After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Georgian Husband with Fourteen Wives

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Charles Hamilton allegedly had fourteen wives according to the newspapers, but the headline was that Charles used to be called Mary. In the 18th century newspaper stories about 'female husbands' were not uncommon; people assigned female at birth who assumed the legal, social and economic position reserved for men.Today we explore two stories with Jen Manion, author of Female Husbands: A Trans History.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Hi, it's Anthony. Just to let you know that this episode contains discussions regarding sex. Boston, America, 1747. And a man is sitting with his family. He's reading a newspaper,

the Boston Weekly Post. Suddenly he chokes on his coffee, laughs but then frowns at a story that has travelled across the world. What he reads is this. At a quarter sessions of the piece, held at Taunton, Somersetshire, Mary Hamilton was tried for pretending herself a man and marrying 14 wives, the last of which, Mary Price, deposed in court that she was married to the prisoner, had bedded, and that they had lived as man and wife for a quarter of a year, during which time she thought the prisoner was a man, owing to the prisoner's vile and deceitful practices.

Our man in Boston looks up from his newspaper. His eyes fall on his wife and daughter, and just for a moment, he thinks that perhaps the rules of the world that he thought he knew were nothing more than a mere illusion. It's not so much the fact that Hamilton was supposed to have taken 14 wives, it was the other part that intrigued him. For if women are men, and by association men are women, then perhaps everything he has been told is a lie. In that moment, it seems that the walls of his impressive wood-framed house tremble with the enormity of this incredible possibility. But then he just sips his coffee once again, folds his newspaper, and puts it away, returning to the limiting comfort of what he has always known. Hello and welcome to After Dark. Today we are joined by Jen Manion. They are a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Jen's

first book, Female Husbands, A Trans History, came out in 2020 with Cambridge University Press, and it was a finalist of the OAH Lawrence Levine Award for US Cultural History. It was also awarded the British Association for Victorian Studies Best Book Prize. Jen, welcome to After Dark. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. I have to admit up front, we are talking with one of my history heroes today on After Dark, because Jen's work, while I was doing my PhD, Jen's work came out around that time and was just so inspiring and so influential to how I posed questions in my own work. So Jen, this is just to say thank you for

that work firstly, and how incredible it is to have you on After Dark, as Maddy just said. Thank you so much. Well, I'm a big fan of your work as well, including this podcast. So it's great to be here. So let's get straight into it, Jen. And for anyone who's coming to this topic new, who doesn't know anything about it, who, unlike Anthony, maybe didn't write a PhD on it, what is a female husband? Is this a term from the past? Is this something that we're using today? Can you explain a little bit more about it? Yeah, it's definitely a term from the past, which is why I love it so much. It was used to describe someone who was assigned female at birth. At some point, usually when they were teenagers, they decided to transgender and started presenting themselves as men.

They usually took up male occupations, got involved romantically with women, and in most cases entered actually legal marriages with women. And so this term was used by other people to describe them, usually when they were outed under some rough circumstance. It's so valuable a term, I think, particularly because it is rooted in the 18th and 19th century. And when, as historians of gender, culture and sexuality, we come up against some pushback about terms like using queer or gay, et cetera. You know, we see it all the time. Female husbands is there at the time it's being used. And that's why I just think it's so priceless. It is. And, you know, the opening paragraph that you so vividly captured this scene, I think was happening all over England and the North American colonies

at this time where people, it's not just that female husbands lived and maybe their friends or family or community knew about them, but that their stories were written in the newspaper. So everyone had to wrestle with this idea of the instability of gender categories, the instability of heterosexuality. And like you said, the possibility that people who they just assumed were men might not have been born that way. So it's so exciting and so relevant to many issues in our modern life as well. Getting to that, Jen, we heard at the beginning about a person who in the newspaper is described as Mary Hamilton, but we might call them Charles Hamilton today. So can you tell us a little bit about who this person is and a little bit about

