Female Husbands

'An altogether fresh and innovative take on centuries-old identities and relationships, Female Husbands shows its readers how the most forward-thinking and progressive conceptions of gender and sexuality can find their origins in the past. ... Manion's female husbands are brought to life by energetic prose and an insistence on their continued cultural and political impact.' Hannah Roche, Times Literary Supplement 'Female Husbands is a powerful work not only because Manion insists on taking the past on its own terms, but also because she refuses to tell her reader if she is reporting on a history that can be made legible to our 21st-century ideas about sexuality, sex, or gender identity.' Los Angeles Review of Books '... a detailed, synoptic history of a fascinating dimension of 18th- and 19th-century cultural history in Britain and the US.' Grace Lavery, The Guardian 'The challenges of interpreting the fragments of evidence about these people's lives, written by those who had the social and economic order of marriage to defend, becomes in Jen Manion's hands a masterclass in historical rigor, empathy, and craft.' Catherine Baker, History Today 'Manion's triumph is to treat with an openhanded and flexible approach a series of lives that resisted categories and flourished through ambiguity.' Karen Harvey, BBC History Magazine 'An absolutely stunning deep-dive into historical transgressions of gender.' Manhattan Book Review '... a treasure trove of historical insights... The research makes a refreshing intervention in the fraught debates about the intersections between queer, lesbian, feminist, and trans histories.' Heike Bauer, Times Higher Education 'In this painstakingly researched study, Jen Manion opens a window into a previously unseen dimension of the British and American past. Female Husbands explores the lives of people who transed gender, lived as men, and married women between the colonial period and World War I, situating them in the context of broader political and social developments including changing understandings of gender and women's rights. The book is a stunning and path breaking achievement.' Drew Faust, President Emeritus and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University, Massachusetts 'Female Husbands combines intellectual rigor and impeccable historical research with sensitivity and even imagination to illuminate this fascinatingly varied cohort of gender rebels.' Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Akin '... fascinating ... extremely thought-provoking.' Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times 'Jen Manion offers a spectacular historical survey of people assigned female at birth who went on to live as men and marry women. In doing so, they demonstrate that contemporary attention to trans issues is just the tip of a vast, submerged legacy of gender variance, traversing both sides of the English-speaking transatlantic world, that stretches back hundreds of years.' Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History and The Transgender Studies Reader 'Jen Manion mines Anglo-American newspapers, books, and pamphlets and shows us how 'female husbands' confounded conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality. An engaging account of the unruly history of 'transing', and the surveillance of it, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' Joanne Meyerowitz, author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States