User:Mochimeadows/sandbox

History of cross-dressing

This is the article I'd like to expand upon. It's titled 'History of Cross-Dressing" and I would focus on the United States subsection of the history because it is only one paragraph and fails to mention anything about the Gold Rush and the American West, females presenting as men for jobs, the legal system and trials that occurred, or anything we learned about in class.

 Draft: 

United States:

The history of cross-dressing in the United States is quite complicated as  the title of ‘cross-dresser’ has been historically been utilized as an umbrella term for varying identities such as cisgender people who dressed in the other gender’s clothing, transgender people, and intersex people who dress in both genders’ clothing. [Sears 2] The term pops up in many arrest records for these identities as they are perceived to be a form of ‘disguise’ rather than a gender identity. For example, Harry Allen, born female under the name Nell Pickerell in the Pacific Northwest, was categorized as a ‘male impersonator’ who cross-dressed, rather than as a transgender male which is how he identified.

The Gold Rush of 1849 led to a mass global migration of mainly male laborers to Northern California and the development of government backed economic interests in the Pacific Northwest region of the modern United States. The sudden explosive population increase resulted in a huge demand to import commodities including food, tools, sex, and entertainment, to these new male-oriented, homogeneous societies. As these societies evolved over the following decades, the growing demand for entertainment created a unique opportunity for male cross-dressers to perform. Cross-dressing was encouraged for entertainment purposes due to lack of women, yet the tolerance for the acts were limited to on-stage roles and did not extend to gender identities or same-sex desires. Julian Eltinge, a ‘female impersonator’ who performed in saloons in Montana as a kid and eventually made it to the Broadway stage, exemplifies this limited social acceptance for cross-dressing. His cross-dressing performances were celebrated by laborers who were starved for entertainment, yet his career was put at risk when he was exposed for exhibiting homosexual desires and behaviors.

Cross-dressing was not just reserved for men on stage. It also played a crucial role in the development of female involvement in the United States’ industrial labor force. Many female-born workers dressed in men’s clothing to secure a laborer’s wage to provide for their families. Testimonial accounts from cross-dressing women who had been arrested reflect that many chose to identify as male due to financial incentives, even though basic cross-dressing had been deemed immoral and could lead to legal consequences. Women also chose to cross-dress because they feared they might become victims of physical harm while traveling alone across long distances.

San Francisco, California, was one of approximately 45 cities to have criminalized cross-dressing by framing the act as a form of immoral sexual perversion. These legal impositions discouraged public gender expression through clothing which promoted the systematic discrimination, repression, and villainization of cross-dressing and transgender identities.


 * 1) Boag, Peter (2011-09-01). Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press. ISBN  978-0-520-94995-9.
 * 2) Sears, Clare (2015-02-20). Arresting Dress. Duke University Press. ISBN  978-0-8223-7619-4.
 * 3) Clare Sears (2008). "Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco". WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. 36 (3–4): 170–187. doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0108. ISSN 1934-1520.
 * 4) "A queer history of the United States". Choice Reviews Online. 49 (03): 49–1649-49-1649. 2011-11-01. doi:10.5860/choice.49-1649. ISSN 0009-4978.
 * 5) Ekins, Richard (2002-03-11). "Blending Genders". doi:10.4324/9780203201442.