your approach as a historian in terms of how you are labeling, naming that individual and how you write about them? Yeah, I mean, I think your description captures like the heart of the question, you know, for us as people looking back on the past and working with these records. So if I read about this account and it's clear to me that Charles Hamilton is someone who, for reasons that are not always clear to us, decided to live as a man and change their name and present as male their whole entire life, as far as we can tell, that based on our contemporary sensibilities and understanding of gender, we respect that. We respect the name and the pronouns and the life that people choose. That's one way that we're human and kind. And so that was a really important

part of my practice as a historian was to honor and respect what this person obviously wanted the world to see and think of them. Now, the newspapers had a different sensibility then as they sometimes do now, right? And they're digging in on what their legal name was at birth and what their legal sex was at birth. And that's a big part of the story. I think that's why a story about this life seems sensational enough and newsworthy, you know, to draw eyes. So they're not going to neglect that. They're going to keep reminding us. And sometimes the way they remind us is, you know, kind of by going back and forth, you know, between names, between pronouns. And I also see that as evidence that they're also grappling with gender.

How am I supposed to talk about this person as we ourselves also grapple with how am I supposed to talk about this person? I think one of the things, this being after dark, the thing I want to make clear is the darker side of history that intrigues us about this topic is how it's being reported and the impact that that can have on people then. It can ruin lives and did ruin lives, as we know, but also what effect that can have on people today. I think it's important to say that in case there's any misinterpretation that we're associating that darkness with how these people are living their lives. But just to come back to something you were saying, Jen, about Charles living his life in the way that he did for most of the time. What is so tantalizing about that, and I remember being really excited about this back in 2020 when I was reading your book,

is that we know about Charles because he was outed, let's say, and just so buoyed by all the Charleses we don't know about. That, to me, is the most incredible thing, because rest assured, they were there. Absolutely. And I think that's one of the hardest parts of this project and working with these records, because we only encounter people when they're under duress. And that very dramatically shapes the lens through which their lives are characterized. And we don't know, we don't get to see. And in most cases, you know, we will never know about all of the Charleses who were just going about their lives. So Jen, let's just establish a little bit more about

Charles before we talk about this moment of outing that happens legally, that happens in the newspapers. Can you tell us a little bit about his life, his position in his community? He's described as a female husband, so obviously he's in some kind of marriage. So what's the situation with Charles? Well, Charles was typical of most female husbands in that they were usually poor. Charles grew up in England, was said to have been raised in Scotland by his parents and then returned to England after having apprenticed with several different quack doctors or mountebacks and was traveling throughout England, you know, selling cures as a quack doctors or mountebaks and was traveling throughout England, selling cures as a quack doctor and ended up renting a room from Mary Creed, who was the aunt of Mary Price.

And so in that time of residing in their house together, they got involved and were entered into a legal marriage. And so they head off. So after several months of marriage, Mary Price runs to the authorities in Glastonbury and says, no, I do not want to be married to this person. They are not the person that I thought they were. And I have since our marriage learned that my husband is a woman, basically. So in this case, this is very unusual. The wife of the female husband outs them to the authorities. And so the wife plays a very crucial role in the identity and life of the husband. in the identity and life of the husband. Charles quite possibly did deceive Mary Price. I mean,

we don't really know what she knew. And this is captured in the deposition in Glastonbury, where she's describing that they had sex, to some extent, how they had sex. And that even though he entered her two or three times, she just now figured out that her husband was a woman. So there's a lot of different things going on there. And this is one of the few cases where the discussion of sex is so explicit. And I think that's a big part of why the punishment was so harsh and why the authorities took this claim so seriously. So what we know about, say, the 1533 Buggery Act, which was trying to legally stop sex between men, that didn't apply to sex between people who are identified as women. So by Mrs. Hamilton, as she now is, going to the authorities, what is she saying has happened? What's the illegality of what's happened here? Well, she's saying, you know, the act of deception, right? That her husband

