Jen Manion’s new book is a detailed, synoptic history of a fascinating dimension of 18th- and 19th-century cultural history in Britain and the US: it comprises dozens of anecdotes and narratives, primarily drawn from newspapers detailing the lives of people who were considered girls at birth, but who adopted masculine names and appearances and who loved and lived with people Manion cheekily calls “female wives”.
We meet, for example, James Howe, an 18th-century publican and businessman, who served his customers with ale and bonhomie while his wife did most of the housework. Howe’s name in obituaries was “Mary East”, sometimes “Mrs Mary East”, as though this person – never legally married – had somehow been a wife.
For many members of Manion’s cast, sex was paramount. George Johnson, a whaler and Massachusetts manufacturing worker, was described in an 1856 news clipping as “a male girl” and claimed to have “pretended to be a nice young man of 17, smoked strong cigars, [and] was a successful beau among the young ladies”. The vigour and the taste for pleasure that Manion ascribes to Johnson runs throughout Female Husbands; one encounters outlaws of sexual gender being punished, humiliated and castigated, but one also finds them engaged in delightful, confrontational, unapologetic presentations of masculinity.
The title of this study derives from a 1682 fictional broadside entitled The Male and Female Husband, which concerns an intersex person named Mary Jewit, raised as a girl, who impregnates someone and is compelled by a court to present as a man. “And changing habit for a man he to the Church straight went,” the broadside briskly puts it. But Manion’s real starting point is Henry Fielding’s still widely read 1746 fictionalised narrative of the life of Charles Hamilton, The Female Husband, the title of which, Manion suggests, echoes other “female X” formulations of the mid-18th century: “female actor”, for one. Hamilton was the first person to be known in the UK by the soubriquet, which became more than a joke – it was a way of life, almost a vocation.
Manion’s book, which considers, at an angle, sexual norms between the mid-18th century and the early 20th, is published at a fractious moment in the history of gender and sex. Attempts have been made to argue that “reclaiming” transgender ancestors is ahistorical. Female Husbands demands a rethink of this position. Charles Hamilton, George Johnson, James Howe and the dozens of other characters animated by Manion’s lively pen may not have seen themselves as “trans”, but nor did they see themselves as “lesbians”. Indeed, among the virtues of Manion’s study is the provision of an entirely pragmatic, value-neutral description of “trans history” as a study of social practices conducted in contravention of a person’s birth-assigned gender.
I am not entirely persuaded that referring to each of the husbands as “they” is a necessary precaution. But then the question of how we refer to conditions of being that we cannot fully comprehend is one of the central challenges of history committed (as Manion certainly is) to the feminist principle that the personal is political.
Consider Frank Dubois, who left a husband and two children in Illinois for a wife in Wisconsin. The authorities instructed Dubois to dissolve the latter marriage and reconvene the former. An article on the subject, headlined “Frank Dubois a Woman”, was published in the New York Times on 2 November 1883, in which a scandalised reporter exclaimed: “You insist that you are a man?” prompting Dubois to reply, resplendently: “I do; I am. As long as my wife is satisfied, it’s nobody’s business.”
Outside the bedroom, nothing about Dubois’s gender defused the impression. Reporting on the Times’s article about Dubois, the New York World found that Dubois “chewed tobacco and swore”, adding that “in spite of these irrefutable proofs of sex, Wisconsin, with inscrutable pertinacity, insists that she is a woman”. So, while the question of how Dubois would self-describe today remains the “ahistorical” question par excellence, two points can be deduced. First, that Dubois did not concede that the designation “a man” was inaccurate. Second, that those wishing to send Dubois back to an unsatisfying marriage found the very idea of transition a self-evident fiction, nothing more than an occasion for a snippy little phrase.
The more that people have, in the century since the end of the era Manion studies, diversified the possibilities of terms such as “husband”, “female”, “wife” and “sex”, the more fraught appear the attempts to treat sex as the stabilising counterpart to gender. One thinks of the almost comical cascade of this-time-we’ve-got-’em constructions of “biological difference” against which the self-designations of trans people have been contrasted in recent years. Genitals! Chromosomes! The present jargon is “large, immobile gametes” – which at least has the benefit of sounding as absurd as would be any attempt to prove, like a chemist on Gulliver’s Laputa, the formula for a husband.
• Female Husbands: A Trans History by Jen Manion is published by Cambridge (RRP £17.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
