Her Husband was a Woman!

Oram, Alison

doi:10.4324/9780203607299

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…11 This narrative played a significant role in the Maud Allan 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel case of 1918, but continued well into the interwar years. 12 Perceptions of decadent over-sophistication among the rich and leisured and 'artistic circles' did not, however, necessarily map to sexological understandings of 'perversion'.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 Doan's most recent work, Disturbing Practices: history, sexuality, and women's experience of modern war (2013) makes a particularly cogent case for the lack of categorisation, indeed, of any usable language, that could be applied when contemporaries grappled with the uncertainties and instabilities around gender and sexuality evoked by women's participation in World War I, with a general lack of any conceptualisation of lesbianism as an identity, or indeed what might constitute sapphic conduct. She comments that 'Beyond the narrow circles of the educated elite, it is unclear if most ordinary citizens thought about the so-called amazonian woman as somehow unnatural or perverse' and points out that in the high-profile 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel case, the dancer Maud Allan was represented as manifesting an exotic and decadent form of femininity, imbricated with family degeneracy (her brother had been executed for a dual homicide in San Francisco in 1898), rather than gender inversion.…”

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confidence: 99%

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‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

Hall¹

2015

Women's History Review

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

Hall¹

2015

Women's History Review

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“…Owen's testimony may reflect a timeworn narrative of sexual ignorance articulated by the wives of 'female husbands' in the press, rather than the couple's real intimate practices -but what matters is that Micklethwait gave credence to her story and yet abrogated ministerial responsibility for the family's well-being. 46 For all the high-minded rhetoric about 'male breadwinners' as the pillar of the welfare state, when it came to allocating contributory benefits the MPNI seems to have stripped it down to a matter of anatomical conjunction. By choosing a partner with the 'wrong' anatomy Josephine Owen had lost title to the rights she supposedly enjoyed as the dependent spouse of a male contributor, and she would have had to resort to means-tested National Assistance for supplemental income.…”

Section: 'Unnatural Passions' and The Limits Of Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

1 Male breadwinners of ‘doubtful sex’

Kane-Galbraith

2024

Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain

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Until the end of 1954, officers at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance had no reason to take note of Vincent Jones. 1 The twenty-sixyear-old held a steady job at a telephone exchange, paid his weekly insurance contributions at a standard male rate, and rented a small Catford flat with his wife, Joan Lee. However, in mid-December, Jones's performance of quiet, respectable masculine citizenship came to an abrupt, and very public, end. 2 On the afternoon of the thirteenth, at the Greenwich Magistrates Court, Jones and Lee pleaded guilty to the charge of making a false statement on their marriage licence. What the couple had neglected to inform the new vicar of their local church -a fact known to the previous vicar, who alerted the police when he learned of their union -was that Jones was registered as a girl on his birth certificate. 'I am a man,' Jones explained to a Daily Express reporter, 'but if you mean physically I still have female organs … I have been to doctors to get my sex changed and I am sick of waiting.' 3 Although Jones carried National Insurance documents affirming his male name and identity, the magistrate ruled that Jones's 'female organs' meant that he could not consummate a legal marriage in the role of a husband: the ceremony was merely a ploy to cover 'unnatural passion … with a false air of respectability'. 4 Jones, for his part, admitted the truth of the former charge, while strenuously contesting the latter. If he could work as a man, contribute to the nation's coffers as a man, but not form a legitimate family as a man, it was the law, not him, that had made false promises. 'I am guilty,' he declared, 'but something should be done for people like us.' Perhaps more striking than Jones's public demand for justice, however, was the active, albeit unpublicised, response it provoked in the upper echelons of the General Register Office (GRO) and the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (MPNI). While Jones was hardly the first English 'female husband' to catch the attention of the Commonwealth press, the exposure of Jones's dual legal identities was a novel feature, casting a cloud of suspicion over the new contributory welfare system and its claims to efficiency, fairness, and transparency. 5 Faced with this direct challenge to its

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“…Several of the films also draw on the sensationalist tone of the popular press in their depiction of gender-crossing as an exciting and entertaining part of modern life, providing parallels with the newspaper stories of 'passing' women discussed by Oram. 38 One of the films even features a genderswapping husband and wife criminal partnership.…”

Section: Quick-change Artists: Male Cross-dressing Performances In Eamentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What a Pretty Man – or Girl!’: Male Cross‐Dressing Performances in Early British Cinema, 1898–1918

O'Rourke¹

2020

Gender & History

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A scene in the 1909 British Gaumont film How Percy Won the Beauty Competition shows the title character eyeing up the rows of wigs on display in the windows of Fox's Theatrical Wig-maker and Costumier. The setting is a real street outside a shop in Covent Garden, which was well known among people working in London's entertainment industry, and which also had a reputation for supplying 'men of all classes' with disguises that could make them unrecognisable even to their closest relations. 1 In the film, Percy enters the shop and emerges seconds later, changed out of his three-piece suit, flat cap, cigar and walking stick and into a smart, rather sporty woman's jacket and skirt, a fur stole and muff and a broad-brimmed hat decorated with feathers. Outside the shop, a small crowd has gathered to watch the scene, which comes to an end as a salesman escorts Percy into a waiting car. Percy, ladylike, smiles politely and bids him goodbye. As the film's title suggests, Percy's aim in effecting this transformation is to enter a beauty contest for women and pocket the cash prize. The crowd of curious pedestrians and shopkeepers leaning out of their doorways adds to the sense that this is a practical joke, in which Percy (played by the film's director, Alfred Collins) is seeing how many people he can fool. This is underlined by the final shot of Collins, out of his wig and feathered hat, laughing as he shows off his winnings to the camera. The practical joke element was taken even further in another British comedy about beauty competitions produced by Cricks and Martin a year earlier, Lord Algy's Beauty Show (1908), in which a troupe of male actors decide to dress as women in order to enter a similar contest, one of them wearing a monkey suit under his outfit and 'cutting a very grotesque figure', as one trade reviewer noted. 2 In its use of men's cross-dressing for comic effect, How Percy Won the Beauty Competition is indicative of a widespread practice in early British cinema. In total, I have identified more than eighty British films made before 1918 that feature crossdressing performances, and that survive either as archival prints or as records in early filmmakers' catalogues and magazine listings. 3 Like Percy, the majority of these films (around three-quarters) involve men dressing as women. Also in common with Percy, most of these films narrativise gender-crossing as part of the plot, although there are

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Her Husband was a Woman!

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

1 Male breadwinners of ‘doubtful sex’

‘What a Pretty Man – or Girl!’: Male Cross‐Dressing Performances in Early British Cinema, 1898–1918

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