caitri | A Book a Day: Female Husbands

After a brief staycation hiatus, we return to A Book a Day! This book came out earlier this year and I finally finished it a few weeks ago. It is very good and eminently readable, which isn't something you can always say about an academic text. Manion looks very specifically at "female husbands" from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, profiling known cases of individuals who were born female and then presented as male for at least a period of time. Depending on time and place, these people were actively punished, actively celebrated, or just allowed to live their lives. The one down side to the book is that it's such a super specific phenomenon/series of texts, and basically I just want a whole shelf of recovered histories like this. (I know there are people out there at work on them, and it's a function of being patient more than anything else.)