Bernadette Kelly
The genre of warrior women ballads spotlights women who cross-dress, or suggest cross-dressing, to enable their enlistment in the military or to become a sailor. Their non-normative gender characteristics allows readers to analyze their possible identity politics. These assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) soldiers perform masculinity to pass undiscovered amongst their regiment or crew by layering socially constructed indicators of sex. They are typically revealed when the author removes a layer (or layers) to revert them back to their assigned gender, removing the agential intention behind the performance. Despite the fact that the authors present these warriors as “warrior women,” I argue that the material aspects of their cross-dressing are prosthetic aids that allow for a reading of the warriors as transgender people.[1] A generic script of the ballads mentions feminine characteristics that each warrior must disguise in order to successfully ‘pass’ as male.[2] However, the ballads often describe how these supposedly feminine characteristics do not, in fact, hinder the warrior from ‘passing’ at all, which demonstrates how the intention behind the use of prosthetics plays a part in their ability to “pass.” By prosthetics, I am referring to the techniques that the warriors use to change what modern audiences might call “secondary” sex characteristics such as soft/ small hands, small figures, long hair, etc. As my research will show, there is a potentiality that early moderns viewed these kinds of features as primary sex characteristics, constitutive of sex in the same way that genitals are commonly considered constitutive of sex, so that a collection of gendered parts blend to create an outer construct of sex. Moments that ascribe gender to non-genital body parts demonstrate the ideological power of the early modern gender binary and how it signifies sex. The ballads in this genre show how gender designations were assigned less through genital sex and more through a constellation of secondary sex parts– visible parts attached to sex based more on cultural norms and ideologies than biological imperative. As the warriors alter their bodies via declaration and prosthetics, they transition from their assigned-at-birth sex to another without the use of what we think of as the modern technologies of transition.
Thinking of sex as fluid rather than as a concrete list of visceral essential qualities helps us better understand the gendered presentations of the warriors. The ballads’ depiction of the warriors as sexually fluid is problematic due to their general return to cisheteronormativity in almost all of the ballads’ conclusions. However, their temporary gender fluidity creates a space to discuss sex’s prosthetic connection with gender in the early modern period. Teasing out the complex interplay between sex and gender, Judith Butler suggests, “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender” (Butler, 9). Once one establishes that sex is as constructed as gender, one can see how heteronormative gender practices also create and maintain the modern binary between male and female, limiting ambiguity and marginalizing those outside of the masculine/feminine and male/female duality. Susan Stryker defines ‘transgender’ as “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place—rather than any particular destination or mode of transition” (Stryker, 1). Stryker’s open definition allows for my interpretation of the ballads’ early modern mode of using prosthetics to change secondary sex characteristics as a valid representation of transgender people. The episodes of gender passing in the ballads display how all gender is a piecing of prosthetics and, even more radically, how sex itself is similarly figured as a shifting and temporary construction.
To show how warrior women ballads reveal early modern understandings of sex to be constructed of non-genital parts in the same manner as modern understandings of gender, I turn to how the bodies shown in the ballads are prosthetically changed or perceived. In Dianne Dugaw’s ballad catalogue, the various ballad authors concentrate on certain body parts as being essentially female for the early moderns. For instance, as women were not supposed to take part in heavy labor, they were supposed to have soft hands. In Bodies that Matter, Butler asserts that the parts of the body that we associate with sex only matter because we have associated them with gender roles:
In other words, “sex” is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize “sex” and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled.
