-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Judith Halberstam, Alison Oram. Her Husband Was a Woman! Women's Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture. (Women's and Gender History.) New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. xii, 192. $35.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 894–895, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.894
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Anyone who has spent any time at all browsing the early twentieth-century popular press in England will have come across a story or two about a woman passing as a man and marrying another woman. Indeed in the 1930s, as Alison Oram's lively book claims, the British popular press was full of such stories and reported them with barely a nod to identity categories such as lesbian or transgender. Many of the stories in the press, furthermore, told stories of “female masquerade” with humor and a great deal of admiration. Oram notes in her introduction that as she did her research, she fully expected to see the tide to turn against these passing men, and she presumed that she would see a sexological language of perversion and pathology take over from the sensationalist and voyeuristic language of freakery and human wonder. But, she proposes, it was not until the late 1940s in Britain when press coverage of gender variance switched from amusement and amazement to judgment and fear; and only then, claims Oram, did notions of lesbianism and transsexualism emerge as explanatory frameworks for the cross-dressing woman.
