Welcome to season one of The Long Transition, where I’m chronicling the history of anti-crossdressing laws. You can read the posts in this series on their own, but I also recommend the whole arc. New installments come out biweekly.
In 1843, St. Louis became the first city in the United States to forbid anyone appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to their sex.”1 Five years later, Columbus, Ohio was the second.2 At least ten copycat laws followed before 1860:
Nashville (1850);
Chicago (1851);
Springfield, Illinois (1856);
Memphis (1857);
Louisiana (the city, 1858) and Jefferson City (1859), Missouri;
and Charleston (1858).3
(New Orleans passed a related, but different kind of disguise law in 1856.)4
Wilmington, Delaware (1856) and Newark, New Jersey (1858) are the only northeastern cities in which historians have found anti-crossdressing laws before 1860.5 (That being said, my research suggests that Wilmington had no such law.6)
Before 1860, anti-crossdressing ordinances were a midwestern and southern phenomenon.
Why did anti-crossdressing laws originate in the 1840s and 1850s? Why did they appear in the Midwest and the South, rather than much older and larger American cities? What did the ordinances say? What was their purpose? And were they enforced? Surprisingly, many of these questions have never been answered. As the introduction to this series explained, historians have typically assumed that anti-crossdressing laws targeted people for gender variance instead of proving it. More importantly, they haven’t examined this antebellum period.
Let’s see what we can find out.
The fact that St. Louis was the first city to adopt an anti-crossdressing ordinance is no coincidence. (Given how deeply hit-or miss antebellum municipal records are, it’s possible there was a city that passed an anti-crossdressing law before St. Louis, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)
In 1843, St. Louis was considered “the gateway to the West.” The United States border, after all, ended at Missouri’s western edge. From its French roots, the city had become an entrepot for the vicious policy of Indian removal meant to clear the way for territorial expansion toward the Pacific. As the fur trade collapsed, railroad lines stretched westward, and confrontations with Mexico and Comanche to the southwest heated up, St. Louis grew astronomically. What had been a few square blocks of buildings in 1815 became the headquarters of the Western Department of the US Army. By 1840, warehouses and small factories dotted the riverfront, where steamships moved agricultural goods, military equipment, laborers, and throngs of settlers, many from Virginia, North Carolina, and the Ohio valley. The city’s population surpassed 35,000.7
Decades of violent campaigns in the Indian Wars framed the Missouri state constitution, which prohibited free black people from becoming state residents, in flagrant violation of the Constitution. (The conflict would be infamously resolved by the 1857 Dred Scott decision.) Missouri was a slavery state, but just as importantly, it was home to a white supremacist variety of antislavery sentiment. As historian Walter Johnson explains, “For the non-slaveholding and working-class white men who predominated in the state, Indians were a barrier to cheap land and enslaved and free Black people were a barrier to high wages.”8
Unlike in the Southern states from which many of its residents had migrated, Missouri was not governed by a slaveholding elite. St. Louis incubated a white working-class that understood freedom, equality, and opportunity as requiring a whites-only West. This conviction made the city a profoundly violent place at times. St. Louis was the site of the country’s first documented lynching in 1836, and what Johnson describes as a low-key state of war simmered along the river border with Illinois. Fervent abolitionists regularly got into shoot-outs with slave-thieves in the business of kidnapping black people to traffic them downriver to New Orleans.9
None of this has much to do with crossdressing, but it begins to explain why a conflict-riven city undergoing explosive growth was so preoccupied with public order and appearances. St. Louis, along with other young Midwestern cities like Columbus, was a prodigious source of municipal works and public regulation—a model for urban planning and policing for the rest of the country. The 1843 misdemeanor law did much more than prohibit crossdressing. The specific section read:
Every person who shall appear in any street, alley, avenue, market place or public square, or in any other place within the city, when naked, or in a dress not belonging to their sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress, or shall be guilt of any indecent and lewd act or behavior, or shall exhibit or perform any immoral or lewd book, picture, statue, or other thing, or who hall exhibit or perform any immoral or lewd play or other representation, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor.
The prescribed punishment for misdemeanors was a fine of up to $100. And the 1843 ordinance defined forty-one kinds of them, from disturbing the peace, to public drunkenness, to firing a gun, not fencing in cellars, keeping a dangerous dog, and running a brothel.10
The law also prohibited bathing naked in the Mississippi river.11 Strange as it might seem, this was how several pre-1860 restrictions on cross-dressing came to be. In Columbus, the city council banned swimming and bathing in the Scioto river in 1834, partly to clear it for commerce, and partly because it was full of sewage. To keep people out of the river, the ordinance also fined anyone “found exposing him or herself naked or in a lewd or indecent manner” while swimming. In 1848, when the city updated the law, it added a line to that section prohibiting crossdressing.12 An 1857 ordinance in Memphis likewise forbid “appearing in a public place in a state of nudity, in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress” in a paragraph that outlawed “bathing in the Mississippi or Wolf rivers, or the Bayou within the limits of the city, in the day time.”13
Unlike Boston, New York, or Baltimore, these Midwestern and Southern cities were young and experiencing tense booms. City councils wanted to shed old habits in neighborhoods that were just years ago small and provincial. They wanted to get people out of rivers, get hogs out of the streets, pave roads, and enact rudimentary zoning by clamping down on brothels, gambling dens, and unlicensed bars. Making public nudity a crime fell under that broad mandate, as did prohibiting crossdressing as another variety of indecency.
