Wellfleet Public Library

FEMALE HUSBANDS

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women’s rights, ultimately leading to the demise of he category of female husband' in the early twentieth century.

Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.

Jen Manion is a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Manion is the author of Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Penn, 2015) and Female Husbands: A Trans History. (Cambridge,2020) and co-editor of Taking Back the Academy (Routledge, 2004) with Jim Downs. Jen has written dozens of essays and articles for popular and scholarly publications. Jen received a PhD in history from Rutgers University and a BA in history with an English minor from the University of Pennsylvania, magna cum laude. Jen is Professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College.