Saints, Soldiers, Artists, Farmers: How Masculine Women Survived History
- Aaron Kimberly
- Jun 4
- 7 min read
History is crowded with masculine women. They appear at the edge of a monastery, hair cut short, dresses exchanged for a monk’s habit. They appear on ships and battlefields, passing through the Spanish colonial world with a sword, a new name, and a talent for survival. They appear in the mud and noise of Parisian horse fairs, or the local cafe, to argue about Lacan and Ellis. Others can be found on farms, sleeves rolled, hands split from harvest, doing what had to be done before weather, hunger, or debt closed in.
Some were famous. Most were not. Some were admired after the fact, once history had polished the rough edges from their lives. Others were mocked, diagnosed, watched, or forgotten. But they were not always unintelligible. Sometimes the world found a story that made room for them. Not freedom, exactly. Something smaller. A permission slip. A disguise. A vocation. A useful exception.
I found these stories while working on a larger project about transmen, sexual violence, and social intelligibility. I was asking how male-passing women become readable to others, and what happens when they do not. The historical material no longer fits the project I am finishing now. But the stories are too strange, too human, and too revealing to leave in a folder and forget.
They show that female masculinity has often needed a surrounding world that could explain it. A woman in men’s clothing could be treated as a joke, a threat, a patient, a saint, a soldier, an artist, or simply the strongest person available when the harvest had to come in. The body might be the same but the story changes. The story could decide a great deal.
One of the darker stories was medical. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology made masculine women visible by making them abnormal. It gathered them into types: inverts, degenerates, failed women, women supposedly too masculine to fit any ordinary script of womanhood, so something must be wrong with them. This was intelligibility with a cold instrument in its hand. It named female masculinity by pinning it down like an insect on a specimen tray.
That is the catch. Being understood is not the same as being free.
Religious life sometimes told a different story. Medieval legends include women who lived as men inside monasteries, where the renunciation of ordinary life could make strange things legible. Saint Eugenia is one such character. As the legend goes, Eugenia becomes "Eugenius", enters a monastery in male disguise, and becomes an abbot. The disguise is exposed only after a woman, rejected by Eugenia, falsely accuses the “abbot” of sexual misconduct.
The courtroom scene is almost theatrical. The hidden body is revealed. “Eugenius” drops her drawers and the charge collapses. Eugenia explains that loving God is a “manly” pursuit, and that male clothing has been worn for chastity, devotion, and spiritual discipline.
This is not a modern story of liberation. Eugenia is not simply allowed to be masculine. Her masculinity becomes readable because it is tied to holiness. The monastery can understand the disguise because the disguise seems to serve God. Female masculinity enters the story through sacrifice, so touching that she became a saint. The body crosses a boundary. The soul supplies the explanation.
Catalina de Erauso found a harsher grammar. Erauso, the seventeenth-century Basque figure later known as the “Lieutenant Nun,” fled a convent and remade life among ships, ports, uniforms, colonial towns, violence, danger, and the hard anonymity of travel. She lived for years as a man while moving through the Spanish colonial world, working as a cabin boy and later serving in Spain’s army.
In early modern Spain, respectable women were meant to be enclosed within a household, marriage, or convent. Public life belonged to men. To enter that world, Erauso had to become someone else.
Once the story became public, Erauso petitioned the king for recognition and reward, emphasizing hardship, loyalty, military courage, and service to the Catholic faith. Her argument was not, “I crossed a boundary, and that should be accepted.” It was closer to: “I crossed a boundary, and look what I did for Spain.”
A woman in male clothing remained visible, but it was absorbed into service. Erauso could be understood because she had fought, suffered, and carried the king’s flag. Masculinity became tolerable when it looked like heroic loyalty.
Rosa Bonheur’s story smells less of incense or gunpowder; more like manure, leather, and linseed oil.
Bonheur was born in nineteenth-century France and became one of the greatest animal painters of her age. Her masculinity was visible early. Her grandfather wrote to her mother, “You imagine you have a daughter…it is a mistake. Rosalie is a boy in petticoats.” Her mother called her “a conundrum.”