(Bodies that Matter, xii)
Certain material aspects of the body that we associate with sex are only made to matter because we place cultural significance on them. The sexing of warrior women’s soft hands, hair, and small frame can also be socially connected to the fact they were supposed to be economically dependent on their husbands. As military and sailing careers were labors that men could undertake to move up the social ladder,[3] the warrior women’s performance of those labors is a subversion of the early modern sex hierarchy. Women were meant to only follow their husbands up the social ladder without having social agency of their own. The early modern belief that women were below men is demonstrated in their perception that women are the “developmentally challenged” sex; their smaller size, relative weakness, and even softness could be attributed to their relative place in a sex hierarchy with men. In Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Early Moderns believed sex was “teleologically male,” meaning achieving the male sex meant your body was finally fully formed. If he is correct, this makes sense as to why the cis-heterosexual lover in the ballads would say things like “your waist it is too slender, love, / Your fingers are too small” (Catalogue, 396). [4] The woman’s core and hands are underdeveloped for the male tasks of military and naval labor. However, even as they partially confirm the idea that the female sex is innately weak, the ballads show examples of women-turned-sailors who succeed in gaining promotion by excelling at the heavy labor, as well as AFAB people who demonstrate battle prowess. One should also note that only upper-middle and upper-class white women (the main protagonists of the warrior women ballad genre) had the privilege to be treated as underdeveloped. Women of color and lower-class women were expected to do manual labor despite their sex. The femininity of small hands, as a socially constructed secondary sex characteristic, functions like a prosthetic representation of sex (not just gender, as we moderns might think). Therefore, I argue, that sex change is possible through the roughening of the hands per early modern beliefs about sex and gender. The ballads use them to show that those categories are totally unfixed and changeable, at least temporarily.
To provide a foundation for my argument that prosthetic secondary sex characteristics allowed the warriors to effectively change their sex and pass as male within the early modern construction of gender, we must look at how early moderns perceived secondary sex characteristics as primary. In his essay, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” Will Fisher argues that facial hair was a male primary sex characteristic during the Early Modern period.
While we might agree that sexual difference is now constructed primarily as a difference of genital morphology and that “secondary” characteristics are subordinated to this “primary” difference, I do not think we can assume that this hierarchy was in place during the Renaissance.
(Fisher 158)
Fisher holds that sex was determined by more than the modern genitocentric model, meaning that early moderns saw sex as an outward construction of the sex a person was assigned at birth. He lists several secondary characteristics that he sees as falling into the category of primary sex characteristics for early moderns: “A list of some of these parts would have to include the beard and genitals, but would also have to include clothing, the hair, the tongue, and weapons such as swords or daggers” (Fisher 157). As the ballad warriors layer prosthetics to represent their new identity, the early moderns would see their alterations to their clothing, hair, and wearing weapons as a change to their primary sex characteristics.
Fisher also discusses how the early modern beard acted as a visible sign of masculinity, separating men from women and boys in a tripartite gender system. The separation between men and boys shows the AFAB warriors’ ability to change their sex by shifting their secondary sex characteristics. Fisher introduces two contemporary physiognomers, Thomas Hill and Marcus Ulmus, who wrote that the beard was proof of semen in a man’s testicles and that, as men were hotter than women, a moisture arose from their genitals and caused a beard to sprout (Fisher 174). If a man was lacking a beard, one could deduce that they were sterile. Fisher’s argument that the Renaissance had a tripartite gender system that included boys as a third gender is important to understanding the sex and genders of warrior women because many seem to have dressed themselves as boys, rather than men.[5] In order to “pass” successfully as a male, they often chose a boy figure because boys were considered closer to being female than a bearded man. The idea of passing as something that can be evaluated as successful or unsuccessful reinforces the socially constructed gender ideologies that creates the binary sex system that we see today. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler emphasizes the illusion of ‘natural’ genders:
Gender is a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them: the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness.
(Butler 190)
When the warrior women disguise themselves as boys, they are partaking in the collective agreement of recognizing the difficulty of passing as men. However, many of them also dress as men and pass as men without question which demonstrates how unstable the concept of sex is, especially when you add in non-genital forms of sex. For instance, in versions of “The Female Smuggler,” they do not recognize the protagonist as female until she arrives in court in feminine dress which implies that, while she apparently did not have a beard while she was presenting as male, her performance of the male gender was still successful (Catalogue 854). Once revealed, the protagonist is not punished, but she is forced back into her socially assigned gender and marries a cis-heterosexual man with the consent of her father. According to the logic of the ballad (at least on its surface), when the female smuggler reverts to her assigned dress-code, her female sex is put back into place because the outward signifiers of gender is more important to ascribing a gender than the genitalia. If “full” masculinity was physiologically derived from beards, what we would modernly consider a secondary sex characteristic, then it holds true that the skirt, the waist, and the hand, all signs of femininity listed in the ballads, functioned in a similar way to construct and convey female sex, even as they could also be cast off for sex and gender transformation.
