From Boy Girl to Trans Butch: Six Ways of Looking at the Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901)
Abstract
Frances “Frank” Ann Wood Shimer (1826-1901) was a prominent mid-nineteenth-century woman educator, the founder of Shimer College, who was noted throughout her life for her masculinity. This article uses a trans methodology to explore the different meanings assigned to female masculinity throughout Shimer’s lifetime, in order to highlight the historic changeability of the supposedly stable category of woman. Shimer’s life is examined, sequentially, through the lenses of didactic literature, romantic friendship, phrenology, pioneer chronicles, sexology, and trans studies. The essay pays careful attention to the intersections of lesbian and trans history in the analysis of Shimer’s life.
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Zebuhr, Laura. "The Work of Friendship in Nineteenth-Century American Friendship Album Verses." American Literature 87, no. 3 (September 2015): 433-54.
Bendroth, Margaret. "Children of Adam, Children of God: Christian Nurture in Early Nineteenth-Century America." Theology Today 56, no. 4 (Jan 2000): 495-505.
Bergman, S. Bear. "I Know What Butch Is." In Butch Is a Noun, 15-19. Vancouver Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.
Bittel, Carla. "Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in 19th-Century America." Centaurus 55, no. 2 (May 2013): 104-30.
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Boydston, Jeanne M. "Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis." Gender & History 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 558-83.
Boylan, Jennifer Finney. She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
Brasell, R. Bruce. "A Seed for Change: The Engenderment of a Florida Enchantment." Cinema Journal 36, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 3-21.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993.
Cleves, Rachel Hope. Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Cohen, Daniel A. "Winnie Woodfern Comes out in Print: Story-Paper Authorship and Protolesbian Self-Representation in Antebellum America." Journal of the History of Sexuality 21, no. 3 (September 2012): 367-408.
Duggan, Lisa. "The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America." Signs 18, no. 4 (summer 1993): 791-814.
Evans, Nancy Goyne. "The Sans Souci, a Fashionable Resort Hotel in Ballston Spa." Winterthur Portfolio 6, no. 1 (1970): 111-26.
Faderman, Lillian. "Acting "Woman" and Thinking "Man": The Ploys of Famous Female Inverts." GLQ 5, no. 3 (1999): 315-29.
Falzetti, Ashley Glassburn. "Archival Absence: The Burden of History." Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 128-44.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Press, 1990. 1978.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
———. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Henderson, Samuel, ed. Selected Readings on the Life and Work of Frances Ann Wood Shimer: Dinosaur Press, 2012.
The History of Carroll County, Illinois, Containing a History of the County - Its Cities, Towns, Etc.: H. F. Kett & Co., 1878.
Innes, Sherrie A. "Mashes, Smashes, Crushes, and Raves: Woman-to-Woman Relationships in Popular Women's College Fiction, 1895-1915." NWSA Journal 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 48-68.
Judith, Halberstam. "Transgender Butch: Butch/Ftm Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 287-310.
Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial References to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. Translated by Franklin Klaf. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965. 1886.
Kunzel, Regina. "The Flourishing of Transgender Studies." TSQ 1, no. 1-2 (May 2014): 285-97.
Lynch, Michael. ""Here Is Adhesiveness": From Friendship to Homosexuality." Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 67-96.
Malane, Rachel Ann. Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
Malkmus, Doris. ""My Whole Ambition Has Ever Been to Do Something Smart": Frances Wood Shimer, Cindarella Gregory, and the 1853 Founding of Shimer College." Journal of Illinois History 6, no. 3 (Autmun 2003): 195-216.
Manion, Jen. "Transbutch." Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (May 2014): 230-32.
———. "Transgender Children in Antebellum America." OutHistory.org (2014). http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/transgenderchildrenantebellum.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Mayo, Kierna. "I Was Born a Boy." Marie Claire, May 11 2011.
Mintz, Stephen. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. New York: Atria, 2014.
Moore, Lisa L. Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Murray, Gail Schmunk. American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood. Twayne's History of American Childhood. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.
O'Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Owen, Gabrielle. "Adolescence." Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (May 2014).
Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Rerick, Rowland H. Memoirs of Florida: Embracing a General History of the Province, Territory and State. Atlanta: The Southern Historical Association, 1902.
Scott, Joan. "Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis." The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-75.
———. "Unanswered Questions." American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1422-30.
Sears, Clare. "All That Glitters: Trans-Ing California's Gold Rush Migration." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2008): 383-402.
Smith, H. Shelton. Changing Conceptions of Original Sin. New York: Scribner, 1955.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
———. "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936." In Disorderly Conduct, 245-96. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Spade, Dean. "Mutilating Gender." In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Stephen Whittle and Susan Stryker. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008.
Tolley, Kim. The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Trainor, Sean. "Fair Bosom/Black Beard: Facial Hair, Gender Determination, and the Strange Career of Madame Clofullia, "Bearded Lady"." Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 548-75.
Traub, Valerie. "The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography." In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 124-45. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vicinus, Martha. "Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships." In The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson and Kathleen M. Weston, 43-65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Walker, John. "Connecting Stonewall to Baltimore: A Conversation with Some Filmmakers Exploring Trans History." Fusion.net (2015). http://fusion.net/story/138153/connecting-stonewall-to-baltimore-a-conversation-with-some-filmmakers-exploring-trans-history/.
Weir, James. "The Effect of Female Suffrage on Posterity." The American Naturalist 29, no. 345 (September 1895): 815-25.
Winter, George. "Winter's Description of Frances Slocum." The Indiana Quarterly Magazine of History 1, no. 3 (1905): 115-18.
Zebuhr, Laura. "The Work of Friendship in Nineteenth-Century American Friendship Album Verses." American Literature 87, no. 3 (September 2015): 433-54.
Published
2018-02-01
Issue
Section
Studies
