence

Blackadder and "Bob"

Come on. Admit it.

You’ve all thought about doing it.

And some of you actually have done it once or twice, haven’t you?

In at least one of your historical novels you’ve dressed a girl as a boy or – less commonly – a boy as a girl. (Or in the case of one History Girl, a man pretending to be a male impersonator dressed up as a woman.) My guess is that at least half the History Girls who write for this blog have a cross-dressing protagonist somewhere in our books.

Here is just a quick random sampling of cross-dressing in novels by some of us History Girls. (I asked for contributions and hope I've avoided mentioning any that might be considered "spoilers".)

Grace as Dick

In Mary Hoffman's Troubadour, Elinor dresses as a boy to escape a loveless marriage and seek out the man of her dreams. Way back in 1994, Mary wrote Amazing Grace about a girl named Grace who loves to play the boys' parts in pantomimes.

Marie-Louise Jensen’s forthcoming book, The Girl in the Mask, features a girl who dresses as a boy by night in order to enjoy freedoms she is denied as an upper-class girl, including highway robbery.

In The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose, Mary Hooper dresses Eliza and her pal Nell Gwyn as boys so they can attend a royal entertainment at Foxhall Gardens.

Celia Rees has cross-dressing characters in not one but two of her novels: Sovay and Pirates!

Eve Edwards’ feisty heroine Cat Royal dresses as a boy in several of her adventures, too, but especially in Cat Among the Pigeons where she has to hide out in Westminster Boys School!

Halo is a girl

Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel, writing as Zizou Corder, have just given us Halo, an ancient Greek girl brought up by Centaurs, who has plenty of adventures disguised as a boy.

Teodora Gasperin in Michelle Lovric’s The Mourning Emporium, disguises herself as boy for the first half so that she can become a sailor on the Scilla, Venice’s floating orphanage.

Eleanor Updale is the one with the man dressed up as a man dressed up as a woman in her book, Montmorency's Revenge.

And I might be the worst offender of the lot. Not only do Flavia Gemina and her sidekick Nubia dress as boys in various of my own Roman Mysteries but The Scribes from Alexandria and The Fugitive from Corinth also feature major characters who are cross-dressers.

Cross-dressing is an especially popular theme in comic drama, e.g Plautus, Shakespeare & Molière, and also in historical fiction (e.g. Georgette Heyer & Geoffrey Trease). But I'm going to take you to a new place, one you might never have visited before.

TV Tropes is a fascinating cult fiction site which identifies themes and devices (don't call them clichés) common in popular films, TV, books, myth and especially Manga.

A Funny Thing...

Here are some of the subcategories of Cross-Dressing on TV Tropes:

Creepy Crossdresser - usually a "he" and mainly used for creep factor - e.g. Psycho's Norman Bates; Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill; The Big Bad Wolf

Wholesome Crossdresser - an attractive boy or girl dresses as the opposite sex for sensible reasons: to solve a mystery or escape detection. - e.g. Famous Five's George, LOTR's Eowyn, Boy2Girl by Terence Blacker, and many more.

Those are the two main categories. Here are some sub-categories. 

Disguised in Drag - a man dressed as a woman for purpose of disguise - e.g. Achilles on isle of Scyros; Some Like it Hot's Joe and Jerry; Tootsie;
Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (above right)

a distaff counterpart

Distaff Counterpart - a female version of a male hero
e.g. Supergirl; She-Hulk; Batgirl; Toy Story's Jesse, etc.

Harmless Lady Disguise - man wants to become invisible so dresses as lady
e.g. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Willow's Madmartigan, Sherlock Holmes, etc.

Hermaphrodite - someone who feels equally male/female and who may have the sexual organs of both - e.g. Hermaphroditus child of Hermes and Aphrodite; Middlesex; everyone on the planet in Ursula LeGuinn's The Left Hand of Darkness

Transsexual - a person who changes gender to feel more themselves - e.g. Tiresias the blind prophet of Thebes, Boys Don't Cry, Tom from the Cement Garden, Orlando, etc.

Attractive Bent Gender - a boy is very attractive when dressed as a girl & vice versa

bokukko

e.g. My hero/heroine P.K. Pinkerton in The Western Mysteries; Billy Krudup in Stage Beauty, Boys Don't Cry, etc.

Bokukko - in Japanese, a girl who refers to herself with masculine pronouns - e.g. mainly from Manga, like Takatsuki Yoshino (right) the girl who wants to be a boy

Tomboy - we all know this one: the girl who likes action and doesn't feel particularly "feminine" - TV Tropes excel themselves by listing subcategories of Tomboy such as the Cute Bruiser, the Faux Action Girl and the Badass Bookworm, who is often a "Stealth Tomboy".

Sweet Polly Oliver - a female who dresses as a boy for a specific reason
(the folk song's Sweet Polly Oliver disguises herself as soldier to follow her lover)

half Irish/half Apache

e.g. "Bob" from Blackadder (pictured at top of blog), Yentl, Mulan & lots of History Girls' heroines.

Why do we History Girls love cross-dressers? Is it because we want female protagonists but know that in almost every era except our own, females led pretty boring lives?

Or is there something deeper going on?

I've only blogged briefly, mainly to introduce you to the wacky world of TV Tropes, (and beware, this site is addictive), but I would love to hear why other History Girls like cross-dressing. If you want to blog in more depth about this, pop in the key word CROSS-DRESSING and we'll see if we can get a discussion going.