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Perverse Modernities
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.
216 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2014
23 people are currently reading
1226 people want to read
About the author
Clare Sears
1 book7 followersClare Sears is Associate Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 17, 2020
It used to be illegal for men to wear dresses, women to wear pants, and visibly gender non-conforming people to exist in public. Between 1848 and the 1920s, more than 40 cities in 21 states passed laws specifically targeting a person “wearing the apparel of the other sex” as part of prohibitions against “public indecency.” Cross-dressing laws were put into place to establish the types of people that ‘belonged’ in public space. These laws not only policed normative gender, they created it by sanctioning who was allowed to be seen and who should remain hidden.
During the California Gold Rush, cross-dressing was widespread and accepted among miners. In 1849, one wrote about enjoying an evening where “the lack of lady dance partners…[was] made up by…gentlemen in calico gowns.” Women who dressed up as men and transmasculine people were also present, such that when one newspaper advertised for help in the 1850s it specified “no young women in disguise need apply.”
However, as San Francisco became increasingly settled new vice laws were put into place criminalizing cross-dressing. Historian Dr. Sears argues that this is because respectable men now had access to female companionship at home and felt they had to “protect the ladies” and “clean up” the city. Cross-dressing legislation emerged because of the perceived threat to male dominance posed by “sexual immorality” and by feminist dress reformers who “defied women’s confinement in the private sphere.” In 1895, a person named Ferdinand Haisch was arrested for “masquerading in female attire” after Hayes Valley residents called the cops, Haisch stated that this was “the only clothing that she had.”
Under the threat of cross-dressing laws, trans and gender non-conforming people had to go underground, modifying their appearance and confining their visibility to private spaces. They were pathologized for their self-knowledge and dismissed as delusional. In 1890, a judge sent Dick/Mamie Ruble to the insane asylum saying that they had a “hallucination that she should wear men’s clothing.” In court Ruble said: “I’m neither a man nor a woman.” Despite constant state violence, our transcestors persisted. Jeanne Bonnet was arrested more than 20 times and declared to the police, “You may send me to jail as often as you please but you can never make me wear women’s clothing again” (142).
To persecute police had to assume people’s assigned sex. They would use the “size of the suspect’s hands and feet, the presence or absence of facial hair, and the way he or she walked” (81). Sometimes the police would resort to assault: tearing of wigs, strip searching people, and conducting nonconsensual medical examination. They would make people “dress up” in prison for photographs to further sensationalize the crime, and publish these photos in newspapers so that people could better identify “queer freaks.” At the same time trans and gender non-conforming people were being criminalized on the streets, cross-dressing became celebrated on vaudeville stages where performers were billed as “female illusionists.” As Dr. Sears argues, “in framing gender crossings as magical illusions, female impersonators ultimately confirmed…the ostensibly natural…gender divide” (100).
This legislation was explicitly about race. In 1854 the Common Council declared the local Chinese population as an “nuisance” and sought the “immediate expulsion” of the entire community. As a way to justify anti-immigration stances, Chinese men were depicted as effeminate cross-dressers (focusing on their long hair, billowing gowns, and ornate fans) and Chinese women were depicted as sex workers – both challenging the presumed sexual normalcy of white America. When Chinese people would be arrested for cross-dressing their name would not be listed by the papers, as a way to contribute to the idea that all Chinese people were inherently deviant. Newspapers would focus on the specifics of white cross-dressing crimes to frame these cases as individual exceptions, in turn establishing gender normativity as something only accessible to white people.
Decades later society has accepted women in suits, but is still uncomfortable with people presumed to men in dresses. While they may no longer be rules on the books, cross-dressing laws still structure the political and aesthetic imagination. To truly move on, we must #DegenderFashion
During the California Gold Rush, cross-dressing was widespread and accepted among miners. In 1849, one wrote about enjoying an evening where “the lack of lady dance partners…[was] made up by…gentlemen in calico gowns.” Women who dressed up as men and transmasculine people were also present, such that when one newspaper advertised for help in the 1850s it specified “no young women in disguise need apply.”
However, as San Francisco became increasingly settled new vice laws were put into place criminalizing cross-dressing. Historian Dr. Sears argues that this is because respectable men now had access to female companionship at home and felt they had to “protect the ladies” and “clean up” the city. Cross-dressing legislation emerged because of the perceived threat to male dominance posed by “sexual immorality” and by feminist dress reformers who “defied women’s confinement in the private sphere.” In 1895, a person named Ferdinand Haisch was arrested for “masquerading in female attire” after Hayes Valley residents called the cops, Haisch stated that this was “the only clothing that she had.”