was a woman who was presenting themselves as a man. So that's one thing. And then, of course, that they engaged in their sex acts that were kind of described in the court record as vile and deceitful. It is very important though in telling that Hamilton basically gets convicted of vagrancy, which we know is such a broad catch-all category for disorder that isn't actually specifically delineated in other places. It wasn't a law against cross-dressing. It wasn't a law against male impersonation and entering a legal marriage. It wasn't a law against having sex with other devices. But the other thing to bear in mind here is that Charles is living his life and is being perceived externally as a man. He has gone through

legal procedures, such as the marriage, which have identified him as a man as he wishes to be identified. And in that sense, it calls to mind what you were talking about earlier about this idea between gender, sexuality, how we perceive nowadays it to have been very clear cut in the past. But actually, I always think that the 18th century, the people who lived in the 18th century, particularly the 18th century, I don't think you can apply it in the same way as the 19th century, but they're having a lot of the same conversations around gender identity and sexuality, but even more so gender identity that we have today. And you can see that here. Absolutely. I mean, that's why I think it's just so exciting to learn about these cases and work with these records. And especially

because now there's a level of and a volume of documentation around our legal names, our legal sex, interacting with the state apparatus that just didn't exist. So you change your name, you convince one person, and suddenly you're entered into a legally binding record book as a man. And as long as the people around you are convinced and support that claim, you're off. In Charles's life, until he is quote unquote caught out, he is accepted in his community as a man. Maybe people know what is the reality of his life. Maybe people don't. There's a question over his own wife and how much she understands him and his situation his identity and his physiology as well but what happens after Charles's arrest obviously in the newspapers he's being described again as Mary Hamilton now is there a purposeful

misgendering that happens from that point onwards is there anyone who supports the identity he's put forward into the world himself after that point? And what happens to him after he's arrested? That's a great question. I mean, it is the courts and the newspapers support this intentional misgendering, but also really a public shaming, right? So part of his punishment, it's six months in jail, but then public whippings in four different towns in which he was known to have lived so that everyone would know about this person so that he would no longer be able to live in that community in peace. So this was extreme. There's no other case with it, but it speaks of its time, right? I mean, also punishment will be undergoing a transformation in the near future. So like most

other husbands, he ends up living an itinerant life. You don't necessarily stay in one place for very long. I mean, we don't have many details about his afterlife other than that we think he boards a ship for North America and ends up traveling with ease from North Carolina until Chester, Pennsylvania, when he sort of gets detained again under suspicion that he might not really be a man. And the local constable runs an ad in the paper, in which, you know, they capture some of Hamilton's story. The ad basically says, does anybody have a charge against this person? And if not, I'll let them go. Again, because what did he do wrong? How do you prosecute that? And do you know what, it's so interesting,

because America becomes, you know, everybody knows about America as a place of emigration or immigration, depending on what side of the sea you're on. But one of the things that's been really overlooked is that America was definitely a mecca for queer immigration. And there is a pattern which has emerged that I didn't even realize, but it's emerging in my book of going to America. And when I looked into that a little bit deeper, it links specifically to the sodomy laws, but applies in so many other ways. One of the main reasons being is that the sodomy laws were, the sodomy itself as an act was deemed to be a thing that you could not mention. It was a sin

that was not worth mentioning. It was so bad, you couldn't mention it. But as a result, you therefore legally tongue-tied yourself. So prosecutions for sodomy were way less prevalent. So therefore, people who were suspected of sodomy often ran to America. But not just sodomy, you see a real queer influx towards the latter half of the 18th century into the first half of the 19th century. And that's so interesting that Charles goes on that queer odyssey as well. And it's this new life thing. It's part of the American dream. It really is, or what becomes known as the American dream. But it really is tangible that this might be a place one can go to, particularly from Britain. I love everything you just said, because

