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.
Historic Cross-dressing: General
Any instance of a woman (or someone assigned as female) wearing male-coded garments, either overtly or for the purpose of passing as male, that doesn't fall in one of the following more specific groups.
LHMP entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #52 - Rupp 2009 Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women
Chapter 1 (Introduction)
A discussion of terminology, some of the cross-cultural problems of defining the topic of the book, and a statement of intent.
Chapter 2 (In the Beginning: 40,000-1200 BCE)
(by Rose Fox)
The book is primarily about Germany, but it touches on a lot of international issues. Chapter 1 analyzed two German novels about French women who cross-dressed to fight in wars. For my purposes, the most useful bit was a list of actual female French soldiers who wore men's uniforms. [Yay, more research to do!]
(blogged by Heather Rose Jones)
This chapter focuses primarily on the history of women participating in military contexts in male dress, whether actual disguise was the intent or not.
Starts off with Joan of Arc, as usual.
This review will necessarily be somewhat cursory, as the entire book is relevant to the LHMP project. In general, I will summarize data not covered in detail elsewhere, and include references to the rest.
There was a theatrical counterpart to the real life cross-dressing women discussed in the previous chapter. It had become the fashion for women to play certain types of male roles on stage, under the cover term “breeches parts”. This was part of the contradictory acceptance/rejection of women in male disguise. Acceptability was not related to how well the disguise was pulled off: “masculine” clothing among fashionable women (such as riding habits) might be mocked while women discovered after passing completely as soldiers might be lauded.
Chapter 3: Motives
While the academic “queer studies” movement has analyzed a great many “high culture” works in literature and art, looking for evidence of same-sex impulses, this approach has been less useful for (or perhaps less interested in) an understanding of the ordinary lives of average people who might have had those same impulses. For this purpose, identifying lesbian motifs in works like the Roman de Silence or interpreting nuns’ adoration of vulva-like images of the wounds of Christ as homoerotic is somewhat beside the point.
Chapter 6: The L-Word in Women’s History
This book as a whole is a “state of the field” analysis of women’s history as an academic discipline, and especially of women’s history (indeed, history in general) covering eras before the 19th century. This summary will cover only the chapter specifically on lesbian history.
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