Female Husbands and Their Wives: Transing Gender in the 19th Century: A Lecture by Jen Manion
Those assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women in the 18th and 19th century US and UK were described as female husbands. They persisted in living as men despite tremendous risk, violence, and punishment. When husbands were outed as being assigned female, the press reported such accounts enthusiastically and frequently, exposing dynamic, contested, and varied stories of love, courage, and loss. In this lecture, Manion will discuss how they traced these histories and their meaning for our understandings of gender today. Stories of female husbands provide a window not only into the past but help us consider our strategies for transgender liberation in the present.
Jen Manion is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College and author Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) which received the inaugural Mary Kelley Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Their new book, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge University Press, 2020) was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American Antiquarian Society. Manion earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD at Rutgers University. Prior to joining Amherst College, Manion worked for ten years at Connecticut College as a faculty member in the history department and founding director of the LGBTQ Resource Center.
Co-sponsored the Department of History and LGBT Studies.