Woman From Joan of Arc to Christina of Sweden: the women who disguised themselves as men to be powerful

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The Bible already warned: "Woman shall not wear men's clothing nor shall men wear women's clothing, for they are abominable things in the eyes of the Lord your God." Almost nothing: to see who angers the almighty. The author of Insumisas (Principal de los Libros), the disseminator Laura Manzanera, explains that "attire has always been used to mark differences, especially those of gender", and that "fashion has been the most effective surveillance tool ”, from the skirt to the pants, from pink to blue -a color assignment that, in its beginnings, was the other way around-.

Tell me what you wear and I'll tell you how much you command: is it a garment that opens, that moves with the wind and that forces the girl to reduce the most dynamic activities and to behave 'properly' so as not to be seen? 'the shames'? Or is it a comfortable, practical garment that represents freedom and security, like pants for men? AHA. Simone de Beauvoir recalled that men's clothing, although it is also an artifice, "is made to favor action instead of hindering it."

“To get rid of the conventions and limitations inherent to their condition, many women throughout history have decided to cross-dress. They wanted to leave behind the family or an unwanted marriage, avoid the roles that were assigned to them: wife and mother, servant, nun or prostitute, get out of poverty, earn their own salary, do a forbidden job or develop a passion”, he writes. Laura. “They were pursuing love or defending a cause, preventing harassment or possible rape, or simply trying to save life.”

This book talks about all of them. From women who never wanted to be men, never really wanted to become one of them, but they knew that playing dress-up with the enemy would lead them to truly compete against him, from a position of equals. There was nothing playful in this cross-dressing: if they were caught, they were punished with insults and humiliation, they were condemned to social repudiation and, in the worst case, they were sentenced to death.

History of transvestism

They are not only fictional heroines -like Leonora from Fidelio, from Beethoven, or Dorotea from Don Quixote-, and they are not only historical women: forty years ago, the Egyptian Sisa Abu Dauh, disguised herself as a man to be able to work and feed her daughter after becoming a widow. “I shaved my head, put on a turban, and hid my figure under a loose-fitting galabiya (robe). And, like any other boy in town, I went to look for a salary”.

That's how it was: she worked as a farmer, as a bricklayer, and, finally, as a shoe shiner. In the 21st century, there have also been homeless women who have suffered the terrors of living without a roof and have decided to disguise themselves to avoid rape: "I cut my hair, put on a cap and wide clothes to hide it, that way everything was easier," she says. to the author Gema, a woman who lived and slept on the streets of Barcelona for twelve years.

Théroigne de Méricourt said it: “I want to look like a man to avoid the humiliation of being a woman”, although the guys who dressed as a woman were also punished very harshly, since it was understood that passing as a woman was something abominable and low -a plummeting fall from high-, while moving towards the virile revealed the ambition to "be better". "If God has entrusted me to take and wear men's clothes, it is because I must carry the weapons that men carry," launched the authentic Joan of Arc.

Crazy Juana

Remember that she -poor, young, illiterate- felt the call of God to rid France of the invasion and enthrone Carlos: she told him so, she had to undergo a virginity test and ended up becoming a famous warrior maiden. When they judged her clothes, she argued: "The clothes of both sexes suit a virgin equally." The theologians came to confirm that, indeed, the thing seemed to be a divine order, so he was given armor, accessories, squires, and an escort, and he commanded five thousand soldiers until he liberated Orleans.

Crazy Juana.

The problem was when she fell in Paris and was injured: her luck was waning. The king abandoned her: he did not mind owing her throne to him. In the Inquisition prison where she ended up, they sunk her for her masculine appearance, "although that was better than being raped." They persecuted her for her haircut and for her stubbornness in dressing as a man. "She was also declared a fortune teller, false prophetess, summoner of evil spirits, sorceress, conspirator, superstitious, skeptical, deviant, idolatrous, sacrilegious, blasphemous, apostate, scandalous... Even an incitement to war," writes the author.

She could be saved if she asked for forgiveness and promised to spend the rest of her life locked up, on bread and water, dressed as a woman. Although her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, her will did not last long and she broke her word. He dressed again in men's clothing. “I prefer to dress as a man than as a woman [...]. I have never sworn not to wear it again [...]. I did it because it seemed more appropriate, being among men, than dressing as a woman [...]. I re-adopted him because you didn't keep your word that I could go to mass and receive my Savior and that they would remove my shackles."