I had not thought of it in those terms at all. But a lot of the early female husbands from North America come from England and Scotland. So there is a way that this is definitely like a British, you know, I've always thought of it as like female husbands was like a British category, right? That kind of gets exported. But part of what you're saying is something even so much bigger with more profound implications. Tell us a little bit more about this 14 wives lark. What function is that fulfilling, do you think, in some of these narratives? What function is that fulfilling, do you think, in some of these narratives? And I don't have a good answer for why that became the story. It's as if the this less threatening was to remove it from the realm of likelihood and make it something ridiculous. When Jen said that, I just threw up my hands because this is a podcast, you can't see that, but it is in victory because I am so in love with the mundanity of these

stories, these histories, not stories. I'm just so in love with the normalcy, the everydayness of this isn't actually that exciting. And it's something we could do well with remembering ourselves. It's so boring. It's brilliantly boring. And it's just exquisitely boring that it's just a life. It's just a life in all its brilliant and boringness. The coverage of it, the response to it is the abnormality in some ways, and that that's worth studying. Not that the lives themselves aren't, but the response to it tells us so much about where we've come from and where we're going next, hopefully, in terms of our response, our understanding of people who are living in this way and who are in the past outed in these ways that obviously have these legal repercussions,

but they're also massively traumatic, that take the joy out of the people just living those mundane lives. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves.

Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk then about another one of these lives. And I have another little passage for you. So you can all settle in with your cups of tea as you listen to this. We'll listen to another little part of the 18th century queer past.

In 1736, when Mary East was 16, life was especially hard on women. Now these are the words of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and he's using these words to begin his account of the life of Mary East, who would become James Howe. Ever the melodramatist, Stoker can't resist painting a picture of the moment that the 16-year-old Mary became James. He tells us Mary, with a friend, a young girl, had gotten together and hatched their plan to live together as man and wife. All that was left to decide was who would wear the breeches.

And so they tossed a coin for it. Up went the coin, flipping end over end in the sunshine. Breaches, petticoats, breaches, petticoats. Which side would it be? Man, woman, man, tumbling down, landing. But for the next four decades, Mr. and Mrs. Howe lived pioneering lives, boring pioneering lives, on the back of a toss of that coin. Now, when I say boring, I'm not trying to say that their lives weren't worthwhile and exciting. I'm just feeding back into what we said before. Tell us a little bit about Mr. and Mrs. Howe and what they go on to do once they've married. Well, I mean, one of the best parts of this story is that Mary East becomes James Howe,

and they never name their wife in any of these records. And after many years of research, I found the actual marriage, the record of the marriage, and it happened outside of Fleet Prison, and the wife's name was Mary. Of course. Mary Snapes. So it's, you know, James Howe and Mary Snapes. You know, the Howes, to link back to the point that was made earlier, are the most conventional, normative, mundane couple with the most stable, long-lasting relationship, successful business owner, pillars of their community in Poplar. And in some respects, one of the ways that I think the place that they have held in history and why they were written about so often, I mean, there is so much written about them

into the 20th century, is that in some respects, they were like a model married couple for British laborers and that James Howe exemplified model working class manhood. So it's actually incredible the detail and the respect given to them in the tellings of their life just to pick up on what we heard in the narrative that this idea they literally toss a coin to decide who's going to present as a man in the relationship and who the woman because it seems to me something pun intended a bit almost flippant about the ease with which they decide that. What's going on there? Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't buy that. We have no evidence of where that story comes from. There is a lot of what I think of is selective, protective

truth-telling that when female husbands or their wives get outed and they're interrogated by the police or other authorities, that there's a certain degree of manipulation in terms of like what they say and how they present their lives. And I don't really buy that account. I think some of us have a propensity for gender transition and living with the expectations and the responsibilities of a man in society. And some of us are really happy and comfortable living as women. So I think that explanation takes away their agency. It takes away their threat.

takes away their agency. It takes away their threat. It takes away any sense that we do have gender identities and desires and that we're kind of on a spectrum and that some of us are in different places and that it would be obvious to these two which one of them wanted to live in society as a woman and which one of them wanted to live in society as a man. But I think it's a really good point to pick out, Maddy, because that's what the newspapers wanted people to think and feel, that actually this is so flippant, there's nothing to worry about here. I think it's invented to calm people down. If you're reading this in the newspaper, you don't need to panic. This isn't a threat. This was just flippant. I think that's key.

