During the most recent Democratic primary, I found myself wondering how things might have turned out differently if Hillary Clinton had spent less time with the glass ceiling and more time campaigning for President. For that matter, would Sarah Palin have been chosen as John McCain’s ticket mate if she had not been female?
Even today, women carry the heavy burden of constantly needing to assert themselves in the workplace while still maintaining their femininity. Though I love being a woman, and probably wouldn’t give it up if I had the choice, I have always been curious if my life would be different if my shirts buttoned on the other side and I wrote under a male name. Would I find more opportunities opening up for me? What kind of different challenges would I face as a man?
I’m not the only woman to have such fantasies, or to feel at times that the social pressures placed on women are just not worth the effort. Inspired by the story of Deborah Sampson, who posed as a man to join the army during the American Revolution, I went searching for other women who decided to make a go of it as men, and why.
Hannah Snell
At loose ends after the death of her daughter in 1747 and the subsequent desertion by her husband of three years, Hannah Snell borrowed a suit from her brother-in-law, James Gray, and assumed his name. She moved to Portsmouth and joined the Royal Marines, sailing to Lisbon and then India aboard the ship Swallow. Throughout her career as a soldier, Snell was wounded eleven times in her legs and once in her groin. She either managed to treat her groin wound without revealing her sex or she may have used the services of a sympathetic Indian nurse.
In 1750, when Snell returned to London, she revealed her sex. Rather than be vilified, she was honorably discharged and granted a pension, which was rare even for male soldiers at that time. Showing an entrepreneurial spirit, Snell sold her story to London publisher Robert Walker who published her account, The Female Soldier, in two different editions. She also began to appear on stage in her uniform presenting military drills and singing songs. Snell even started a pub in Wapping, England, called the Female Warrior, but it did not last long. Upon her death in 1792, she had married twice and had two children.
George Sand
George Sand is the pseudonym of Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin. Sand was a French novelist in the early 19th century who challenged conventional distinctions of male and female, fact and fiction, and public and private, in both her work and her life (which she saw as one and the same). At nineteen, Sand married Baron Casimir Dudevant and had two children with him. Bored with her marriage, however, Sand left Dudevant in early 1831 claiming “romantic rebellion,” and was legally separated from him in 1835. This rebellion included such daring acts as smoking in public and carrying on a string of love affairs. Most scandalous was Sand’s habit of wearing men’s clothing in public. She was called every name in the book, from nymphomaniac to lesbian to slut (by Baudelaire), but Sand argued that men’s clothes were more comfortable and less expensive than dresses, and enabled her to circulate more freely in Paris than most women could.
Dorothy Lawrence
Dorothy Lawrence was an English reporter who posed as a man to become a soldier during WWI. When the war began in 1914, Lawrence was nineteen and living in Paris. She wanted to be a war reporter, but was unable to get a post on the front lines because she was a woman. Lawrence met two English soldiers in a café who helped her smuggle a uniform into her apartment. She bound her chest, cut her hair, padded her back with sacking and cotton, and learned to drill and march. She even dyed her skin with furniture polish to make her look like she’d been working out in the sun. Lawrence arrived at the Somme on a bicycle with forged identity papers as Private Denis Smith of the First Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment.
