A History of Women in Men's Clothes

From Cross-Dressing to Empowerment

Norena Shopland

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526787682
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Les femmes dans l'histoire

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and travelled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behaviour, but many more got away with it. For the first time, A History of Women in Men’s Clothes looks at those thousands of individuals who broke conventions in the only way they could, by disguising themselves either for a brief moment or a whole life. Daring and bold, this is the story of the women who defied social convention to live their lives as they chose, from simply wanting more independence to move and live freely, to transgender and homosexual women cross-dressing to express themselves, this is women’s fight to wear trousers.

Chapter 1

To See Lovely Things

The nineteenth century saw a great rise in the number of women travellers – some accompanying husbands or other male family members; others wishing to experience new places or become missionaries; some simply to escape the stifling oppression of their homes. For wealthier women it could be an escape from boredom, as Isabella Bird complained, ‘nothing new, nothing exciting, but the same drudgery day in, day out’.1

Most women who travelled were accompanied by men, to avoid assaults or social condemnation. The attitude to their dependent roles as wives, daughters and sisters was compounded by the fact that any work undertaken on their travels, either scientifically or expeditionary, was often not taken seriously and either attributed to the man or simply ignored. A number of women did travel alone and often wrote up their exploits, but they were in the minority and most continued to wear female attire. Gertrude Bell, the famous explorer, wore silk petticoats – albeit with a pistol strapped to her thigh. Some adapted native costumes: Isabella Bird wore female Manchurian clothing in China and unlike many women who continued to ride side-saddle, she rode astride like a man – although she threatened to sue The Times if it published the fact.

Isabella was right to be worried, for the press could be scathing of women explorers who chose to wear male attire, questioning their femininity and attempting to put them aside in a category of ‘unnatural’. Frenchwoman Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin (1775–1847), described as the first solo woman balloonist and the first woman to make a parachute jump, suffered this kind of abuse. While there is not much evidence to support her wearing men’s clothes on a regular basis, she certainly did in 1802, when the Bury and Norwich Post reported that in France, she ‘went about that place in male attire. So much for female delicacy!’ The offensiveness being so great it required the clothing to be described in italics. The Post’s horror can be clearly seen when they go on to compare Jeanne’s unseemliness to that of fifty women in Pudukkottai, East Indies who chose to burn to death as they ‘preferred death to an exposure of their persons to the sight of man.’2

Equally controversial was Frenchwoman Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916), a highly regarded archaeologist and one of the few women who have been acknowledged as receiving the title of Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. When her husband Marcel was called to war, she dressed in a soldier’s uniform and served alongside him. Throughout her life she dressed as a male and appeared so convincing that many did not recognise her as a woman. Images of her with close-cropped hair, tight collars and a man’s jacket give her an androgynous appearance. Jane had very strong views on the attire assigned to women and declared that ‘women’s dress has done more to hamper women’s energy and brains than all the scolding’s administered to independent women by men from the time of Isaiah the prophet to the present day.’3

Not all approved of her choice. After causing a sensation when appearing at the theatre, one unnamed journalist in the Belfast News-Letter sniped, ‘That Mdme. Dieulafoy found a rough tourist suit very convenient in the interior of Asia and Africa is justly held to be no reason why she should don a dress coat at the Opera Comique.’4

At the end of the article, the journalist complained that the number of women wearing men’s clothes had risen, contrary to the law, but he was wrong – it had been never illegal in the UK for women to be in male attire. That was not the case in many European countries, however, particularly France, and it could have been this that confused him. The European law did have an impact on some British female travellers, such as in 1834 when a ‘trousered’ woman was detained at Calais and forced to apply for permission to continue her journey – with the police at her intended destination being ‘informed’ of her arrival.5

Jane Dieulafoy had received permission from the French authorities to wear men’s clothes and would often buy ready-made suits to save time. She said she wore them for convenience but there seems more to her desire to cross-dress than that. She wrote fiction and two of her novels, Volontaire (1892) and Frère Pélage (1894), include cross-dressing characters and both works are now considered early trans novels. In Frère Pélage a woman disguises herself as a monk, an idea which may have been inspired by Pelagia of Antioch from the fourth or fifth century who, having become religious, took to a cave on the Mount of Olives and remained there dressed in a monk’s habit. Her story was apparently an inspiration for Marina the Monk in the fifth century who lived undetected for ten years.

A similar dedication to wearing male attire outside the bounds of ‘convenience’ was shown by Austrian Ida Laura Pfeiffer (1797–1858), one of the earliest popular travel writers. The only daughter of six children, she was bold, enjoyed sport and exercise and ‘loved to dress like her brothers’. Indeed, her cross-dressing was attributed to her growing up with all boys.

She was 10 when her father died and her mother ‘could not understand why her daughter should prefer … the masculine trousers to the feminine petticoat’ so put an end to her unconventional ways. After the death of her husband in 1838, Ida began to travel and her first book, Reise einer Wienerin in das Heilige Land (A Vienna woman’s trip to the Holy Land) appeared in 1843, earning her enough money to carry on a roving life.

Most women travellers dressed in female attire, however, there were those who attempted to both dress and pass as men – such as two other Frenchwomen, Jeanne Baret (1740–1807), the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, and Rose de Freycinet (1794–1832), the first woman to record her experiences.

In 1766, the naturalist Philibert Commerçon was invited onto an expedition and, as no women were allowed on board a ship, his lover Jeanne Baret dressed as a man to be with him. Due to the large amount of equipment Commerçon took on board, he and his ‘assistant’ were given a cabin to themselves, helping Jeanne to keep up her disguise. Commerçon suffered from a bad leg and so it was Jeanne who did a great deal of the work, not just collecting specimens but cataloguing them; this left French admiral and explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville to describe her as an expert botanist, for which she received little recognition until her first biography in 2002.