Under the threat of cross-dressing laws, trans and gender non-conforming people had to go underground, modifying their appearance and confining their visibility to private spaces. They were pathologized for their self-knowledge and dismissed as delusional. In 1890, a judge sent Dick/Mamie Ruble to the insane asylum saying that they had a “hallucination that she should wear men’s clothing.” In court Ruble said: “I’m neither a man nor a woman.” Despite constant state violence, our transcestors persisted. Jeanne Bonnet was arrested more than 20 times and declared to the police, “You may send me to jail as often as you please but you can never make me wear women’s clothing again” (142).
To persecute police had to assume people’s assigned sex. They would use the “size of the suspect’s hands and feet, the presence or absence of facial hair, and the way he or she walked” (81). Sometimes the police would resort to assault: tearing of wigs, strip searching people, and conducting nonconsensual medical examination. They would make people “dress up” in prison for photographs to further sensationalize the crime, and publish these photos in newspapers so that people could better identify “queer freaks.” At the same time trans and gender non-conforming people were being criminalized on the streets, cross-dressing became celebrated on vaudeville stages where performers were billed as “female illusionists.” As Dr. Sears argues, “in framing gender crossings as magical illusions, female impersonators ultimately confirmed…the ostensibly natural…gender divide” (100).
This legislation was explicitly about race. In 1854 the Common Council declared the local Chinese population as an “nuisance” and sought the “immediate expulsion” of the entire community. As a way to justify anti-immigration stances, Chinese men were depicted as effeminate cross-dressers (focusing on their long hair, billowing gowns, and ornate fans) and Chinese women were depicted as sex workers – both challenging the presumed sexual normalcy of white America. When Chinese people would be arrested for cross-dressing their name would not be listed by the papers, as a way to contribute to the idea that all Chinese people were inherently deviant. Newspapers would focus on the specifics of white cross-dressing crimes to frame these cases as individual exceptions, in turn establishing gender normativity as something only accessible to white people.
Decades later society has accepted women in suits, but is still uncomfortable with people presumed to men in dresses. While they may no longer be rules on the books, cross-dressing laws still structure the political and aesthetic imagination. To truly move on, we must #DegenderFashion
June 6, 2023
In 1863, San Francisco's board of supervisors passed a law banning a person from appearing in public in "a dress not belonging to his or her sex."
This is a small but dense volume. Sears uses something they call "trans-ing analysis," which appears to be another name for intersectional analysis, bringing together topics that are usually understood separately in order to reveal the shared underpinnings and impacts for a fuller understanding of the root subject.
In this case, Sears takes as their starting point San Francisco's 1863 cross-dressing law, and follows its origins and enforcement to better understand how gender and gendered presentation were understood and constructed in the City during the late 19th century. This analysis doesn't limit itself only to the disparate enforcement of cross-dressing offenses, but also to how the cross-dressing law and its enforcement connected with prostitution, vaudeville performance, dime freak-shows, displacement of the disabled, and racial othering of Chinese immigrants based in part on their "illegible" gender.
By the turn of the century, enforcement of cross-dressing offenses included police surveillance, forced disrobing, and--if found guilty--the potential of institutionalization. Who was allowed to wear which garments was always a constructed paradigm, as evidenced by one case where a judge maintained the difference between bloomers (legal) and pants (illegal) was the amount of fabric used in the construction of the garment. And although cross-dressing was prosecuted on its own (most frequently against white men and women), it was just as or more often used as a supplementary instrument to proscribe the use of public space by "undesirable" or "problem" bodies. From those with gender-variant presentation, to prostitutes, to the visibly disabled, to immigrants, few were spared from the enforcement of the aggressively constructed "normal," which itself shifted over time in tune to the political needs of the day.
It's an interesting work, and quite readable for academic nonfiction. The attention to detail on local history and political motivations is refreshing. It is perhaps particularly appropriate that I've read this book now, when concerns about legibility of gender in public spaces are once more coming into vogue.
In reading this book, I found myself struck by the tendency of society to come full circle. Or perhaps it's a pendulum, ringing in the hour of each age in actions and reactions and overreactions and overreach.
Well worth reading. I might buy a copy for my own library.
This is a small but dense volume. Sears uses something they call "trans-ing analysis," which appears to be another name for intersectional analysis, bringing together topics that are usually understood separately in order to reveal the shared underpinnings and impacts for a fuller understanding of the root subject.
In this case, Sears takes as their starting point San Francisco's 1863 cross-dressing law, and follows its origins and enforcement to better understand how gender and gendered presentation were understood and constructed in the City during the late 19th century. This analysis doesn't limit itself only to the disparate enforcement of cross-dressing offenses, but also to how the cross-dressing law and its enforcement connected with prostitution, vaudeville performance, dime freak-shows, displacement of the disabled, and racial othering of Chinese immigrants based in part on their "illegible" gender.
