Manion, Jen
Female Husbands: A Trans History
Cambridge (Cambridge)
2020
OUR SYNOPSIS: Jen Manion shares the stories of female husbands: “people assigned female at birth [who] chose to trans gender and live fully as men, in small towns and big cities, in the U.K. and the U.S.,” from 1746 to the early twentieth century. (1) These female husbands in many cases built intimate relationships with women that sometimes became official marriages. Manion shows that starting in the mid-nineteenth century, American female husbands were increasingly portrayed in the press with emphasis on sex over gender. This led to substantial public discussion about these identity categories, as did revelations about individual female husband cases in both the U.K. and U.S.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What are some best practices for respectful and unassuming approaches to gender and sexuality in the practice of history?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Hamilton, Wilson, and dozens of others like them were designated ‘female husbands’ – a term that persistently circulated throughout Anglo-American culture for nearly 200 years to describe people who defied categorization. Though assigned female at birth, female husbands assumed a legal, social, and economic position reserved for men: that of husband. Female husbands were presented as shocking and controversial figures, often with headlines featuring the word ‘extraordinary.’ By their very existence, they challenged essentialist understandings of sexual difference. They demonstrated by their actions every day that gender was malleable and not a result of one’s sex.” (1)
“It is my fervent hope that Female Husbands will offer a necessary alternative to traditional approaches to the past that render LGBTQ history invisible while nonetheless claiming to be objective and politically neutral. . . . By reading against the grain and approaching the material and above all the subjects with compassion, we can see the full humanity and vulnerability of those who have gone before us.” (14)
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