Despite trying to pass as a man, Jeanne’s transvestitism was temporary and did not appear to fool many people. The same can also be said of Rose de Freycinet, who went to sea as a man. Rose accompanied her husband who had been given command of an expeditionary ship and the crew became very quickly aware of her sex, as did the Ministry for the Navy. Reaching Gibraltar, Rose maintained the masquerade at a dinner, the French Consul describing her as ‘dressed as a man in a blue frock-coat with trousers to match.’ Obviously, the disguise was not particularly convincing. Rose kept a diary detailing places, people and events, the first woman to do so, and it remains an important anthropological resource.

When women did travel on land, most of them upheld Western dress traditions and would wander about hot countries in voluminous suffocating dresses. A number did wear native attire such as Alexandrine Tinné, a Dutch explorer and the first woman to attempt to cross the Sahara. When she was young her ‘earliest developed tastes were those of an Amazon’6 and on the death of her father, she became the richest woman in Holland allowing her freedom to travel. She never married but spent her time exploring the Nile having ‘adopted the Egyptian dress’ but there are few images of her wearing this. It is worth bearing in mind that photographs and sketches of female travellers may seem to conform to dress conventions, but behind the lens they could and would dress more comfortably.

Isobel Burton, wife of the explorer Richard Burton, admitted they lived two lives:

we were always thoroughly English in our Consulate, and endeavoured to set an example of the way in which England should be represented abroad, and in our official life we strictly conformed to English customs and conventions; but when we were off duty, so to speak, we used to live a great deal as natives, and so obtained experience of the inner Eastern life … I always wore the men’s dress in our expeditions in the desert and up the country. By that I mean the dress of Arab men. This is not so dreadful as Mrs. Grundy may suppose, as it was all drapery, and does not show the figure.7

When female explorers cross-dressed, or adopted local attire, they rarely tried to appear as men. For example, in certain countries they still followed the requirement to veil their faces and there are images of Alexandrine Tinné doing so. Pioneering archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope’s was said to be quite ‘mannish’ and was subjected to gossip as a result. In the Middle East, she wore Turkish male clothing and later dressed as a Bedouin; but in 1889 as she approached Jerusalem, she was advised ‘by her native escorts to veil her face in conformity with Turkish usage, since in spite of her masculine attire, it was known that she was a woman.’8

Conversely, when women from Eastern countries arrived in Europe, their dress often created a sensation. The Birmingham Daily Post in 1889 described how two of the Shah’s wives, visiting Berlin, were dressed in ‘men’s clothes’ – ‘long black tunics, baggy pantaloons and loose cloaks so that they looked like boys.’9 Three Chinese women arrived in New Zealand (apparently the first to do so) described as ‘disguised in male attire’. But it was evident to a ‘close observer’ that their voices and general demeanour provided unmistakable evidence of their ‘real sex.’10 If their ‘real sex’ was evident were they really disguised, or simply wearing the loose pantaloons oriental women were known to wear?

In 1888, a journalist mused on the social demands that clothing places on people whilst describing a trip in Japan:

As we got further from the ordinary roads of travel, dress ceased almost entirely to differentiate sex: men and women, boys and girls, alike wore the blouse and tight trousers of rough blue cotton. It would seem, therefore, that civilization emphasizes sex – a nut perhaps for some of our more radical reformers to crack. Given unceasing and wholly unimaginative labour for both, and the sentimental distinctions between man and woman are obliterated. “Segregation is asexual,” remarked our professor sententiously.11

Despite his piece, few other writers considered how dress differentiates sex; instead, women were generally seen as sensationally different for wearing what was considered exclusively male attire. Bifurcated lower garments, no matter how ‘baggy’ they appeared, were considered trousers and to many Western societies, which followed a strict moral code governed by biblical rules, trousers were only for men.

Society’s reaction then would be comparable to a man wearing a dress today. When David Beckham wore a sarong in 1998, he was universally mocked. In 2017, a story about boys from Isca Academy in Exeter made international headlines when they defied a ban on shorts, even in a heatwave, and opted for skirts instead.12 In the same month, French bus drivers wore skirts in defiance of their no shorts rule during 30°C heat. The hundreds of social comments around these stories were overwhelmingly positive but only because they challenged what was seen as a ridiculous rule – the boys and men were seen as champions of common sense, not as champions for the right of males to wear female clothes. The handful of comments advocating that boys and men should be allowed to do so permanently were generally ignored.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the reports of women wearing trousers were, as with David Beckham, mocked or disapproved of. By the end of the century, the media, although accustomed to women wearing trousers, could still range in its commentary from criticism, through resignation, to complimentary.

Ménie Muriel Dowie (1867–1945) rode through the Carpathian Mountains alone and described her travels in a number of popular books. Her Women Adventurers (1893) covers well-known cross-dressing individuals and she defined the woman adventurer as:

not a woman who has achieved some heroic deed (whether in men’s clothes or not), nor yet the woman who has yielded to some strange freak and left the beaten track for a little time; far from this, she is the woman with one inherent, dominating passion for adventures, for change, for surprise; the woman who keenly loves to be overtaken by unexpected situations.

There were those who were not always convinced about female adventurers. ‘Cosmos’, writing in the South Wales Daily News in 1891, claimed that Ménie Dowie had visited places with plenty of good hotels and an abundance of tourists. ‘She would,’ wrote Cosmos, ‘have encountered more danger in the Essex salt marshes, where she would have been apprehended for masquerading in masculine attire.’13

Perhaps women felt that they could not achieve anything in their nati...