By the turn of the century, enforcement of cross-dressing offenses included police surveillance, forced disrobing, and--if found guilty--the potential of institutionalization. Who was allowed to wear which garments was always a constructed paradigm, as evidenced by one case where a judge maintained the difference between bloomers (legal) and pants (illegal) was the amount of fabric used in the construction of the garment. And although cross-dressing was prosecuted on its own (most frequently against white men and women), it was just as or more often used as a supplementary instrument to proscribe the use of public space by "undesirable" or "problem" bodies. From those with gender-variant presentation, to prostitutes, to the visibly disabled, to immigrants, few were spared from the enforcement of the aggressively constructed "normal," which itself shifted over time in tune to the political needs of the day.
It's an interesting work, and quite readable for academic nonfiction. The attention to detail on local history and political motivations is refreshing. It is perhaps particularly appropriate that I've read this book now, when concerns about legibility of gender in public spaces are once more coming into vogue.
In reading this book, I found myself struck by the tendency of society to come full circle. Or perhaps it's a pendulum, ringing in the hour of each age in actions and reactions and overreactions and overreach.
Well worth reading. I might buy a copy for my own library.
February 26, 2016
This book provides a thorough analysis of early American cross-dressing criminalization. Sears demonstrates how anti-cross dressing laws were used not only against trans and gender variant people but also against a variety of 'problem bodies' the municipal and state government sought to control - in particular suffragettes, Chinese and Mexican migrants, gays and lesbians, and others. Her exploration of the ways in which gender normativity was constructed via cross dressing laws to exclude Chinese and Mexican peoples from the very idea of the 'norm' is one of the most interesting parts of the book. That said, the text is full of lively and sometimes depressing stories of the varied group of people who faced arrests, trials, deportations, fines, and public scrutiny for wearing clothing that the Board of Supervisors deemed did not "belong" to their legal sex.
Although an academic text, Arresting Dress is immensely readable and quite short, so it makes a good quick read for anyone interested in trans history. Sears skillfully manages to avoid reading contemporary genders onto historical figures, without erasing their lived identities when this information is available - a feat I so rarely see in anyone who writes about gender variant people in history. All in all, a very brilliant book that I'll be returning to in the future I'm sure.
Although an academic text, Arresting Dress is immensely readable and quite short, so it makes a good quick read for anyone interested in trans history. Sears skillfully manages to avoid reading contemporary genders onto historical figures, without erasing their lived identities when this information is available - a feat I so rarely see in anyone who writes about gender variant people in history. All in all, a very brilliant book that I'll be returning to in the future I'm sure.
July 1, 2021
Une superbe lecture, excessivement instructive, sur le travestissement à San Francisco au XIXème siècle. Relativement court, bien que très académique, c'est une lecture qui nous fait découvrir, notamment à travers des analyses des journaux de l'époque, des procès, des arrestations ainsi que des témoignages, des pratiques relativement répandues jusqu'à l'arrivée des lois renforçant la binarité des genres notamment au niveau de l'accoutrement.
On explore des figures individuelles, souvent assez rapidement quand même, il ne s'agit pas de parler d'une personne en particulier, mais de parler d'un ensemble de pratique. On explore aussi, et c'est probablement une des forces du livre, comment le discours anti-travestissement se recoupe avec le discours raciste anti-chinois et comment des accusations sont portés à l'encontre d'hommes chinois accusés d'être trop féminisés. À travers de nombreuses arrestations et mention dans les journaux, on voit comment les lois de l'époque servait à expulser les migrants et faciliter leur détention. Un aspect dont je n'avais jamais entendu parler jusqu'à cette lecture.
Ce n'est pas la première fois qu'un livre avec un sujet très spécifique dans un lieu très précis donne en fait une situation et des observations sociales très larges et très éclairantes sur des pratiques (le dernier que j'ai en tête est La formation d'une culture élitaire dans une ville en essor : Joliette, 1860-1910) et explose complètement mes à priori et sur le livre et sur le sujet!!!
(Je dois avouer que la librairie dans laquelle je travaille avait ce livre depuis plus d'un an et que je ne l'avais pas acheté, il aurait été retourné au distributeur, je suis tellement content· de l'avoir lu et je vois définitivement sa nécessite en rayon!!!!!)
Une superbe découverte, pour toutes les personnes qui s'intéressent moindrement un peu à l'histoire trans, des droits des femmes (oui, le travestissement masculin faisait parti des transgressions des premières suffragistes), des spectacles de foire, de la criminalité, du racisme anti-chinois ou encore des lois américaines.
