New York City to Grand Forks, North Dakota. The wire dispatch read:
A Waupun special to the Sentinel15 says: “S. J. Hudson of Belvidere, Ills., who came here recently with two children in search of his runaway wife, found her masquerading in male attire under the name of Frank Dubois. She was living with Gertrude Fuller, having been married to her early last spring by Rev. H. L. Morrison, at the home of the bride’s mother. The deception had not been suspected, but many thought Frank Dubois had many characteristics of a woman. Under this name she had solicited odd jobs of painting, and was earning enough to support them both.”16
In most cases, the above dispatch was published on an interior page within a column relaying other brief stories from around the nation, likely provided to the papers by the Associated Press.17 The remarkably unsensational account presented the details of the story in a matter-of-fact way and provided very little in the way of a framework through which readers could make sense of the story; there is no suggestion as to why Dubois began dressing as man, or what motivated him to marry Fuller. However, newspaper editors stepped in to fill the void and presented the dispatch under a wide range of titles, including “A Truant Wife” in the Helena Independent, and “An Insane Freak” in the Grand Forks Daily Herald. While such titles did not provide much framing, they did suggest to readers how they should think about the story. Additionally, they reflect a range of understandings regarding gender transgressions: the “truant wife” of Helena was the “insane freak” of Grand Forks.
One term that was used by the press with regularity to describe Frank Dubois, however, was “female husband.”18 The term was originally coined by English novelist Henry Fielding in his 1746 criminal biography The Female Husband.19 Fielding’s novel was based on newspaper stories, which had appeared in England the same year, about the arrest of a fraudulent doctor and “female husband” Mary/Charles Hamilton.20 After the publication of Fielding’s work, the term “female husband” would go on to appear with relative frequency in the British and U.S. press, most often to describe women who lived as men or who partnered with other women and took on “masculine” occupations.21 While female husbands were by no means celebrated in the mass-circulation press, they were not denigrated as insane, as sexologists were beginning to do with their figure of the “female invert.” As Jennifer Manion has argued, “If representations of female husbands in the eighteenth-century press appear to mock their protagonists at first glance, they also serve to make the category real.”22 The utterance of the term “female husband” in the press animated in the minds of some readers the possibility of women serving the function of husband, a prospect that some readers likely found appealing. Indeed, as Rachel Hope Cleves has observed, the term “female husband” had a long tenure in the U.S. press, and yet its meaning was by no means stable. She writes, “The diversity and longevity of stories about female husbands leads to the conclusion that this form of same-sex union, in particular, had cultural legibility within American society despite its routine description as singular and astonishing.”23 As Cleves explains, the term “female husband” appeared with great regularity in the press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Significantly, it was often used to discuss cases that the press deemed remarkable but not pathological.
Additionally, newspaper coverage of female husbands consistently conveyed an understanding of the boundaries of gender as porous and incomplete. It appears that a great deal of public interest in stories such as that of female husband Frank Dubois was provoked precisely by their illustration of how permeable gender boundaries really were. American audiences had a powerful desire for such stories, and newspaper editors did not shy away from them. As such, by referring to Dubois as a “female husband,” newspaper editors rendered his case legible as a familiar social phenomenon to American readers and helped to ensure interest in the case. Furthermore, while the term itself was likely familiar to readers, they also likely had seen it used in a variety of ways; “female husband” is ambiguous (or is an oxymoron, as Susan Clayton has argued), allowing for it to be interpreted and utilized in a variety of ways, which likely added to its appeal to newspaper editors nationwide.24
“He Is a Woman”
Journalists in Milwaukee were seemingly aware of the potential national interest in the Frank Dubois story and pounced on the case as a means of earning national recognition for their papers. Indeed, Milwaukee was the closest big city to Waupun, and its newspapers (mainly the Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee Journal) possessed many more resources than did Waupun’s. However, the journalists’ drive to produce an exclusive story that would be reprinted nationally apparently led to some violations of ethical journalism. For example, on November 1, 1883, the Milwaukee Journal published a front-page article titled “He Is a Woman,” which was supposedly the first interview with Frank Dubois and Gertie Fuller after the revelation of Dubois’s “true sex.” This story appeared to be quite the scoop, as no other paper had yet reached the pair. The article began with a lengthy description of the Journal reporter’s long chase of Dubois and Fuller, which brought him “seven miles into the country.”25 The reporter found the pair taking refuge in the house of a local farmer, where Dubois and Fuller allegedly agreed to an interview.
The reporter painted a dramatic scene, wherein both parties appeared distressed. Dubois “cast nervous glances toward the door, and his small hands worked and twisted in apparent mental agony,” while Fuller “was in tears, and appeared greatly distressed when the question of her husband’s sex was mentioned.” The reporter also offered detailed physical descriptions of both Dubois, who appeared as “a slightly built effeminate personage,” and Fuller, who is depicted as a “rather pretty blonde with dark hair.” The article goes on to reproduce the reporter’s interview with Dubois, wherein Dubois initially insists on his maleness:
“Mr. Dubois, you, of course, know the stories which have been circulated concerning you”
“I do,” hesitantly and in a voice which could not be mistaken for a man’s.
“You are married to Gertrude Fuller, are you not?”
“I am; the ceremony was performed by Rev. H. L. Morrison, in Waupun.”
“You insist you are a man?”
“I do—I am. As long as my wife is satisfied it’s nobody’s business.”
“Mr. Dubois, you look like a woman, act like a woman, and there are dozens of reasons to suppose you are not Frank Dubois, but Mrs. Hudson—a woman. Do you refuse to reveal yourself?”
“There is nothing to reveal.”
“If you are caught in this disguise you will be arrested! You should place yourself in the proper light at once and thus avoid punishment.”
Apparently this line of questioning got to be too much for Fuller, who then cried:
“O Frank, Frank, for God’s sake tell all and have it over,” at this moment exclaimed the young and pretty wife, tears streaming down her face.
Dubois looked toward her, his lips trembled, and he burst into tears, sobs choking him for a time. Finally he said: “It’s true,” and endeavored to leave the room. He was restrained and finally was induced to tell his story.26
In this account, Dubois is presented as wholly effeminate, and the notion that he could have successfully passed as a man is presented as absurd. His innate femininity is highlighted at the end of the above quote, where he bursts into (feminine) tears. For her part, Fuller is presented as a heartbroken young woman. She is characterized here, and in other press coverage of the Dubois case, as a “normal” woman; later in the interview, Dubois reveals that Fuller did not know his “true sex” before their wedding night. However, the precise nature of her relationship with Dubois is cast in vague terms, and the possibility of sexual intimacy is at least tacitly suggested. For example, Dubois’s flippant line about how “as long as my wife is satisfied it’s nobody’s business” assuredly reflects a certain understanding that biological women could sexually satisfy one another and, furthermore, that biological women had (contrary to Victorian notion of female passionlessness) sexual desire.
Significantly, this interview later proved to be entirely contrived. Many of the details provided in the Journal’s “scoop”