The ballad that most clearly illustrates the idea that the early moderns did not subscribe to a genitocentric system of gender is “The Handsome Cabin Boy.” [6] In the ballad, the captain takes on a cabin boy and there is the implication that there is a sexual relationship between the cabin boy and the captain, and also between the cabin boy and the captain’s wife, which causes confusion when the cabin boy gets pregnant. For the cabin boy to get pregnant, they would need to have a reproductive system that allows them to carry a child which is normatively considered female. However, in the second half of the ballad during the pregnancy, the ballad characters and narrator only refer to them as “he,” “cabin boy,” or “lad.” In her essay, “‘Neither a Man nor a Maid’: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads,” Pauline Greenhill asserts that the cabin boy’s pregnancy reinstates a binary gender system despite their ambiguous gender:
The cabin boy’s pregnancy argues against those critics who would see the body as simply a blank page upon which culture – sex, gender, and sexuality—is written. Ultimately, the realities of female embodiment intervene to assert that he is a she.
(Greenhill 168)
Greenhill’s argument follows the modern genitocentric system which reasons that a person’s gender must be ascribed to their genitals and reproductive organs. However, the ballad starts with a maid who decides to dress as a cabin boy and create their own identity which remains in place even with their pregnancy. The other characters in the ballad perceive their outward performance of gender as their identity as a male. They say, “The sailors swore by all was good the cabin boy would die, / The doctor ran with all his might and smiling at the fun, / For to think a sailor lad should have a daughter or son” (Catalogue 844). Even the author does not correct the cabin boy’s gender: “and likewise to the cabin boy, tho’ neither man nor maid” (Catalogue 845). The ballad displays a constructionist rather than essentialist concept of gender which shows how the Early Moderns’ addition of secondary sex characteristics as primary can be seen as being more fluid than some modern perceptions. By dressing as a cabin boy, the protagonist becomes a cabin boy despite being assigned female at birth.
Many of the “perceived female characteristics” captured by the ballad database are mentioned in terms of the female character’s crossdressing techniques. The narrators tend to note what aspects of femininity are exchanged for masculine, with many examples of gendered clothing. Although modern audiences do not believe that clothing can change one’s sex biologically, early modern thinking and the passing in the ballads suggest that clothing may signify a change in sex. The warrior’s first step in successfully performing as a male is to dress like one. In “The Soldier’s Delight, or The She Volunteer,” the unnamed warrior follows her[7] lover to war. Her change of clothes takes an entire verse:
She speedily was manly Rigg’d quite from the skin to skirt
Made of her hair a Perriwig & of her smock a shirt.
Instead of Quoif a hat she sought, for gown a doublet spoke
For Bodice she a waistcoat bought for Pettycloats a Cloke
(Catalogue, 537)
Despite the fact that most of the Volunteer’s transformation involves her clothes, the first line states that she was changed from “skin to skirt.” The only bodily object that she changes is her hair, however, the ballad suggests that her transformation started from her skin and worked to her clothes. She is literally being “rigged[8]” as a man, in the colloquial sense, that she is being prepared for a journey. While the semantic connection in “skin to skirt” is small, the idea that the transformation took place from the inside-out imparts the idea that the Volunteer’s internal identity had to change before the external representation. What follows is a rendition of the items of clothing that depict that inner change. Through this prosthetic, and possibly symbolic, dressing, one can see how the warrior women are partaking in an ambiguous sex identity.
