Cross dressing soldiers

Earlier this year that I noticed a story of an Australian woman who had got on board an Australian troop ship heading off to World War 1.  She was found out fairly early, but it appears that in the American Civil War, some women managed to carry out the subterfuge for a very long time.

I think this review of a book on the topic might have come out earlier this year, but it's just turned up on my Zite account, hence I have only noticed it now.  I was particularly struck by this part:

Though once found out, these female soldiers were discharged from the army for “congenital peculiarities,” “sexual incompatibility,” or the unambiguously termed offense of “unmistakable evidence of being a woman,” most of these women went undetected, at least for a while — a fact not all that astounding in the context of Victorian society where the single most revealing litmus test, nudity, was a rarity given bathing was a rare occurrence and people often slept in their clothes. (But today, in an age when the tip of the devastating iceberg that is sexual assault in the military is only beginning to emerge, one has to wonder what happened to the women who did get found out.)

Thanks to the poorly fitted uniforms, some women were even able to disguise their pregnancies until the very end, startling their male platoon mates with the delivery. Others chose to continue dressing as men after the end of the war, raising gender identity questions also not discussed in the book. But perhaps most interesting of all is the question of how women got the idea for this in the first place. Blanton argues that much of it had to do with cultural influence — cross-dressing female heroines permeated Victorian literature, with military and sailor women often celebrated in 17th-century ballads, novels, and poems.

I'm guessing that 17th century reference, coming after talk of the Victorian era might be a mistake, but in any event, I was not aware of the general popularity of cross dressing women stories from back then.

I also think this is part of what makes the true stories of pretend male soldiers so remarkable - because if we see it in a movie, it always looks so improbable.