Antebellum city councils kept minutes, but not detailed records of deliberations, so there isn’t a good way to reconstruct the motivations of the men who wrote and voted for these ordinances. In fact, the only evidence is of crossdressing’s unimportance: newspapers that reported on the doings of councils don’t seem to have mentioned the issue.14
What can we make of this?
In the two decades before the Civil War, dressing as another sex certainly wasn’t understood by Americans to be a practice belonging to a discrete group of people who changed sex. It was seen either as a criminal method of disguise or a question of women’s rights.
Compared to the decades following the Civil War, crossdressing was also mentioned in antebellum newspapers rarely. Mostly, it came up in stories about alleged criminals and runaway slaves. Dressing as another sex in these contexts was pretty self-evident: people meant to evade detection. Still, it’s not clear that these practices directly motivated cities to make crossdressing a misdemeanor. More likely, they formed a small part of the tapestry of behavior city councils wanted to curb to secure public order in a tense era.
There was lengthier discussion of women wearing pants, and some were famously arrested for it. In 1852, Emma Snodgrass made the papers for wearing breeches in public and getting arrested in Boston—but not under an anti-crossdressing law, since the city did not have one.15 The debate mainly concerned whether women should be allowed to wear practical clothes while moving about in public.
Crossdressing laws were simply not necessary for pursuing women dressed in men’s clothing. In 1846, for instance, a woman in New Orleans was fined for attending the opera dressed as a man, even though the city had no law against crossdressing.16 And in New York City in 1848, a sailor was apprehended for drunkenly carousing with women and outed as female when he physically struggled with the arresting officer. Using the city’s drunk and disorderly conduct ordinance, a judge fined him $5.17
This sailor might have been a passing man. If he was, he was unlucky, but his arrest illustrates an important point: passing women and men were not singled out by the law before the Civil War. Their arrests were rare and usually on some other charge, like drunkenness for men, or prostitution-related offenses for women, during which they were outed.
The first wave of American anti-crossdressing laws, then, don’t on their yield much insight for a history of anti-transgender discrimination. However! I promise this history will pay off over the course of this series.
The archaic subject of sumptuary law I discussed in my previous post also pays a dividend here. There’s a shade of sumptuary law at play in these antebellum ordinances. Crossdressing laws reflect a broad sentiment of urban government: the problem of living in close quarters with strangers. Sumptuary laws stretching back centuries were preoccupied with the instability and conflicts of city life, where traditional hierarchies were weakened by depending on strangers as neighbors.18 Requiring that people be both recognizable and decent in public was an extremely old principle of statecraft, but it took on sharp importance as the United States was riven by existential conflict between slavery and free labor.
Our patience in following the threads of these early histories is about to pay off. The Civil War and its aftermath were the pivotal turning point in the history of anti-crossdressing laws. In the next installment of this series, we’ll meet a generation of black passing women who became part of the national battle over Reconstruction in part because of crossdressing laws. And there, I think we’ll find a new appreciation for just how long anti-transgender campaigns have played a role in American politics.
The Revised Ordinances of the City of Saint Louis (Chambers and Knapp, 1843), 303.
Mansel Blackford, Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change (Ohio State University Press, 2016), 62.
Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 320n2; Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century (Chicago Review Press, 2018), 56; and Digest of the Charters and Ordinances of the City of Memphis, from 1826 to 1860 (Saunders, Oberly, and Jones 1860), 272. I’ve dated the Memphis law to seven years earlier than prior scholars.
“Synopsis of Ordinances, 1841-1937,” New Orleans City Archies and Special Collections, https://nolacityarchives.org/charter-and-ordinance-history/synopsis-of-ordinances/#gsc.tab=0.
The City Charter and Ordinances of the City of Newark (Daily Advertiser Office, 1858), 260.
William Eskridge lists Wilmington in a table of crossdressing laws (Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the closet, Harvard University Press, 1999, p.338); however, the city ordinances from 1857 includes no such provision. There is a prohibition on disorderly houses, and on bathing in the Brandywine river, but neither references clothing. The Ordinances of the City of Wilmington (Henry Eckel and Co., 1857), 153, 161-166. Wilmington adopted an indecent costume and mask ordinance in the 1860s, but it does not mention dressing in the opposite sex. The Charter and Ordinances of the City of Wilmington, Delaware (Henry Eckel, 1863), 196. Crossdressing is still not in an 1872 volume of ordinances, either. The Ordinances of the City of Wilmington, Delaware (Henry Eckel, 1872). I suspect Eskridge made a mistake.
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books, 2020), 35, 41-42, 64, 76.
Ibid, 83-84, 85.
Ibid, 73-74, 84, 96.
The Revised Ordinances of the City of Saint Louis, 301.
Ibid, 302.
Blackford, Columbus, 62.
Digest of the Charters and Ordinances of the City of Memphis, 272.
Full runs of city papers from the 1840s and 1850s are rare, so it’s possible I couldn’t find a stray article, but that wouldn’t line up with the overall pattern after combing through the Missouri Daily Republican, the Memphis Daily Appeal, the Ohio State Journal, and comparing them to newspaper accounts of people arrested without crossdressing laws, as discussed later in this piece.
Leslie Landrigan, “Emma Snodgrass, Arrested for Wearing Pants,” New England Historical Society, https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/emma-snodgrass-arrested-wearing-pants/.
“A Frolic in Breeches,” Baltimore Daily Clipper, May 1, 1846, 4.
“Police Intelligence,” New York Herald, February 14, 1848.
Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Macmillan, 1996), 10, 112.
Thank you for these articles! Every one of them is eye-opening.