As seen in the “Soldier’s Delight,” clothing is only the first visible step to the warrior women passing as male. The narrators also note the visceral sex characteristics that the warrior women need to hide to “pass.” One that is perceived throughout the ballads is “fair” skin. The trope of fair skin as a feminine identifier is both racist and classist as it suggests that those with darker skin tones cannot be perceived as feminine or beautiful. Only upper-middle class and wealthy women had the luxury of keeping their skin out of the sun. The ballads (and much Early Modern literature) focus not only on gender as a denotation of sex, but also on gender as constructed within a white hegemony. In “Susan’s Adventure in a British Man of War,” Susan follows her lover into the navy and travels on the ship until they reach China with no one recognizing her as a female until she is wounded in battle. When she originally cross dresses, she “put on a jolly sailor’s dress, and daub’d her face with tar” (Catalogue, 764). The fact that Susan’s was able to pass as male by darkening her skin shows how whiteness is connected to the ideal of female purity during the time period. The narrator continually brings attention to the fact that Susan’s main disguise was darkening her skin, “It was then she was contented, all bedaubed with the pitch and tar… / She kept her place with her pretty face bedaubed with pitch and tar” (Catalogue, 764). I would argue that the tar works as a masculine prosthetic as it helps her pass unidentified. By smearing her skin with tar,[9] her ‘fair’ femininity was undiscernible to a whole sailing crew. Furthermore, the narrator moves from their renditions of “pitch and tar” to noting that Susan feared “wound nor scar.” As she has already darkened her skin, Susan does not fear permanently marring her skin as the scars would only be a further her transition as a male. Despite her confidence, Susan’s sex is only revealed when she is wounded, “She said my jolly sailor I’ve for you received a scar, / Behold your faithful Susan on board of a man of war” (Catalogue, 764). The ballad does not say that any of Susan’s genitals were exposed but the scar to her previously white skin is enough to prompt her to expose herself and she simply tells her sailor her true identity. He responds:
Then William on his Susan gazed, with wonder & surprise
He stood some moments motionless while tears stood in his eyes,
He cried – I wish instead of you I had received that scar,
Oh, love, why did you venture on board of a man of war.
(Catalogue, 764)
Here, it seems that their heteronormative sex and gender roles are switched. Susan is glib and stoic while William stands crying in surprise. Susan’s successful passing as a male sailor shows how ‘fair’ skin acts as a denotation of femininity; once Susan applied her tar, she was male from the surface in which is demonstrated in her masculine response to being wounded. If she had not exposed herself verbally, no one would have known that she was a woman as she successfully changed her sex by dressing as a man, giving herself a more manly complexion and acting as a man.
Like white skin, soft and small hands acted as primary sex characteristics in the ballads, but not just as a reason for the cis-hetero lover to tell the warrior to stay home. We see moments when the warriors did pass for male by prosthetically or naturally roughening their hands to pass or complete masculine tasks. In “Young Henry of the Raging Main,” Emma follows her lover onto to a ship and works as a sailor without being discovered. He knows her true identity, but they sail for two years keeping her assigned sex a secret. “Her pretty hands once soft as velvet, / With pitch and tar appr’d in pain / Tho her hands were soft, she went aloft, / And boldly plough’d the Raging Main” (Catalogue, 497). Like Susan, Emma covers her hands in pitch and tar which disguises their feminine features. This example shows how the gendering of hands is socially constructed as the narrator does not suggest that her hands are less capable of masculine work due to her sex, or that they even become men’s hands from doing masculine work. Through performing manual labor, the warriors move beyond needing the prosthetic of the tar to roughen their hands by naturally building calluses. The prosthetic secondary sex characteristics can serve as a way for the warriors to change their sex as well as being only a stepping stone to a more permanent sex transition.