On explore des figures individuelles, souvent assez rapidement quand même, il ne s'agit pas de parler d'une personne en particulier, mais de parler d'un ensemble de pratique. On explore aussi, et c'est probablement une des forces du livre, comment le discours anti-travestissement se recoupe avec le discours raciste anti-chinois et comment des accusations sont portés à l'encontre d'hommes chinois accusés d'être trop féminisés. À travers de nombreuses arrestations et mention dans les journaux, on voit comment les lois de l'époque servait à expulser les migrants et faciliter leur détention. Un aspect dont je n'avais jamais entendu parler jusqu'à cette lecture.
Ce n'est pas la première fois qu'un livre avec un sujet très spécifique dans un lieu très précis donne en fait une situation et des observations sociales très larges et très éclairantes sur des pratiques (le dernier que j'ai en tête est La formation d'une culture élitaire dans une ville en essor : Joliette, 1860-1910) et explose complètement mes à priori et sur le livre et sur le sujet!!!
(Je dois avouer que la librairie dans laquelle je travaille avait ce livre depuis plus d'un an et que je ne l'avais pas acheté, il aurait été retourné au distributeur, je suis tellement content· de l'avoir lu et je vois définitivement sa nécessite en rayon!!!!!)
Une superbe découverte, pour toutes les personnes qui s'intéressent moindrement un peu à l'histoire trans, des droits des femmes (oui, le travestissement masculin faisait parti des transgressions des premières suffragistes), des spectacles de foire, de la criminalité, du racisme anti-chinois ou encore des lois américaines.
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November 11, 2022this was good! sears does an excellent job at drawing out the connections between 19th century cross dressing legislation, chinese exclusion, freak shows, and slum tours, providing a well-structured and well-supported argument for the mutual constructions/instantiations of race, gender, and nationhood. there were some places where i wanted more support for sears' arguments, but overall this was compelling and well-written.
June 11, 2024
Happy Pride Month! 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (2024)
January 10, 2021
This book is a wonderful read. The text is enjoyable to read and contains a very well-balanced combination of historical detail and theoretical insight about laws that policed public presentations of gender. It is important to recount the historical records of these laws and their effects, but in order for us to understand where we are and how we got here, it’s also important to understand the norms these laws served. If variations in gender presentations seem like something “new”, it’s important for us to understand that these laws aggressively attempted to erase historical examples of cross-dressing and transgender expressions of gender, which were then labeled “criminal” and “deviant” when they DID come up in the historical records.
March 23, 2017
A fascinating history of gender presentation in San Francisco during the second half of the 19th century. One of my favorite thing about this book is that Sears resists the temptation to project current (and anachronistic) categories and labels onto her subjects, allowing her to place her subjects in their proper contexts. Sears does not confine herself to subjects who might be categorized as trans today, but also includes other "problem bodies" regulated by the municipality, such as feminist dress reformers who wore pants and Chinese men who were stereotyped as feminine. In doing so, Sears reconstructs ideologies around gender, sex, race, and more in a fairly comprehensive manner. Definitely an enjoyable read and interesting all the way through, particularly in its discussion of the Gold Rush years!
February 25, 2025
This is a great examination of the changing gender dynamics of Gold Rush-era San Francisco and the ways those dynamics were forcibly altered by municipal government as San Francisco exploded in population during the early 1850s. Essential reading for anyone interested in gender studies or fashion history, or even urban legal history.
July 4, 2023
"...continue to haunt us today." This was an excellent read, but deeply unsettling, especially in 2023. This book is only eight years old, and largely discusses late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws, but it feels eerily current.
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April 27, 2021Read for class "History of San Francisco"
also, only reading introduction & ch 1. I def skimmed it, but it’s pretty interesting! I hope to read the full version sometime.
also, only reading introduction & ch 1. I def skimmed it, but it’s pretty interesting! I hope to read the full version sometime.
Read
October 27, 2021rtc, i don't usually rate nonfic
November 11, 2023
3.5 star school book but 2 star overall experience. also 2 stars for the 2 days it took me to read this. i might be the most courageous (and humble) person alive
November 28, 2023
Very worth the read.
Read
October 30, 2024awesome
January 1, 2025
A well written review of dress laws in San Francisco during vaudeville. We'll researched and moves at a good pace. I learned a lot.
June 2, 2016
Interesting book. It was the authors thesis and that shows in style and content. That said, it's still quite readable. I find the book quite timely given the current transphobia, and to see the similarities to the current crisis. The book has limitations due to loss of records during the 1906 Earthquake and fire. Nevertheless, it's still a great story. The story is substantially one sided as we're often dealing only with press reports based on trials, and not with much left to us from these men and women themselves. It's good to recognize that transgender may be a new concept, but the human experience predates any word we might coin to capture those human beings who are different, and inexplicable to so many.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews