and the US took great interest in printing stories about them.
Female husbands usually became known to local media in
times of crisis or duress, often arrest or death. The stories focus
on tragedy and hardship. Some of them, especially the accounts
about Lobdell, are heartbreaking.
Charles Hamilton, James Howe, James Allen and Joseph
Lobdell are just four people who earned the label ‘female hus-
band’ in the press in the 18th and 19th centuries. Assigned
female at birth, they transed gender to live as men and marry
women, long before the term ‘transgender’ was coined or the
development of treatments and surgeries that enabled people to
physically change their sex.
Their partners – long overlooked by writers, readers,
and historians alike – were crucial to their
happiness and social respectability. In count-
less ways, these legal marriages to queer wives
affirmed and stabilised the gender of female
husbands. Together, these couples carved out
lives for themselves that were never easy, filled
with uncertainty and risk – but, for most of the
pairs, they couldn’t imagine an alternative.hardship of supporting a family on the wages available to
women. They were confident that they could do any work that
a man did, and set off to do so – now presenting fully as male.
This decision marked a new course in their life – one
that was filled with many new experiences, feelings of visibility
and recognition in their manhood, and many feelings of
erasure and hurt in the face of hostility. Indeed, across the
course of decades, Lobdell would have their gender challenged
repeatedly in the court of law, the court of public opinion
and, finally, at the behest of their birth family, who had them
declared insane and institutionalised on account of their
gender in 1879. Their wife of nearly 20 years, Marie Louise
Perry, was even misled into believing that Joseph had died;
Joseph’s brother, James, circulated a false news-
paper obituary, and it took Marie nearly a year
to discover the truth. Such was the cruelty with
which family members and mental-health offi-
cials often treated those who transed gender in
the late-19th-century United States.
We know about female husbands and their
WAwives only because newspapers in both the UK
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Social challenges
Joseph Lobdell, named Lucy at birth
in 1829, was celebrated as a hunter,
farmer, writer and teacher – but was
faced with cruelty from their birth family
as well as other social and legal challenges
after deciding to live fully as a manFor those assigned
female at birth, living
as a man was never
without risk;
for some, it
was filled with
hardship
Jen Manion is associate
professor of history at Amherst
College, Massachusetts. Their
new book is Female Husbands:
A Trans History (Cambridge
University Press, March 2020)