Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

4. Mannish Women

27 4 Mannish Women In the second half of the nineteenth century, some women freed themselves from male bondage by throwing off their corsets and bicycling. Other women cross-dressed as men and fought in the Civil War, and then there was the strange case of Nicholai de Raylan, secretary to the Russian consul in Chicago, who duped two wives into thinking she was a man. In 1889 the Chicago Times published an article headlined “Masculine Corsets,” about a new craze, mostly among “dandies and actors,” for wearing the feminine garment. “It was at Mme. G’s on Broadway,” stated the paper, “that the pink haired dude returned a pair of baby blue satin corsets trimmed with lace, after they had been fitted three times, to have them made a half inch smaller, and his anxious perplexity was very amusing to the mischievous merry maiden who fitted them on.” At the time, men in women’s clothing was rarely mentioned, but crossdressing women proved a more abiding subject. One women’s emancipation movement then was for dress reform, from skirts to pantaloons. Many women campaigned to break free from the constraints of corsets and heavy skirts, claiming they were injurious to one’s health and symbolic of women’s slavery to men. The most famous exponent of dress reform was Amelia Bloomer, who popularized “bloomers,” sometimes called “Turkish” or “Syrian” trousers, though the original design was by Elizabeth Smith Mannish Women 28 Miller. Bloomer first wore trousers with suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851, and her outfit comprised a short dress worn over oriental-style pantaloons. The fad was short lived. The negative male attitude toward women’s rights was shown in 1869, when Sorosis, a group founded a year earlier in New York by Jane Cunningham Croly, held its first convention in Chicago. One Chicago newspaper described the event as “the best argument for woman suffrage, the men being ladylike and effeminate, and the women gentlemanly and masculine.” It was the bicycling fad that brought bloomers into the mainstream. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the sport became popular with women in Chicago, the Daily Inter Ocean solicited opinions from their readers: “There is no reason why women should not wear any becoming and useful garment,” wrote Bayard Holmes, MD. “The bloomer is certainly useful. It is a matter of opinion whether or not it is becoming. In this matter each woman is likely to be the best judge for her self. I like bloomers, and I hope the ladies will allow the men to put on short skirts whenever they have occasion to wear them. If the wheel makes women and men independent of the fashion it will have accomplished a couple of centuries of evolution.” Amelia Weed Holbrook wrote: “Any man who conscientiously desires to know why women wish to adopt a new style of dress for the bicycle should borrow from his cousin, his sister, or his aunt, two long, full petticoats and take a turn round the back yard on his machine, and lo! He is answered! I should deplore its advent anywhere else, but I am open to conviction.” Women viewed bicycle bloomers as an issue of comfort and independence , but the male establishment treated them as a threat to the status quo. One critic suggested that if women were mobile they might stray to unsavory parts of the city and take to vice. Shopkeepers insisted the bicycle would drive them into bankruptcy because women could seek cheaper goods in other neighborhoods. Articles began appearing in medical journals suggesting bicycling would lead women into masturbation and sexual inversion. The Chicago Tribune of May 25, 1896, reported on a parade of Chicago’s all-male bicycle clubs, gathering at Washington Park; forty groups were represented with 2,936 members, but the final tally of 3,200 bicyclists included the nonaffiliated “women’s auxiliary” and “bloomer brigade.” Two other rather homely “female” bicyclists are depicted in a cartoon with Mannish Women 29 the caption “A Tandem of Female Impersonators.” The bicycle did get the thumbs-up from some prominent women, like actress and singer Lillian Russell, who reputedly rode a gold-plated bicycle around Chicago. But Russell did not like masculine women; in the Chicago Tribune of April 29, 1915, she wrote: There is no more reason to laugh at the effeminate man than at the masculine woman. The one cuts the...