Well, it ties into the other case of Charles Hamilton having 14 wives, right? It's that same kind of ridiculousness that this is somehow elevated to almost a joke in order to pacify it or make it seem less threatening to society. So we have this couple who are living their life very happily. Jen, you talk about them being later on understood as a real model of a long-term relationship. And again, it feeds into that everydayness. They seem to be just getting on with things quietly in their own corner of the world. But we know about them today because they are outed, aren't they? So what happens in their story? They're running, I think it's a pub in Whitechapel in the middle of the century, the 18th century that is. And at some point they're exposed and we know about them today. So what happens? What goes wrong for them? Sure. So they're owners and they run this pub for decades together. They're accumulating quite

a bit of wealth. I mean, they're not quite middle class, but for a laboring couple that started with nothing, they're doing very well. They don't have servants or other people working in the pub or in the house. And the first thing that happens is that Mary Howe dies in 1766. And then the next thing that happens is an intensification of the blackmailing that James Howe had been subjected to for actually a very long time. So someone who recognized them from their childhood and kind of pieced it together and figured out who they are, had been blackmailing them intermittently, but at this point asked for a sum of money that was just astronomical and that James didn't have on hand and threatened James that if they didn't come up with this money, they actually hired two people

to impersonate police and said that they were going to be arrested and potentially executed for male impersonation. And at this point, in part, I think because Mary has died and James doesn't have the money and is beaten up by these guys and is truly fearful about the legal threat, James basically is super connected and respected in the community and goes to the authorities and is like, listen, I'm really a woman, but the rest of what they're accusing me of is not true. And so then files a lawsuit against them. And they actually go to prison for four years for this whole incident. And there's a couple of records verifying this in the London Metropolitan Archives.

And so here it just gets a little unclear. So the way I describe it is, you know, James Howe basically under threat of death, ungenders themself, goes to court and presents as a female and, you know, is telling people, you know, their first legal name at this point. And one of the things in the recording of this that I love is that there is a description of how awkward and unnatural they looked in a dress and that like everyone in the community was like really uncomfortable with this and just like wanted them to like, you know, be themselves again, but that this is what they had to do in order to be taken seriously and have the weight of the law work for them rather than against them. It is, I think, very important that we remember some of those ideas of simple queer joy in the past. And the long life that James had with Mary is the real thrust of the story, really. The way it ends, there's a

tragedy to that. And there's a kind of a forceful narrative that he has to go back and occupy a gender space in which he's uncomfortable. But there was a long time in which he was thriving and that his wife Mary was thriving, or relatively so. And there is something quietly revolutionary about that, I think, and something that's worth remembering about that ordinariness rather than the extraordinary thing that happened in the end. I 100% agree. They lived long lives and they had a stability and a simple ordinariness. And as far as we can tell, yeah, a real joy and love and domesticity and daily life that is not really dwelled upon in the records, in the telling, because of the slant and the bias of what newspaper editors think their readers want to see. And it's not queer joy. And some things never change, sadly, but we press on, we press on nonetheless. As we have you here, Jen,

I think it would be remiss of us to, just very briefly to take us to the end of this episode about where we are right now in terms of queer histories and particularly histories that relate to gender identity and what that says in our own time. And if I may, just to kind of start that, I have a concern, which is, I think, more obvious maybe in America, and you can talk to this better than I can. But when I said earlier, there's a parallel for me between some of the conversations we're having today and some of

the conversations that were happening around gender identity in the 18th century. I find that again and again. I'd be interested to know if that's something that you identify in your work. The second thing, however, is that the 19th century puts a stop to that. And it changes, in my opinion, it changes the ways in which gender and sexuality are spoken about. It changes the idea of possibility within binary categories. And it starts to regulate. And I refer to it in my work as hetero-regulation as opposed to hetero-normalcy, because I don't get that term, what's normal. And it's deliberate.

