Are We Proud Yet?

This article uses the lens of one particular well-documented life in the 19th century to track the shifting images and understandings of female masculinity during that era, and perhaps incidentally to comment on the general environment of shifting understandings of gender and sexuality that continue up to the present. One of the points being made is that for modern people to try to pin down one specific label or category for a historic person undermines the variable ways in which that person themself may have reported their own understanding.

Frances “Frank” Ann Wood Shimer grew up in New York, became an educator including founding and leading a college, and eventually retired to Florida and helped start the citrus industry there. Throughout this life, Frank (her preferred version of her name) used a variety of information sources to develop, shape, and revise her understanding of her identity. [Note: The author of the article uses female pronouns because, despite expressing various aspects of masculinity, Shimer identified her accomplishments as those of a woman who was proud to serve as an example of what women could achieve.) Cleves has identified five successive frameworks: “didactic literature, romantic friendship, phrenology, pioneer chronicles, and sexology.” The title of the article is a deliberate homage to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, which itself plays off the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

The first stage draws on literature aimed at children to instruct them in the dangers of cross-gender behavior and presentation. This was a genre that developed in the early 19th century in support of changing views of gender roles and the tacit recognition that those roles were not “natural” but must be trained into children. This literature established the parameters that girls should be modest, quiet, and non-athletic, whereas boys were expected to be loud, boisterous, athletic, and competitive. Shimer’s school essays reflect these models, depicting a domestic life as desirable, but at the same time rebelling against expectations by insisting on using the name Frank, rather than Frances, which was treated as a “youthful mistake.”

The articles discusses several typical stories of the type used for gender indoctrination and speculates that Shimer would likely have been familiar with them and that they might have shaped her later recollections of her childhood, such as a disinterest in playing with dolls, a love of outdoor activities, and a tendency to disruptive behavior in school. Like the “boyish girls” in the morality tales, Shimer occasionally cross-dressed as a child to engage in work that earned her enough to pay for her own advanced schooling. Unlike the girls in books, she never “learned her lesson” and retreated to feminine behavior.

At normal school, training to become a teacher, Shimer became part of the culture of romantic same-gender friendships common to single-sex schools. Although the particular institution she attended was co-educational, socializing was mostly gender-segregated. Close relationships with fellow female students are recorded in her “friendship album” (a type of scrapbook and public journal popular at the time). These include exchanges of poetry with Cindarella Gregory, using the conventional romantic language of such friendships, often drawn from popular poetry copied from magazines. Shimer was hardly alone in using a male-coded nickname when engaging in romantic friendships, though perhaps more unusual in using it as a regular thing, rather than only in the context of particular relationships. Male nicknames between intimate friends were a part of the culture of romantic friendship. Cleves speculates that her more general use of a male-coded name may have served as a signal of her deeper romantic interest in women. [Note: As in her book Charity and Sylvia, Cleves is given to phrasing speculations in a way that can become tricky to distinguish from evidence-based conclusions. “The [name]…may have signaled…suggests that…”]

After graduation separated them, the relationship with Cindarella Gregory was sufficiently intense that Shimer strategized to get both of them teaching in the same location, while worrying that she might be hampering Gregory’s career in the process. But the opportunity came when Shimer was asked to help found a seminary on the frontier in Illinois and was able to bring Gregory in as one of the teachers. They shared a household and bed for the next two decades, even after Shimer married—though evidently the marriage was to stave off rumors about a possible male romance, not about her arrangement with Gregory. The two Shimers never cohabited (he immediately left for medical school) and there is no indication that it was anything but a marriage of convenience. However when Gregory married, it caused a break between the two women. Later, Shimer found a new female partner in Adelia C. Joy and that relationship lasted until her death. Photographic portraits of Shimer with each of her partners follow the artistic conventions for married couples, with Shimer filling the pose normally taken by a husband.

Shimer’s interest in science and medicine led her into a third framework, which Cleves identifies as phrenology, but is a bit broader than that. [Note: Technically, phrenology concerns itself with the shape of the skull, but the theories here involve various physical variations and their supposed relationship to personality and intellect. The field also overlaps somewhat with eugenics and can go to bad places.] Shimer had invited a famous phrenologist to present lectures at her school and was particularly interested supposed gender differences expressed via phrenology. Shimer’s own analysis concluded she “had a larger and more powerful brain than the majority of men.” Shimer notes her reaction to the claim that she was “cut out for a man” as being “Not so very flattering either I don’t think.” Phrenology offered the possibility that gender-coded traits could instead by interpreted as physiology-linked traits, such that women could make positive claims to male-coded traits such as intelligence, leadership, and assertiveness without becoming men.

Cleves once again moves into speculation, saying that phrenology “may also have provided Shimer with a context for understanding another quality connected to her masculinity: her desire for intimacies with women.” Some theories based in phrenology relating to same-sex attraction are discussed. Then we get another sequence of “likely..may have…could be read…may have read.” While I admire the lengths Cleves goes to in providing historic and cultural background for her subjects, I get very frustrated when the connections she makes between the two are all framed in speculative language.

The next context for Shimer’s understanding of female masculinity comes through heroic traditions of female pioneers whose lives and actions contrasted greatly with the new models of femininity that emphasized passivity and domesticity. Pioneer women were celebrated for physical prowess and courage. [Note: Somewhat unfortunately, these narratives also existed with a tradition of erasing Native Americans from the historic present, and valorizing the white settlers as being a new foundation of history.] Shimer, in her memoirs, leveraged this tradition both by emphasizing her own “frontier” role in establishing the Illinois academy, but also harking back to a namesake and relative who was part of a prominent “kidnapped by natives” story and became a powerful presence within the Miami Nation. Despite the problematic aspects, the “frontier heroine” tradition provided a context for praising women for male-coded attributes and for positing that all women had the potential to be strong and self-reliant, thus redefining womanhood. Shimer’s work in establishing what would later be renamed the Frances Shimer Academy was constantly praised in gendered terms, noting that she “did the work of two men” and that it had been established with “no man’s aid.”

By the time Shimer retired to Florida (retired from teaching, but not from continued enterprise!), sexology was becoming better known in popular reception. The work of people like Krafft-Ebing reanalyzed the culture of romantic friendship and the lesbian encounters of students and teachers at single-sex academies as being pathological. Educated and economically independent “new women” were another target for psychoanalysis. Shimer pushed back against this framing in magazine essays, praising educated women and arguing that their critics were over-reacting and “hysterical” (using the term advisedly, in contradiction of its usual gendered implications). Although she rejected negative framings of female masculinity, Cleves suggests that in writing her memoirs, Shimer used the format and tropes of “invert” case studies to describe her own life and experiences as reflecting an innate masculinity. (Though her memoir is very vague on the subject of her romantic relationships.)

The concluding section of the articles discusses the value of viewing Shimer’s life history through the lens of trans studies, regardless of whether one considers her to fall within the category of transgender.