Slightly off topic but not by much:
Several years ago Radio Netherlands broadcast "Crossing the Line", a really fascinating documentary on how and why some women passed as men in 17th and 18th century Dutch society, notably in the Dutch army and navy.
I just found the program archived on the RN website. You can listen to the program here:
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/thenetherlands/weeklyfeature/tv020405.html
The program is based on the following book:
The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe
by Rudolf M. Dekker, Lotte C. van de Pol
The authors present highlights of their work.
Similar studies in British records would be an intriguing topic for a scholar (if it hasn't already been done).
Here's the program outline from RN:
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Imagine you're a poor servant girl living in The Netherlands in the eighteenth century. Your prospects aren't good. What do you do? Well, you could always become a man. That's what many women of the time did. It was illegal but they felt it was worth the risk. Most became soldiers and sailors and many even became famous.
Two Dutch social historians have now written a book on women who dressed as men in the 17th and 18th centuries. Lotte van de Pol and Rudolf Dekker trawled the Dutch historical archives, mostly records of court proceedings, and found that the phenomenon was far more common than expected.
Most of the time it was purely for economic reasons, where the choice was either prostitution or military service, but for some there was a sexual motive. A few even married other women.
Increasing Income
"Women cross dressing could gain in various ways," explains Rudolf Dekker. "They could earn immense income, they had possibilities for some kind of a career in the army, or navy and if they were successful they had at least shown some male qualities, like bravery, and these were valued in a positive way.
"Of course they have to find an excuse for not having a beard but in general a woman dressed as a man looks younger and most of them, as far as we can judge, looked like attractive young men. They looked like boys but that was no problem because the general idea was that when a child was six years old, he or she should begin to work for a living. So, if a woman of 20 looked like a boy of 14 or 15 it was not a problem to enter military service or to have a job aboard a ship."
Hygiene Problems
The lower standards of hygiene in those days also helped to avoid detection, people didn't undress or wash as much as they do today. But dressing and acting as a man all day every day, proved too difficult for most women.
"They were usually detected after rather a short time," says Lotte van de Pol.
"Sometimes after only a few weeks or a few months. Only a very few managed to live for many years as a man. Sometimes the performance was just not good enough. Or, in a ship in crowded quarters where common sailors lived together it was of course extremely difficult if you had to change your clothes or even go out for a pee, or even worse if you are menstruating."
Exiled Existence
When they were discovered, the cross dressing women often faced severe punishment. It was especially dangerous for those who had been married as they risked the death penalty, but more usually they were exiled from their community. A very harsh punishment for the time.
"Sending people to prison was expensive," says Rudolf.
"And besides there weren't many prisons. These were difficult cases and the judges seemed to think that if these women were out of their jurisdiction then they'd have one problem less. It could be exile from a city or a town but more usually it was from a much larger geographic region. This was really a heavy punishment because theses women were looking for jobs in the economic centre of the country so if you were forced out of that it would be a heavier sentence than we would think today."
Behaving Differently
Of course, even with such harsh sentences some women continued to live their lives as men. But, says Rudolf, for various social and cultural reasons, the phenomenon seemed to die out at the end of the 18th century.
"After around 1800 we only found some isolated cases and there are various reasons for the disappearance of this tradition. Holland because an economic backwater of Europe. There was much less or no female immigration of adventurous women who wanted to try their luck in Holland."
"Also, you started to get passports and registration of people," adds Lotte. "You could no longer just skip from one country to another without confirmed identity and you couldn't go into the army without an medical examination. It maybe that it was a social-cultural thing as well, the idea of what a women is and how a woman should behave was very different from that early modern period."
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