So for that and for recognizing that he heard heavenly voices, he went to the stake at the age of nineteen. She left heretic and proud, because she rejected the Our Father and the ecclesiastical authorities and because she came to admit having slept... with another woman, in an undeniable lesbian wink.

Pharaoh(a) of Egypt

I was not alone: ​​there queens like the pharaoh of Egypt Hatshepsut, the first woman with a beard we met - even if it was false. With a naked torso, with bare and visible breasts, with a masculine headdress. She referred to herself as “he” and “she”, and was the first publicly known person to use gender “according to what interested her on a political level and performed on herself the miracle of holding royalty and power without it the fact of being a woman will hinder it”.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut.

She invented a prodigious birth in which she claimed to be the very daughter of the god Amun, therefore she was predestined as heir to the title of pharaoh. She paid for turning the foundations of Egyptian society upside down with silence in history: her images were removed after her death, her name was removed from the list of kings' men.

The Free Queen

What about Christina of Sweden? This is how her memories begin: “I was born with a good star; he had a hoarse, strong voice and his entire body was covered with hair. Seeing that, the midwives believed it was a boy. They filled the palace with their misguided cries of joy, which for a time deceived the king himself," he wrote. “Wish and hope joined to deceive them all, and the women found themselves in great trouble when they realized that they had been wrong. In a hurry, they did not know how to tell the king the truth.”

However, to the monarch Gustavo Adolfo, that seemed the most: “I trust that this girl will be worth me as a man. She will be cunning, because she has outwitted all of us." He brought her up like a boy, like an heir, although his wife was not amused by that. "Cristina blamed the mistake on having been born wrapped in the amniotic sac that covered her genitals, and some historians consider a hypertrophy of the clitoris, an anomaly that is corrected with growth," writes the expert.

Cristina from Sweden.

Horse riding, hunting, fencing, philosophy, geography, astronomy, mathematics... everything interested him. She was strong, tough, independent, and she turned down everyone who proposed to her because they "disgusted" her. At the age of six her father died and she was declared queen-elect, but she said before Parliament, already when she came of age, that she did not admit "the authority of a husband" and named her cousin heir. "Her bachelorhood was her first great act of rebellion, but there would be others," says the author.

She dressed as a man, called herself Count Dohna and went to live in the direction of Rome armed with a rifle. She converted to Catholicism but gave war like no other: although she respected Pope Alexander VII, she "was rude and obscene, whistled, rolled up her skirts to sit with her legs spread, refused to kneel in public to pray..." . They didn't forgive her criticism, but she felt free. They called her hermaphrodite, hybrid, sexually ambiguous. He messed it up to the end: he tried the Polish crown, he wanted to recover the Swedish one, they reviled it... and he ended up accepting an annual income from Pope Clement IX and settled in Rome at the age of forty-four.

She wasn't really a feminist: she believed that women were incapable of ruling, she believed in Salic law. They say that she had sex with men and women, but that was the least of it: she was annoying, simply being authentic.

Many other rebels

The Marquise de Châtelet disguised herself as a man to enter the intellectual debates in which she had been rejected as female. Mary Edwards Walker dressed as a man to practice the profession of surgeon and she always lived insulted-she even got married and did not accept her husband's last name, take it now-.

Enrique Faber, when he became a widow, posed as a man to be free and studied medicine. Other women signed their works with male names, from George Sand to George Eliot through J.K. Rowling. Rachilde and Marc de Montifaud—actually two 19th-century Frenchwomen whose pornographic works sparked scandal after scandal—were not men either. Neither were Viscount Charles de Launay, Daniel Stern, Otto Stern, Fernán Caballero, Víctor Català or James Tiptree Jr.

Calamity Jane.

The girls from the West who posed as cowboys and rode freely but deviously against that hostile environment - there the real Calamity Jane. Or Charley Parkhurst drinking like a cossack and driving stages in the middle of a gold rush. Maud West being a detective, Martha Gellhorn being a journalist. Females entering the prohibited professions of football, judo, bullfighting -I smelled María Salomé Rodríguez, 'La Reverte'- or music. Ellen Craft was a black slave who lived poorly in the southern United States in the 19th century, and changed not only her gender, but also her race and social class. "Thanks to his disguise as a rich white man he achieved freedom." Now we keep trying to make them look at us the same as they do... from our own body.

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