Women dressing as men - was this illegal?

Toby Frost

Toby Frost

Well-Known Member
Supporter
Joined
Jan 22, 2008
Messages
8,053
In several Shakespeare plays, women dress up as men. Clearly this is something that could be mentioned on stage, if usually for comedy, but would it be illegal for a woman to wear men's clothing in real life? I gather that the 16th century authorities regarded playhouses as pretty rowdy and immoral, and (albeit a long time earlier) I think cross-dressing was one of the charges levelled at Joan of Arc.

So: would the average Renaissance citizen (in, say, London in 1580) regard this as either an offence against creation, a crime or both? Any pointers on this would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'm no expert on this but I would say it was not the clothing as such, but impersonating a man in order to achieve a position/vocation not allowed to women at that time?

I think it was heavily implied that, as a woman and a commoner, Joan of Arc had no place leading an army into battle.
 
IIRC, there were numerous instances of women 'passing' as men in the UK armed services circa Napoleonic War. Presumably their officers turned Nelsonian eye !

Historically, IIRC, many craft guilds were 'men only', with rare exceptions for eg daughters of Master Craftsmen.
 
Tobytwo said:
I suspect the J of A aspect is a bit of a red herring, since they were looking for an excuse to kill her anyway.
Click to expand...

Nevertheless, it was something they could use as an excuse. And as it was a relapse they arranged themselves, while they were arranging things they could have contrived something else.

But the rules in Catholic France in 1431 may have little bearing on the situation in Protestant England a century and a half later.

What happened in the playhouses is not such a good indication either, since the girls dressed as boys were really boys dressed as girls dressed as boys. Assuming they would have let a woman on the stage in Elizabethan England to begin with (which they didn't) would they really have allowed her to dress as a boy and make the fantasy a reality? The female characters in the plays put on male attire as a disguise to protect their virtue, which the audiences obviously found palatable. A woman openly dressing as a man might have been a very different thing.

Edit -- But then, what about women dressing as men or boys in masques held privately at court? I wonder if that was allowed?
 
Last edited:
Yeah they did not allow women to act, so everyone on stage was a male in Shakespearean times.

Also, laws against women dressing as men exist today. In some countries, like Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan women were/are whipped and even killed for dressing like men. In Malaysia women can not wear the same clothes as men.

And in some countries, like France and Turkey, woman's traditional clothing, specifically the hijab, is outlawed.

But no where do we outlaw how men dress.

Interesting, no?
 
Although wasn't there a US state where it was ruled (in a court case) that women had less restriction on them appearing with no clothes than men, due to less-than-obvious physical differences (if I may word it like that)?

(It may have had something to so with some sort of student ritual in public.)


Whether you see this as a bias towards women or towards men is up to you. :)
 
I assume, Ursa, that you (or they) are referring to primary sexual characteristics rather than secondary ones. Since, um, the differences above the waist can be very obvious indeed.

Undressing, however, is another subject, although local and contemporary notions of decency definitely play a part in what is accepted, what is frowned on, and what is outlawed.
 
I didn't want to hijack the thread, Teresa (and still don't), but the issue - one of freedom versus oppression, in this case that men are free to dress as they like, but women aren't (with examples of how a woman can't wear what is, traditionally, women's, not men's, clothing) - had already been raised.

It seems obvious that men have less restrictions placed on them in terms of their clothing (taking account of the whole world), but I don't think it's true to the extent Dusty has suggested. My example was merely a rather extreme example illustrating this point.
 
Not found anything about Elizabethan England yet, but 18th century France has thrown up Charles d'Eon de Beaumont. Baptised as a boy s/he was raised as a girl and appears to have had feminine features, being accepted at the Russian court as a woman. S/he then took up male dress but the King of France ordered her/him to assume female clothing -- presumably on the basis s/he was thought to be a woman and it was immoral (or worse) for her to dress as a man.

Wikipedia has an article on cross-dressing which may be of interest - particularly a list of people famous/notorious for doing this. Catalina de Erauso may be someone in the rightish time line as she was born in 1592 - if the article is to be believed, the pope gave her dispensation to wear men's clothing, which again suggests some kind of legal prohibition.
 
Mosaic Law explicitly forbids women from dressing as men, probably the basis for any such laws in Jewish/Muslim/Christian circles. Whether non-theocratic states have ever followed such rules is a strange one. Presumably some countries have had such laws while others haven't.
 
This came up on another forum and the example of La Maupin was given.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//Julie_d'Aubigny

La Maupin

Crossdressing would have been regarded poorly in that era. Strangely though, views on the subject grew more conservative as time went on rather than more progressive.

