Why did hundreds of young women dress as men?

Young women in their teens and twenties threw off their petticoats and pulled on trousers driven by an inner need which, when combined with other factors, propelled them to make this dramatic step into the illicit world of men. Patriotism, poverty, family break-ups, losing husbands to war, escaping marriage and sometimes fate. Freedom was what the American Deborah Sampson described her male disguise as giving her,

 ‘bursting the tyrant bonds, which held my sex in awe and clandestinely or by stealth, grasped an opportunity, which custom and the world seemed to deny as a natural privilege (sic). A new scene and as it were a new world now opened to my view.’

The chance to be a part of events and the outside world. Women stood and watched from their front doors and garden gates as men marched off to fight. The Irish Christian Davies was ‘dazzled by the sight’ and all were inspired by patriotism and the call for recruits as the wars dragged on. War was an everyday reality for three hundred years, with a break before the First World War. European countries fought each other over who got which throne, over land, over trade and power. The fields of Flanders, the East and West Indies and the Americas were the battlegrounds where hundreds of thousands of men fought and died. They besieged fortified towns and staged set-piece fighting with foot and cavalry battalions facing each other. At sea, ships’ cannons blazed, standing broadside to each other and with time weapons became better designed, like faster firing guns, but all still demanding manpower. Which is where the women wanting to volunteer succeeded. For recruiting was all about numbers and not quality. Men with diseases, disabilities, short-sighted, flat-footed, criminal and too young or too old were enlisted by fair means or foul. There were no proper medicals, no suspicions that a young man was a girl, as no-one was asked to drop their trousers or take off their shirts. One American doctor passed ninety men in an hour, with no time for checks.

‘I want to do something splendid…. something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.’ Louisa May Alcott wrote

as the Civil War raged in America and she did get to nurse the wounded soldiers. Fighting for their country was something young women from army families knew about. They could become camp followers, one of the hundreds who provided for the soldiers’ daily needs of food, washing, nursing and setting-up camp when on the move. Or work on the battlefield like Mary Hay, bringing water to cool down the cannon, standing alongside the soldiers and taking up guns if needed in the heat of fighting. But for those looking for adventure and wanting as Alcott said to ‘do something’ extraordinary, being ‘domestiques’ held little appeal. Masquerading as men was part of the excitement they sought and there was plenty of that in the countless theatres of war. So, they followed the drum, were enlisted and sometimes gave excuses that they were searching for husbands and lovers lost to recruiting sergeants and disappeared overnight.

Cross-dressing satisfied the ‘tomboy’ in these young women or what Christian Davies called’ my inclinations as a girl that were always masculine.’ Ditto the English Hannah Snell who felt she ‘had the real soul of a man in her breast.’ And American Loreta Velazquez who said,

‘I have no hesitation in saying I wish I’d been created a man instead of a woman,’ or AKNellie who ‘cursed the fate which had made me a girl.’

They felt best doing men’s work, in the fields, riding horses bareback and once they had enlisted, fighting. Being brought up as a boy made transitioning to a soldier easy for Maria van Antwerpen, Robert Cornelius and the pirate Mary Read.

Escape from the drudgery of low-paid jobs and the prospect of marriage was a spur. Deborah Sampson did not want to marry and she like other working-class girls in their late teens and early twenties needed to work. Soldiering offered regular pay and food. Parents often died young leaving children to fend for themselves; or else they were contracted out to farmers, tradesmen or into service to make one less mouth to feed at home. Girls from better-off families were confined to the home, doing domestic chores, sewing and waiting for marriage. As American Sarah Emma Edmonds said, ‘I did not want to stay at home and weep.’ She became a soldier and spy.