By showing how the warrior women’s passing as male is not just a performance of gender, but also the prosthetic construction of sex, the ballads demonstrate how heteronormative ideologies have informed the concept of a binary sex system. The warrior protagonists depict the possibility that these AFAB warriors are not only crossdressing but changing their sex as well. Early Modern concepts offer a fluid, non-essentialist perception within the fictional world of the ballads which implies that gender, as social importance is placed on it, becomes a part of our comprehension of sex and its serial[10] rather than essential qualities. The perception of secondary sex characteristics as prosthetic aids for early modern sex transition will hopefully act as a middle ground for some of the concerns expressed by scholars, such as Sawyer Kemp, who warn against seeing all crossdressing in early modern literature as proto-trans representation: “to read clothing and disguise as hallmarks of a proto-trans identity risks creating a binary between the body—which is ‘true’ and essential—and the clothing that is ‘trans’ but also deceptive” (Kemp 122). Although my essay does focus on what can be described as disguises, I have tried to avoid that terminology to demonstrate how the intention of outward performance is indicative of an internal change. The ballads could also be used to examine how the warriors must revert back to feminine dress when they return home as their families and cis-heterosexual lovers would not accept their new identity, or how many of the cis-heterosexual lovers are against the idea of the warriors crossdressing. I used textual examples from the ballads where the warrior successfully passes as male, but in 44 of the original 113 ballads the warrior is deterred from crossdressing at all. The warriors who are denied use of these prosthetic secondary sex characteristics are just as important as those who pass as they are representative of the modern trans people who feel trapped by the sex they were assigned at birth.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Taylor and Francis, 2011.
Fisher, Will. “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England.” Renaissance Quarterly 54.1 (2001): 155-87. ProQuest. Web. 21 Nov. 2019.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Greenhill, Pauline. “‘Neither a Man nor a Maid’: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross- Dressing Ballads.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 108, no. 428, 1995, pp. 156– 177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/541377.
Gordon, Colby. “A Woman’s Prick: Trans Technogenesis in Sonnet 20.” Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, ed. Jennifer Drouin. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Hubbard, Eleanor. “Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea: Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire.” History Compass, vol. 14, no. 8, 2016, pp. 348-358.
Johnston, Mark A. “Prosthetic Absence in Ben Jonson’s “Epicoene”, “the Alchemist”, and “Bartholmew Fair”.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 37, no. 3, 2007, pp. 401-428.
Kemp, Sawyer K. “”in that Dimension Grossly Clad”: Transgender Rhetoric, Representation, and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 47, 2019, pp. 120-13.
Stryker, Susan. Transgender History, Seal Press, 2009.
[1] For background material on the theorization of humanity’s ability to create a new body as we evolve, please see Colby Gordon’s essay, “A Woman’s Prick: Trans Technogenesis in Sonnet 20.” Also, Susan Stryker’s first chapter “An Introduction to Transgender Terms and Concepts” from Transgender History illustrates how the language surrounding gender identity politics has (and is still) fluctuating and evolving.
[2] Although the warrior’s goal is to pass as male, not every transgender person feels the need to pass as a binary gender.
[3] Eleanor Hubbard, “Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea: Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire.”
[4] Billy and Nancy’s Parting N-8 (Catalogue, 396)
[5] Fisher does go into depth on how people could get fake beards from vintage shops or the Lord of Revels office. Fisher also uses John Bulwer and Hugh Crompton’s contemporary text to discuss how, if men shaved, they would be seen as more womanly, however, if women shaved, they were likely to grow more facial hair. Per Crompton, “That women should not shave their tender skin / Lest that a hairy bush should chance to bud, / and spoyle the sanguine colors of their bloud” (Fisher, Crompton 169). This begs the question of whether or not the warrior women pretended to shave while they were in disguise as smooth faced men.
[6] Dugaw lists an alternative title, “The Female Cabin Boy” (Catalogue 844)
[7] Despite the fact that I am arguing that the warriors in the ballads can change sex by using secondary sex characteristics, I refer to the warriors with feminine pronouns in my literary analysis as many start and end the ballads in feminine dress.
[8] OED Entry 1: To prepare (a sailing ship or boat) for going to sea; spec. to set up the sails and rigging of (a sailing vessel). Also figurative.
OED Entry 4: intransitive. Originally: to behave in an immodest or wanton manner (cf. rig n.4). In later use also in weakened sense: to romp, frolic; to act or play energetically and excitedly, esp. to clamber, climb about.
OED Entry 4.2: transitive. coarse slang. Of a man: to have sexual intercourse with (a woman). Obsolete. rare—1.
[9] For more on tar and complexion, see Sarah Chapman, “‘With Pitch and Tar Appeared In Pain’: Whiteness as Class Signifiers in Warrior Women Ballads.”
[10] Iris Young Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective (1994)