Part of the problem wasn't so much a woman dressing in a man's clothes as a woman acting like a man, which is to say, a woman forgetting her place. As has already been mentioned, the theater itself was a different place than it is now and actresses were regarded poorly by some. There were those who saw them as little more than prostitutes. As always, the viewpoint is different depending on what social class a person was. A noblewoman wearing breeches is something different than a farrier's daughter doing the same, noblewomen being far more restricted.

I think it depends on who the character is and what they're actually doing. That will be the difference between "Well, look that that little trollop" and "Burn the witch!"

I've found a few articles about the subject in early modern England, but all of them relate to how it was perceived within the theater. As far as society at large, I can't give anything else aside from the second-hand things I've already given.
 
Well, modern times aren't really what I'm thinking about, and I do agree that the theatre was probably something of a rule unto itself. All actors were male until very much later, but the concept of women dressing as men seems to be most openly expressed in plays (in whatever context).

I know there are examples from the 18th Century: a friend of mine wrote a novel based on a couple of examples, including a successful surgeon who turned out to have been a woman. To be honest I think this is an issue I can work round: I suspect dressing as a man was both sinful and illegal (not sure they differentiated much then) and wouldn't have been tolerated even for practicality's sake.

The reason I raise this is because - although the stuff I'm writing is riddled with anachronisms and incosistencies - I do want to give a sense of place and time, albeit distorted. Although I am writing a fantasy world I don't want to move so far away from reality that anything is tolerated: I found it odd in Scott Lynch's writing that the Watch, and IIRC the army, included women officers. It jarred a little somehow.

Of course, if Joan of Arc hadn't been captured, and she'd won hands down, who knows how the church would have regarded it? Interesting. Perhaps, Judge, the issue is precedent: if Ms Arc's equivalent survived and formed a knightly order, what then? As with most fantasy, if you can make it credible enough, it'll probably work. I'll just have to get to work on the credibility...
 
Ursa major said:
It seems obvious that men have less restrictions placed on them in terms of their clothing (taking account of the whole world), but I don't think it's true to the extent Dusty has suggested. My example was merely a rather extreme example illustrating this point.
Click to expand...

Well, there are societal restrictions and there are legal restrictions. I think that women, traditionally (and still in many parts of the world) endure harsher penalties -- which would often include legal penalties -- but I completely agree that men are also restricted, if only by community standards that require them to conform if they wish to maintain their position in the community. Depending on when and where, the censure of one's community or one's peers could lead to some very serious misfortunes (losing your job, being ostracized, being disinherited, etc.) and should not be discounted. Again, women would likely suffer much more at the hands of society for sartorial improprieties, but that does not mean that men would always get off lightly.

So whether it was actually legal for women to dress as men in, for instance, Elizabethan England, it might nevertheless have other consequences that our heroine (or Toby's) ignores at her extreme peril.
 
Yes, it's a heroine. It's also worth mentioning, I suppose, that almost no-one then would regard wearing the opposite sex's clothes all the time as desirable anyhow (we're talking about practicality here, not, er, other reasons).

As a general point women have been depicted as wearing some very silly things in fantasy in the past, much more in pictures than books. High heels? In a battle? A little realism goes a long way!
 
It goes without saying that almost any woman who ever fought in battle would have dressed as a man, even if she wasn't trying to pass herself off as one. The simple practicality of male dress almost demands this. But one weird thing is that in the medieval era, it was not uncommon for women to ride horses astride, but centuries later if a woman did the same thing it was scandalous.

I think you can get away with it though. Joan wasn't the only woman to ever fight or threaten the mores of the time, just the most famous, for the Western audience anyway. I really dig Lady Ann Cunningham for one.

Timeline of women in Medieval warfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Timeline of women in early modern warfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Dear Toby,

I think you would be right to address the situation in a fantasy, just like Mr Pratchett has done in the Monstrous Regiment with one of his main characters, who in the turn is a woman dressed in a man's military uniform. But if you put your before 20th century woman in man's clothes, then address them as butch, not as a girly girl. Although there might be very girly moments, but that's just the salt, if you know what I mean.


Best,
C.T.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
K the defender of the old women cant remember title need help Book Search 0
Foxbat Women in 1950s Sci-Fi Movies SFF Lounge 3
C Hunting Women of hunter-gatherer societies History 94
Bramandin What is a good word for "women who would do things for the men they weren’t married to" Grammar & Spelling 42
E Trying to track down story about Aliens creating women's fashions so repulsive that men can't have sex with them. Book Search 4

Similar threads


Back
Top