Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (review)

In Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, Clare Sears draws out the implications of a little-known San Francisco law that criminalized people appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex” (p. 2). Though this 1863 local government order seems like an idiosyncratic detail on which to base the book, Sears uses this law and its subsequent enforcements to show the consolidation of White cisgender privilege in a newly colonized and former disorderly gold-rush town during the second half of the nineteenth century. This is a careful and impressive study of how an anti cross-dressing law had implications for who could participate in urban life, what gender roles were considered normal and abnormal, and ultimately what races would be included and excluded from the nation.

The book begins with two historical chapters, the first setting the scene of gold-rush San Francisco and the second explaining background for the emergence of the 1863 law, before moving into four thematic chapters. Sears gives details that help the reader understand the particularities of the gold-rush in San Francisco—its population explosion, predominantly male society, Chinese immigration, and its annexation as an American state—never going into too much detail, but placing the specifics of this history into a race, class, and gender context while relating to the cross-dressing practices of this period. These chapters give a sense of the continuity and change of cross-dressing practices and the motivations that lay beneath. Sears demonstrates that during the gold-rush era there were multiple places where cross-dressing practices flourished—gold mining camps, masquerade balls, domestic labour, circulating photographs. Sears is quick to analyze how these practices were often used to establish and maintain racial and gender norms. For example, Euro-American men dressing in women’s clothing at gold-rush dances were creating the appearance of heterosexual relations within a single racial category while Indigenous women who were present went unacknowledged by White men, and were thereby dehumanized.

The subsequent chapter outlines the development of the anti cross-dressing law because of various changing historical circumstances at the end of the gold rush. These changes included a demographic shift as more middle-class White women immigrated to the area, large company-driven mining, less racial and class mixing in urban space, and the establishment of a police force. All this led to and was part of a well-known anti-vice crusade whose supporters took over the civic government for 20 years starting in 1856. This campaign and its subsequent law is what set the groundwork for the chapters that follow. Sears expertly and efficiently demonstrates how the rhetoric of the anti-vice campaign established White middle-class women as respectable and averse to seeing and interacting with indecency, and White middle-class men as having the responsibility as husbands and fathers to protect their wives and daughters from vice. These separate-sphere normative gender relations made cross-dressing one manifestation of the broader offence of indecency, which also included such offences as prostitution, gambling, visiting opium dens, and permitting women in bars after nightfall. Sears’ analysis is exemplary, showing the uneven enforcement of the law which targeted Chinese and Mexican prostitutes while ignoring Euro-American prostitutes, and by showing how cross-dressing imagery of politicians wearing women’s clothing to represent their weakness and ineffectiveness was used to shame those who were not part of the anti-vice campaign.

The final four chapters are thematically driven, each studying different results of the cross-dressing law. Chapter 3 looks at how the law was enforced turning city streets into gender-normative spaces. The chapter also places the cross-dressing law into the larger context of nuisance laws that dealt with various problematic bodies such as prostitutes, Chinese immigrants, and the disabled. Chapter 4 makes evident the surveillance required to enact and...