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Come in, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you anything? A coffee? Tea? Cocktail?
Old Fort Niagara, New York, at sunset
Potential Posts. . .
tell me, what interests you?
So please, come back and stay a while. You’ll always be welcome.
Hello!
Come in, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you anything? A coffee? Tea? Cocktail?
Old Fort Niagara, New York, at sunset
Potential Posts. . .
tell me, what interests you?
So please, come back and stay a while. You’ll always be welcome.
I would be very interested to find out about colonial cross-dressing! I may well be wrong about this but I guess I assumed that in the olden days people wouldn’t have been allowed to wear clothes that were designed for the other sex. My sense is that in the past people weren’t as liberal and you could get in trouble for engaging in behaviour that people today wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with. People seemed to have quite a rigid view of how men and women should behave and dress and they wouldn’t have been comfortable with men dressing as women or women dressing as men – cross-dressing would probably have challenged gender stereotypes and maybe men would have felt threatened if women began to dress like them and exhibit characteristics that were traditionally thought of as masculine (like being very confident and outspoken)?
There were a few women (“sporty types”) who adapted men’s clothing to their liking, and they were probably considered eccentric but tolerated. Some working-class women wore pieces of men’s clothing because it was more practical for the work they were doing, and some women of the lower sorts may have worn a man’s coat for warmth, if they didn’t have their own warm cloak. So it wasn’t that unusual to see a woman wearing men’s clothing, although it usually was not a statement that a woman was making about herself except in the higher social classes.
The eighteenth century was actually pretty tolerant of strong women. Women in the eighteenth century owned businesses, some were financially self-sufficient, many were educated and admired for their contributions to the arts and sciences. Of course it depended on the attitudes of individual men, and I imagine that women knew where they’d be accepted and where they wouldn’t be welcomed.
However, a man caught wearing women’s clothing risked being pilloried, exposed to the disapproval of the public in the form of verbal abuse, and possibly pelted with things–mud, dung, anything that could be picked up out of the gutter… stones. As you can imagine, it could be life-threatening if a crowd decided to stone a man convicted of indecency. Again, the wealthier classes had the means and the privacy to “dress in drag” (I don’t think that it was referred to in those terms) at carefully shielded molly-houses if they chose, but even they had to be careful. Homosexuality was not condoned; it was condemned.
I am incredibly sorry it has taken me so long to write back. I hadn’t realised that in the eighteenth century it was OK for women to wear men’s clothing! I must confess that I would feel really self-conscious if I wore clothes intended for a man and I would feel very uncomfortable and embarrassed, especially if people made fun of me, but it’s wonderful that in the eighteenth century women who chose to dress like this were accepted and people didn’t mock them or call them horrible names. I wonder if men are more likely to accept strong women if they don’t feel threatened – if a man is happy and secure in himself then he shouldn’t feel intimidated by women who are strong and confident. My sense is that if a woman chooses to dress differently and doesn’t conform to female stereotypes then it is actually other women who are most likely to tease her and make fun of her. Unfortunately that is what used to happen at school – if you dared to dress differently and you didn’t fit in, the popular girls would be really mean to you and they would laugh at you and humiliate you in front of the whole class.
Thank you so much for another fascinating history lesson!