takes a satirical turn:
The marriage of women would solve the problem which renders wretched the superfluous women of New England. Those unhappy women cannot marry because there are not enough men in New England to be divided fairly among them. The New England men, to a large extent, abstain from marrying their fellow New England women, and prefer to seek wives in other states. If half of these neglected women were to put on trousers and marry the other half, the painful spectacle of a hundred thousand lonely spinsters would forever disappear. The female husbands and their wives could read Emerson’s essays to each other, and thus completely satisfy the wildest longings of the female New England heart. What more could a New England spinster desire than a husband who never smokes, swears, or slams the door; who keeps his clothes in order, and does not stay out of the house until late at night, and who reads Emerson, understands the nature of women, and can discuss feminine dress with intelligence and appreciation?81
A sense of anxiety is palpable in the article, and it is clear that for some readers, news of the Dubois story provoked fears about the sanctity of marriage and its future in American society. This anxiety is articulated more clearly in an editorial published in the Milwaukee Peck’s Sun, penned by editor and eventual Wisconsin governor George W. Peck. He argues that “the marriage relation is an excellent thing for the world at large but if it is tooled with in this way by amateurs it will be brought into discredit and will become very unpopular. The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd. The best woman in the world could not take the place of a man, and do chores around the house and go down town nights and come home full of election whisky without giving herself away.”82 Of course, several fictions are required both here and in the New York Times in order for the narrative to operate on the level of satire and/or ridicule. Although the national press had flirted with illusions of the sexual attraction between Dubois and Fuller—using vague language to suggest a “mysterious link” joining the married couple—in the New York Times editorial, women are depicted according to the Victorian model of female passionlessness. As such, it is suggested that the “wildest longings of the female New England heart” could be satisfied by poetry—not sexual activity. Additionally, while Peck claims authoritatively that “the best woman in the world could not take the place of a man,” he ignores the fact that Frank Dubois had successfully passed as a man for many months, adeptly performing all the manly chores that were expected of a husband.
Furthermore, while most coverage of the Dubois affair portrayed Gertrude Fuller as a “normal” woman—young, conventionally attractive, and, had it not been for Dubois, a suitable partner for a middle-class man—in the New York Times editorial, same-sex marriage is portrayed as a solution to the “problem” of spinsters (or, as the author refers to them, the “wretched … superfluous women of New England”). Americans had long been anxious about the troublesome figure of the “spinster,” as rates of unmarried women had climbed throughout the nineteenth century, at times reaching near 10 percent.83 The spinster was a queer figure, as she rejected convention by remaining unmarried, and yet the popular image of the spinster—old and unattractive—suggested that she was unmarried not by choice, but because she was undesirable to men. Thus, in the New York Times “Female Husbands” editorial, same-sex marriage was evacuated of its radical potential to serve as an alternative to heterosexual marriage, because it was positioned simply as a solution to a problem that plagued heterosexual men—unattractive women. Thus, rather than acknowledging the facts of the Dubois case—that a “normal” biological woman chose to marry a trans man—the New York Times ridiculed the practice by associating it with a group that was universally derided.
Furthermore, these editorials differ substantially from coverage of the Dubois case elsewhere in the mass-circulation press in another important way: they portray the boundaries between men and women as inflexible and impermeable. As Peck writes, “The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd.” This conveys the notion that women are inherently so distinct from men that the suggestion that they could complete the same tasks was laughable. However, elsewhere in the mass-circulation press, journalists were not so quick to dismiss the idea of women successfully embodying masculinity. The editorials published in the Peck’s Sun and New York Times reveal the anxiety provoked not simply by the facts surrounding Frank Dubois’s marriage, but also by the tepid response to the marriage evident in the nation’s newspapers. If individuals assigned female at birth could successfully woo “normal” women, and if their actions were condoned, then the romantic future of heterosexual cisgender men could be in peril.
Although George Peck and the author of the “Female Husbands” editorial likely sought to delegitimate same-sex marriage and trans men, neither the authors, nor the papers that published their editorials, could control the ways that readers interpreted their work. No doubt, some individuals who read the line “If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it?” agreed with the sentiment. Some, perhaps even were themselves engaged in some sort of queer domestic arrangement. As subsequent chapters will illustrate, queer households peppered communities throughout the nation, and trans men lived in towns large and small from coast to coast. These individuals assuredly read editorials like “Female Husbands” with a smirk, perhaps before heading out and splitting wood or performing some other “manly” chore with ease.
Conclusion
The newspaper coverage of Dubois’s story in 1883 marked a turning point in representations of trans men and relationships between individuals assigned female at birth; it was within coverage of Dubois that many of the last utterances of the term “female husband” appeared in metropolitan newspapers such as the New York Times.84 Although the phenomenon of women posing as husbands did not disappear, the label of “female husband” did. This shift was likely caused by growing anxiety (palpable in the editorials discussed above) about the term itself. Indeed, the term “female husband” could serve dual purposes. At once, it registered the absurdity of the notion of women serving as “husband,” as women in the late nineteenth century were constructed as being the opposite of that which is implied by the term. On the other hand, however, the term “female husband” could also provide same-sex relationships with a certain amount of legitimacy. Husbands in the nineteenth century carried a great deal of legal and social authority; male privilege was enshrined in large part through coverture laws that conferred authority to “husbands” in unique and important ways. As such, the term rendered respect such that the phrase “female husband” was jarring—too jarring, it seems, for newspaper writers to employ after 1890.
In the 1870s and 1880s, however, newspapers were willing to discuss “female husbands,” and what’s more, they were willing to make vague references to same-sex desire. Indeed, even in Victorian-era America, there appeared to be an understanding of biological women as sexual entities. In the coverage of both Joseph Lobdell and Frank Dubois, newspapers consistently made open-ended statements about their “mysterious” relationships with women, leaving readers to imagine the possibilities of same-sex intimacies. Furthermore, the relationships themselves were not portrayed as inherently deviant. Instead, Lobdell’s failure to live up to the expectations of a “husband” (i.e., his inability to provide a stable home for Mary Perry) rendered him a nuisance—not his queer embodiment. Similarly, Frank Dubois was seen as strange because he abandoned a normative household where he was a wife and mother in order to serve as a husband to another biological woman. Such behavior was considered strange, but not in and of itself dangerous. Even as sexological writing began to infiltrate popular discussions of gender and sexuality, it was not immediately embraced as gospel. Newspaper editors, particularly those who wrote for the community wherein a trans man was “discovered,” continued to do what they did in the Dubois case: they looked to sexology to provide one possible explanation, but they also sought out local experts—people who knew the individuals personally and could attest to their character and their standing in the community. It continued to be the case that the opinions of neighbors, coworkers, and wives mattered much more on the local level when it came to determining the reaction to trans men than did the “expert” opinion of sexologists.
On the national level, however, sexologists did come to have greater explanatory power after the 1890s. The sexological model of the “female sexual invert”—a dangerous and pathological individual who threatened to seduce “normal”