True Sex. Emily Skidmore

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СКАЧАТЬ getting tiresome. We have published many articles on the subject because the whole thing is so marvelously strange and without much plausible reason. We hope the article published today from the Commonwealth is the last chapter.”78 Thus, while the newspaper narratives produced around Frank Dubois in 1883 suggest some of the ways sexology was beginning to influence popular discourse on gender and sexuality, they also provide evidence that sexology was looked to as providing a possible explanation, but not the only one. Indeed, the Waupun Times, unlike virtually all the other newspapers nationwide, went out of its way to provide readers with antecedents to makes sense of Dubois’s story. This likely displays how much more invested Dubois’s friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Waupun were in the story than were typical readers of newspapers elsewhere in the nation. They desired not just to be titillated by the tale of an eccentric individual but also to understand the story and the possible rationale behind Dubois’s unusual decisions. Editors of the Waupun Times understood this but came up short in terms of being able to provide local readers with a definitive explanation because there was no definitive explanation for gender transgression or “female husbands” in 1883.

      “Female Husbands”

      As was mentioned above, the national press consistently used the ambiguous term “female husband” when discussing Frank Dubois’s case. This phrase was by no means new, but its resurfacing in relation to the Dubois case prompted some newspapers to ruminate on its meaning. For example, on November 4, 1883, the New York Times published a multivalent editorial titled “Female Husbands.” It began by reminding readers of the details of the Dubois case, and it almost mournfully reported that “public opinion will not tolerate the marriage of two women.”79 The paper then went on to carefully consider the potential benefit that such marriages might pose:

      If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it? Such a marriage concerns the general public less than the normal sort of marriage, since it does not involve the promise and potency of children. It has been well established that if a woman chooses to wear trousers she has a right to wear them, and no one will venture to deny the right of any two women to live together if they prefer one another to solitude. Why, then, has not Mrs. Dubois the right to live with another woman who wears lawful trousers, and why should so much indignation be lavished upon Mrs. Dubois’s female husband?

      There are many women who, if they had the opportunity, would select other women as husbands rather than marry men. The women who regard men as dull, tiresome creatures, incapable of understanding women, would find sympathy and pleasure in the society of female husbands.80

      While up to this point the anonymously published editorial appears to be an earnest endorsement of same-sex marriage, it quickly takes a satirical turn:

      The marriage of women would solve the problem which renders wretched the superfluous women of New England. Those unhappy women cannot marry because there are not enough men in New England to be divided fairly among them. The New England men, to a large extent, abstain from marrying their fellow New England women, and prefer to seek wives in other states. If half of these neglected women were to put on trousers and marry the other half, the painful spectacle of a hundred thousand lonely spinsters would forever disappear. The female husbands and their wives could read Emerson’s essays to each other, and thus completely satisfy the wildest longings of the female New England heart. What more could a New England spinster desire than a husband who never smokes, swears, or slams the door; who keeps his clothes in order, and does not stay out of the house until late at night, and who reads Emerson, understands the nature of women, and can discuss feminine dress with intelligence and appreciation?81

      A sense of anxiety is palpable in the article, and it is clear that for some readers, news of the Dubois story provoked fears about the sanctity of marriage and its future in American society. This anxiety is articulated more clearly in an editorial published in the Milwaukee Peck’s Sun, penned by editor and eventual Wisconsin governor George W. Peck. He argues that “the marriage relation is an excellent thing for the world at large but if it is tooled with in this way by amateurs it will be brought into discredit and will become very unpopular. The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd. The best woman in the world could not take the place of a man, and do chores around the house and go down town nights and come home full of election whisky without giving herself away.”82 Of course, several fictions are required both here and in the New York Times in order for the narrative to operate on the level of satire and/or ridicule. Although the national press had flirted with illusions of the sexual attraction between Dubois and Fuller—using vague language to suggest a “mysterious link” joining the married couple—in the New York Times editorial, women are depicted according to the Victorian model of female passionlessness. As such, it is suggested that the “wildest longings of the female New England heart” could be satisfied by poetry—not sexual activity. Additionally, while Peck claims authoritatively that “the best woman in the world could not take the place of a man,” he ignores the fact that Frank Dubois had successfully passed as a man for many months, adeptly performing all the manly chores that were expected of a husband.

      Furthermore, while most coverage of the Dubois affair portrayed Gertrude Fuller as a “normal” woman—young, conventionally attractive, and, had it not been for Dubois, a suitable partner for a middle-class man—in the New York Times editorial, same-sex marriage is portrayed as a solution to the “problem” of spinsters (or, as the author refers to them, the “wretched … superfluous women of New England”). Americans had long been anxious about the troublesome figure of the “spinster,” as rates of unmarried women had climbed throughout the nineteenth century, at times reaching near 10 percent.83 The spinster was a queer figure, as she rejected convention by remaining unmarried, and yet the popular image of the spinster—old and unattractive—suggested that she was unmarried not by choice, but because she was undesirable to men. Thus, in the New York Times “Female Husbands” editorial, same-sex marriage was evacuated of its radical potential to serve as an alternative to heterosexual marriage, because it was positioned simply as a solution to a problem that plagued heterosexual men—unattractive women. Thus, rather than acknowledging the facts of the Dubois case—that a “normal” biological woman chose to marry a trans man—the New York Times ridiculed the practice by associating it with a group that was universally derided.

      Furthermore, these editorials differ substantially from coverage of the Dubois case elsewhere in the mass-circulation press in another important way: they portray the boundaries between men and women as inflexible and impermeable. As Peck writes, “The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd.” This conveys the notion that women are inherently so distinct from men that the suggestion that they could complete the same tasks was laughable. However, elsewhere in the mass-circulation press, journalists were not so quick to dismiss the idea of women successfully embodying masculinity. The editorials published in the Peck’s Sun and New York Times reveal the anxiety provoked not simply by the facts surrounding Frank Dubois’s marriage, but also by the tepid response to the marriage evident in the nation’s newspapers. If individuals assigned female at birth could successfully woo “normal” women, and if their actions were condoned, then the romantic future of heterosexual cisgender men could be in peril.

      Although George Peck and the author of the “Female Husbands” editorial likely sought to delegitimate same-sex marriage and trans men, neither the authors, nor the papers that published their editorials, could control the ways that readers interpreted their work. No doubt, some individuals who read the line “If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it?” agreed with the sentiment. Some, perhaps even were themselves engaged in some sort of queer domestic arrangement. As subsequent chapters will illustrate, queer households peppered communities throughout the nation, and trans men lived in towns large and small from coast to coast. These individuals assuredly read editorials like “Female Husbands” with a smirk, perhaps before heading out and splitting wood or performing some other “manly” chore with ease.

      Conclusion

      The СКАЧАТЬ