Therefore, it's regulatory as opposed to normalcy. My fear in some of the regulation we're seeing again, I don't necessarily say that history repeats itself because that's a little bit glib, but there is the danger that this malleability of the 18th century and many of the parallels to the present. I mean, I see time and again in records, you know, when people are trying to understand female husbands, they don't think, oh, you know, they just put on men's clothes. They say, oh, yeah, there was something about their nature or their character that made them this way. And it sort of makes sense to me. And that's definitely like a precursor, you know, to what we think of now as the gender potential gets rerouted into sexuality in the 19th century. Certainly for female husbands, there's no longer a gender variable. These are simply women who want to be with other women and who will do whatever it takes to be women. So gender nonconformity is just seen as a means to same-sex desire. And maybe that's like one way that it's easier to regulate and easier to punish. And I agree with you. I'm really alarmed about what's happening

politically right now. And I think some of us are really alarmed and some people just see how far we have come in the last 50 years and can't imagine that things would ever go back or that, you know, such a central part of the movement for LGBT rights and dignity has been, well, we just have to tell the truth about ourselves. We just have to be honest about who we are to our friends, our coworkers, our family members, and that people will want to love and support us once they understand the full picture. I mean, I have like totally bought in to that thinking. And it's really hard to then consider that after all of that has happened, that there's a sizable, powerful enough segment of the population that hates us and actively wants to harm us

and take away rights that we have, take away our autonomy, really, just to live in our bodies. But I do agree with you that history is a powerful lens through which we can try to understand how could things seem to be moving in one direction and then stop and perhaps go back in another direction. I think that's a good place to finish up on today because that's how Maddy and I always say this in terms of After Dark. That's kind of how we interact with history, right, Maddy? That it's there's these echoes from the past and these echoes are particularly loud at the moment. And it would be a shame to see that 19th century bent towards regulation and very harmful regulation.

It'll take us another 150, 200 years to come out of that if we dare to go back in there. As well, for me, just listening to Jen speak in this episode so brilliantly, it's just testament to the fact that in the 18th century, as in all of human history, trans people, people who identified in different ways, presented in different ways, were present, of course, but they were thriving, they were joyful, albeit in a system that tried to regulate them. And the ones that we know about, we often know about them because they were caught out. But as you said at the beginning, Anthony, for every Charles Hamilton that made it into the papers and was misgendered and publicly punished, there will be 10, 20, 100 Charles Hamiltons who we don't know about who just lived their lives. And hopefully those lives were, as much as they could be, full of joy and full of hope. And I

think that's a really powerful thing. The final thing I would say as a queer person who does queer histories, don't let labels hold you back from engaging with or telling what we now refer to as queer histories. Labels are constantly changing. You've heard about female husbands today. That was a common naming practice in the past. We don't have it now, but we still know what we mean by female husbands. Words change. They're changing now. When I came out first, I was a gay man. Now I use queer far more, but nothing has changed in my practice because of that. So we see this thing in the archive and sometimes it's too difficult for people to say, well, let's not, you can't impose these labels. I get it. There was no such thing as heterosexuality either, though. So you can't hold

people to different standards. If that was not there, which in terms of label, it wasn't, then these queer histories weren't there either. I'm sorry if that's getting a little bit passionate, but I am passionate about this. And Jen, I know you are, and Maddy, I know you are in many other ways as well. So don't let this argument of, we can't impose labels from now on the past. It's happening all the time. Just look at heterosexuality. Anyway, that's enough. I'm getting off my soapbox. Sorry, I've rambled. On that note, thank you so much for listening to this episode of After Dark. We love hearing from you, the listener. So if you want to get in touch with anything at all,

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