I'm glad I decided to cover Manion and Skidmore back to back (well, with the exception of that little blip I posted last week) because they cover similar material, use similar research sources, and overlap slightly but not significantly in time scope. Reading them together not only provides a broader picture for the topic, but points out significant shifts in experience and reception that occurred around the late 19th century.
LHMP
Blog entry
After what seems like entirely too long a period of covering a single book, we come to the end. Female Husbands: A Trans History has some interesting strengths and weaknesses as a historic study. The greatest strength (and my favorite aspect, given that I like the puzzle-solving parts of historic research) is Manion's willingness to dig through obscure public records to fill in the details of these people's lives. The original publicity around the story of James Howe/Mary East and their wife never mentioned the wife's name.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 208 – Shakespeare’s Queer-Baiting - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/08/21 - listen here)
Same-Sex Themes in Shakespeare
One thing that can be easy to lose track of when researching gender-crossing histories is that, given the historic context, we rarely know about the people who lived happily-ever-after lives, being accepted as the gender they presented to the world, loved and supported by those close enough to know their histories. We may occasionally get a glimpse of those lives after the fact, if their history comes to light after death.
It's hard enough trying to untangle the interesections of gender identity, sexuality, economic necessity, and sexism without tossing a completely unreliable narrator into the mix. The narrators of gender-crossing stories already have enough motivations to be unreliable, even setting aside the question of the language and concepts they have to work with. They may be motivated by identifying the narrative that will make their audience most sympathetic (which may change with the audience). They may be motivated by trying to protect a spouse, by presenting her as naive and ignorant.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 207 - On the Shelf for August 2021 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2021/08/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2021.
In this chapter, Manion touches on--but doesn't fully explore--a couple of key differences between the trans-masculine experience in England and in America. English social structures around marriage, employment, charitable support, and rights to residence were deeply embedded in an assumption of static location. The parish you were born into was obliged to support you if you were indigent, which meant other parishes could be hostile to if they felt you might be (or become) a burden.
By the usual calendar schedule, given that this is a 5th Saturday, there should have been a fiction podcast today. I've gotten behind on the podcast activities that involve reaching out to set things up with other people, and that includes lining up my narrators. Be assured that all the planned stories will be podcast, but perhaps not on the planned schedule. I'd rather put out a great episode than be chained to a specific format.
One of the themes that emerges from the individiaul biographies in this book is that the "female husband" phenomenon was primarily associated with working class people. (There are a few exceptions, such as Mary Diana Dods, as well as those who transed gender without marrying, which includes a few more examples of professional-class people.) On the one hand, the types of occupations these "female husbands" had challenged myths about gendered abilities even more strongly than middle-class professions would have.
In some ways, this chapter feels like Manion is happy to play fast and loose with the theme of "female husbands" in order to cast a wider net on the subtitle "a trans history". The people transing gender to take up roles--whether temporary or long-term--as a soldier or sailor generally did not end up in marriages with women, though they might use flirtations with women as a strategy for gender acceptance. One perhaps unusual feature of the figures covered in this chapter is that they all had (auto)biographies published about their trans experiences.
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