Down to the sea in slips- women sailors in disguise

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/women-who-went-sea-dressed-men

This feature on women who disguised themselves as men. They slipped through the recruiting net to go to sea and fight in the West and East Indies and in the fields of Flanders. The piece follows on from my talk at the National Maritime Museum,Greenwich, London. I talked about women cross-dressers in general. This relates to my book ‘Cross-dressed to Kill-women who went to war disguised as men.’

Sailor women as a term is therefore not strictly accurate as they took aliases. They were only discovered and their real sex revealed either by chance or by intent when the women sailors themselves decided to give up fighting.