NEW^YORKPUBLIC^LIBRARYDIGITAL^ COLLECTIONSTransgender history
womanhood as required by desire or circumstance. All were
described as ‘female husbands’ by reporters and publishers
seeking to attract readers with enticing and original stories.
In the writing of their lives, I decided to embrace the newly
popular and increasingly accepted pronoun singular ‘they’
when referring to husbands in the third person. This was
a difficult decision, inspired by dozens of conversations with
students and colleagues about the merits and pitfalls. ‘They’
seemed the perfect way to honour these extraordinary lives
that never fit neatly into the box of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, and will
make the past legible and relatable to contemporary transgender
and nonbinary readers – a group that has long been denied
a history of their own.
English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding first popu-
larised the phrase ‘female husband’ in reference to someone
assigned female who lived as a man and married a woman.
His fictionalised essay ‘The Female Husband’ (1746) was based
on the real case of the charismatic mountebank Charles Hamil-
ton and their bride, Mary Price.
We can only speculate as to what drew the pair together
in the first place. Charles was affable, charming and outgoing,
living a life mostly on the road. Mary proved herself to be confi-
dent, strong and assertive. She was probably bored living with
her aunt, who rented rooms for extra income – which is how the
travelling quack doctor came into her life in the first place.
But the excitement and anticipation of young love was short-
lived. After about two months of marriage in 1746, Mary decided
that she did not want to be with Charles. It may have been that
she realised for the first time that her husband was no ordinary
man; at least, that is what she told authorities.
We know this from records drawn up in Glastonbury, about
six miles from Mary’s home in Wells. The court there charged
Charles with vagrancy, a category of crime that was vague and
flexible, and often used in cases in which the transgression was
highly subjective, concerning morals and norms. The judge
found Charles guilty of fraud and declared them “an uncommon,
notorious cheat”. They were sentenced to six months of hard
l abou r i n pr i son a nd publ ic wh ippi ng i n t he fou r d i f ferent tow n s