It is a beautiful word, and a lonely one. A conundrum is not yet a person fully seen. It is a puzzle other people haven't solved. No one knew how to place a girl who led classmates on calvary marches through the flower beds. Nor the young woman who couldn’t sit still to sew dresses. She preferred the nearby gun cap factory. Her father fretted that she’d never be employable. He eventually gave up on making her dainty and taught her how to paint. And paint she did.
She went where the animals were: horse fairs, stables, slaughterhouses, places thick with mud, sweat, blood, noise, and men. Trousers were practical. Petticoats would have been ridiculous. But in nineteenth-century France, women’s trousers were not merely eccentric. They were police-regulated. A woman could be arrested for wearing men’s clothing in public unless she had official permission. Bonheur obtained that permission. A formal police permit.
Even this is telling. Her masculinity did not become ordinary. It became administratively explainable. If anyone bothered her, she had the paperwork. The state could tolerate her trousers because they had a purpose. She needed them for work. They belonged to the artist’s labour, not to rebellion in the abstract.
Success softened the edges. Medals, reputation, and elite admiration gave people more ways to explain her. She was not simply a masculine woman in public. She was Rosa Bonheur: brilliant, disciplined, eccentric, useful. No one could question her raw talent. Genius can excuse a great deal, though usually only after it has proved profitable, patriotic, or impressive.
Claude Cahun belonged to another France entirely. Born Lucy Schwob into a prominent Jewish intellectual family, Cahun moved through the charged air of interwar artistic life. Psychoanalysis, surrealism, Marxism, sexuality, masks, mirrors, fractured selves: these were not private oddities in that world. They were material for art and serious intellectual work. Cahun’s self-portraits are not politely asking to be recognized. They stare back. Shaved head, ambiguous clothing, theatrical poses, an angular face arranged as refusal and a question: what is a self? That question had a home in Surrealism. It was the very question of the age, shattered as it was by war.
Still, this did not make Cahun free. Her father did not approve of her relationship with Suzanne Malherbe (who used the name Marcel Moore) but tolerated it. Family, class, education, and artistic networks all factored into the tolerance. A working-class woman playing with the same ambiguity would not have been called avant-garde. Homosexuality, at that time, was something only the rich could indulge in. Cahun might have been called unstable, immoral, ridiculous, or dangerous were it not for her station.
Prairie farmwork produced yet another grammar. In Sarah Carter’s account of women who bought land in the Canadian West, figures such as “Jack” May became intelligible through labour, landholding, and settler competence. Their masculinity did not need to be explained as art, sanctity, military necessity, or theatrical self-invention. It could be absorbed into the practical world of work. A woman who wore men’s clothes, handled stock, ran a farm, and lived outside ordinary domestic expectations could be understood, at least for a time, as useful. The category was unstable, and hardly innocent. It belonged to settler land politics, not liberation. But it still shows the pattern. Female masculinity became livable when the surrounding world had some use for it.
This is the uncomfortable lesson: Female masculinity does not mean the same thing everywhere. In one room she becomes an artist. In another, a patient. In another, a sinner. In another, a threat. Sometimes a saint or a soldier. Intelligibility is fragile, and rarely travels well.
This is where the gender identity framework deserves its steelman. It was meant to provide a stable, portable form of recognition. A person could move from the school to the bank to the hospital without having to be reconstructed from scratch at every counter. Anyone who has had to negotiate ordinary life room by room can see the mercy in that.
The trouble is that the steelman starts to look rather tin when portability is mistaken for meaning. The older grammars worked, when they worked, because they attached female masculinity to something the surrounding world already knew how to value: God, country, art, labour, genius, necessity. They gave masculinity a local reason to be there.
Gender identity does something different. It gives institutions a category. That category can secure recognition, but it cannot by itself supply the dense, local meanings through which people become understandable to one another. It can get you through the door. It cannot tell everyone in the room what they are seeing.
Masculine women have never lived by categories alone. They survived, when they survived, through stories. Some were narrow. Some were cruel. Some were bargains no one should have had to make. But they were stories the surrounding world could read.
The modern framework solved one problem: it gave recognition a passport. But the passport is not the person. This is where the gender identity framework becomes a steelman, and then rusts out like a tin man. It travels well because it travels light, and that is exactly the problem.
