The Violent Abuse of Women by Geoffrey Pimm

Author:Geoffrey Pimm [Pimm, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526751621
Google: sCLIxQEACAAJ
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2019-10-30T22:34:55+00:00

Chapter 12

Male Impersonators & Female Actors

Although women regularly dressing in male attire became common practice in the twentieth century (at least in the Western world), women have dressed as men since time immemorial and for a wide variety of reasons. We have no way of knowing for certain, but Boudicca probably did not go to war with the Romans wearing a frock! Other than going to war, the wearing of masculine cloths invariably arose from a need to ensure anonymity or avoid recognition, perhaps to evade creditors or to illicitly seek employment as a man in order to claim a man’s income. It might also have been to masquerade as a man in order to pursue a lesbian relationship, as was the case with Mary (aka Charles) Hamilton, born in 1721, who in order to have a sexual relationship with other women allegedly ‘used vile and deceitful practices, not to be mentioned’.

One of the most common reasons for adopting such a subterfuge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to have been to follow a husband or lover into the armed services, being unable to face the months or even years of separation (and lack of income) that having a partner in such an occupation entailed. Sometimes the woman was in pursuit of an absconding partner, as in the case of Hannah Snell, whose husband deserted her while she was pregnant with their first child. Determined to trace her errant husband, she served under the name of James Grey for several years in the 6th Regiment of Foot and subsequently the Marines, seeing action in both services. Amazingly, she remained undiscovered, despite having been stripped and flogged with 500 lashes in the army on a trumped-up charge of dereliction of duty, and later being wounded with a musket ball in the groin while on service in India. Hannah remained undiscovered while being flogged, apparently because she had small breasts and was tied pressed against a wrought iron gate while the cat o’nine tails was applied to her back. She had actually been sentenced to 600 lashes, but such was her stoicism under the agony of the lash that the officer overseeing her punishment rescinded the last 100.

Other women had their true identities discovered when being similarly stripped in readiness for corporal punishment, although of course their punishment had been awarded as men. In 1771 naval seaman Charles Waddall was revealed as a woman when, unlike Hannah Snell, she was being stripped to the waist in order to receive a flogging. Likewise in 1781 another naval seaman named George Thompson was shown in fact to be Margaret Thompson while being similarly prepared for punishment.

Phoebe Hessel was born in London in 1713 and after marriage, in order to follow her soldier husband overseas, joined the 5th Regiment of Foot as a man and fought with them at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745 under the Duke of Cumberland, where she received a bayonet wound to the arm. She also served in Gibralter and later in America, where she fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

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