Patriotism has no sex- for cross-dressing women

What fascinated me most when researching my book, is what drove these the young women and teenagers to take this radical and dangerous step. Cross-dressing women risked prosecution with penalties including execution, for cross-dressing was universally illegal. I found that patriotism was the biggest driver during the 17^th to early twentieth century , as countries’ Kings or Queens, revolutionary leaders or Prime Ministers called out for support and volunteers. Daughter, wives and lovers stood at their doorways or garden gates and watched their men leave to sign-up as soldiers. They saw troops marching past and heard the recruiting sergeants beating-up in their village squares. Like Loreta Velazquez, women wanted ‘to be part of the living drama’, not content to stay at home and so cross-dressed as men and signed-up.

I knew that patriotic fervour inspired hundreds of women in the French Revolution to help storm the Bastille and bring down the King and that hundreds more fought in the American War of Independence and their Civil War and in the English Civil War. Yet what I found most intriguing  was the determination and strength of character showed by these cross-dressing women who the acted alone, cut-off their hair, wrapped bandages around the breasts and took the risk. Like Eleonore Prohaska the daughter of a Guards officer in the Prussian army. She wrote to her brother after secretly enlisting under the name August Renz. “I’ve been a soldier for 4 weeks! Don’t be surprised, nor scold; as you know how determined I was to do it. .. to fight in this honourable war .. look at Spain and the Tyrol, and how the women and girls take part! Now I’m part of the volunteer riflemen – you know I’ll be clever enough to remain undetected. I have only one great wish that you tell father in as favourable a light as possible to me. I don’t think Father should be angry with me, when he himself told us stories, which made me determined to follow”. She was nicknamed the ‘Potsdam Joan of Arc’ in recognition of her fighting for her country.

Another, Anne Lavaux, born in Neufchateau,Belgium in 1620, was angry at the French invasion of her village and joined the Spanish Netherlands army in 1642 to help defend her country. When she left the army after being discovered, she was praised for having been a ‘model of piety as she had been a paragon on the battlefield, of honour, bravery and patriotism.’

Frederika Dorothea Kruger was awarded the coveted Iron Cross.  Born in Friedland in 1789 in the very north of Germany, close to the Polish border, Frederike had all through her childhood seen fighting between the French and the Polish, and how in her own village in the neutral area of Mecklenburg-Stralitz, the soldiers plundered and brutalised the people. Upset and angry she swore to fight for her country’s freedom. At the Battle of Dennewitz a Prussian victory and another blow to Napoleon’s weakening army, Frederike was hit by a shell in the shoulder and feet. She refused to quit the field until the battle was over. It was then her sex was discovered. Recovering in hospital in Berlin she was visited at her bedside by her King Frederick Wilhem who gave her the medal for her bravery in battle.

The roll call is long of these cross-dressing women, some only aged fifteen that I’ve included in my Appendix and as I wrote I wondered whether I too would have rallied to the flag. Would I have been prepared to die in the field of Flanders, to endure the exhaustion, the conditions and also the fear of discovery. The answer is probably not.

Louisa May Alcott was determined. ‘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’.

I too would have wanted to do something but not take up arms, kill men and risk being killed.

What I wonder is propelling women soldiers today, fighting for equality as they  try out for the Green Berets or Special Forces. Does patriotism feature? I’m not sure.  A recent recruit said she applied ’for any role that had the word combat in it’, looking for the opportunity to be a soldier in the truest sense. She and others are defying the view held by the army and historians as late as 1967 that “a woman’s place should be in the bed and not the battlefield, in crinoline or terylene rather than in battledress, wheeling a pram rather than driving a tank”. (John Laffin).

Interestingly the original definition of patriotism was support for ‘the common good’ and ‘civic pride’, before it became associated with love of country or nationalism. Where we stand now during the pandemic is testing our support of community and uniting people globally in a different fight. And for me, an important battle is to make sure that the iconic cross-dressing women from the past are included in the re-versioning of history rightly described as ’stale male and white’ that is taught and exists in the history books.