A closer look
Gender Fluidity in Nineteenth-Century Cities
How did the growth of cities in the early nineteenth century provide opportunities for a range of sexual and gender expressions?
by Anne Valk, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Sexes in the City
In the summer of 1836, Manhattan police made two apparently routine arrests. In June, Mary Jones was apprehended on the Bowery, one of the new sex districts that sprang up in the growing city. Jones, an African American sex worker, was accused of robbing a white man during a paid sexual encounter. A search of Jones’s home yielded several wallets, presumably stolen from other customers. Charged with grand larceny, Jones was tried, convicted, and sentenced to several years at Sing Sing, one of New York’s state prisons. In August, police arrested James Walker, drunk and sleeping on the street near City Hall. The officer initially mistook Walker for a sailor; although Walker worked in a factory on the Lower East Side making fur caps, the mix-up was understandable given the large number of sailors in this part of New York City. The cases took unexpected turns, however, when police discovered that both Jones and Walker were expressing genders—via clothes and names—that were different from those expected. After interrogation, Jones confessed their given name was Peter Sewally, who, as a sex worker, regularly dressed in women’s clothes. After undergoing a physical examination by another prisoner, Walker disclosed that they had been raised as a girl but, since age twelve, had worn male clothing, worked in men’s jobs, and later married a woman.
The cases of Jones and Walker received extensive coverage in tabloid newspapers. Sandwiched between multiple accounts of robberies, stabbings, prostitution, and break-ins, the news of Sewally’s and Walker’s arrests are revealing: they attest to the commercialization of sex, the rough-and-tumble street life that accompanied urbanization, and the role of the “penny press,” inexpensive and widely read newspapers that sensationalized such activities. New York City had the country’s busiest harbor; and the factories, piers, warehouses, and docks that crowded Lower Manhattan teemed with people who worked on ships and ferries, loaded and unloaded cargo, and manufactured goods that would be transported to customers in other ports. Thousands of women also arrived in the city alone, searching for domestic work, factory jobs, and sometimes employment as sex workers. As immigrants and rural migrants with loose community ties crowded into poor quarters, they sought companionship and entertainment in brothels, saloons, and on the streets. In New York and other growing cities, these spaces made possible the kinds of unconventional gender fluidity represented by Walker and Sewally.
Historian's Note: Police reports and newspaper stories, which covered the news of Sewally’s and Walker’s arrests, have many shortcomings. Confessions extracted during police interrogations cannot be trusted, given the coercion Sewally and Walker both faced and their desire to avoid criminal penalties or other repercussions. Both sources revealed how police officers and journalists tended to demean or insult gender non-conforming people; and the written sources identified them using pronouns corresponding with the sex assigned them at birth. Unlike the contemporary convention of asking individuals to indicate which pronoun best reflects their identity, Sewally and Walker were not granted this opportunity. This makes it difficult to know how best to refer to them now. This essay refers to transing, a practice of crossing genders, and does not claim that Sewally or Walker were trans women or trans men. In order to avoid assuming a gender identity, this essay uses their names or the pronouns they/them.
Policing Morality and Profiting from Sensationalism
In mid-nineteenth century New York, it was not illegal to dress in clothing of a different gender. Yet the arrests of Sewally, Walker, and other individuals who transed gender helped solidify an association with immorality, if not criminality. In turn, such arrests helped city officials to justify a growing urban police force that tried to compel gender conformity and ensnared people whose behavior seemed to threaten social mores or public morality. Indeed, the New York City police arrested Sewally multiple times. Charged with theft or vagrancy, each conviction resulted in at least six months behind bars. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act further increased the risk of arrest for African Americans, including Sewally, who came under heavy scrutiny from bounty hunters and local police.
Like the police and the courts, the press also played a role in policing gender through demeaning stories about those caught transing gender. Catering to readers’ interest in sensationalized stories, publishers exploited racist and heteronormative stereotypes about crime and deviance. As historian Jen Manion has shown, the press printed countless articles about “female husbands,” a category associated with individuals who were white, working class, and married. Walker’s story appeared more than a hundred times in newspapers around the country. Newspaper stories assumed that a female husband’s “true” gender identity corresponded to the sex assigned them at birth, and without question sided with spouses, family, coworkers, or creditors who charged female husbands with fraud. Occasionally, however, newspaper stories took a more sympathetic tone toward others who were assigned female at birth but lived as men temporarily for work or military service.
Media coverage of Sewally’s arrests and trials were even more dehumanizing, associating African Americans with criminality and disapproving of paid interracial sex. An article in the New York Herald on March 9, 1842, referred to Sewally as a “beast in the shape of a man,” and newspaper stories stressed Sewally’s long history of criminal activities. A New York lithographer began to sell an image of Peter Sewally shortly after their first arrest. The drawing showed Sewally neatly and modestly dressed, with a demure expression that contradicted the image’s title, “The Man-Monster.” Simultaneously alluring and demeaning, the image may have appealed to some viewers’ salacious desires. But it is hard to know how the public responded to these stories and images.
Transing Gender
These records reveal glimpses of individuals whose lives were generally mocked, and they pose many questions for historians today. The sources provide only limited insight, for example, into the reasons that Sewally, Walker, and others transed, how they understood and described their actions or identities, and even what pronouns they used. Even less information records the motivations of Sewally’s customers, Walker’s wife, and others who formed the community of intimate relations of individuals who transed.
Sewally and Walker were not alone in their decisions to move away from the gender assigned to them at birth. Migration, immigration, and crowded urban environments offered countless people the chance to adopt identities apart from their extended families and establish new relationships and communities.For some, transing may have been a decision spurred by the need to make money or motivated by emotional or sexual attachments. At trial following their 1836 arrest, Sewally claimed a male identity but acknowledged working as a woman. With customers Sewally used a female name—including Mary Jones, Eliza Smith, Miss Ophelia, and Miss June—and wore an elaborate girdle to simulate female genitalia. When asked to explain their appearance as a woman, Sewally testified that others in the brothel encouraged them to dress that way. An African American who transed from male to female, Sewally faced limited opportunities for secure or respectable work and heightened exposure to arrest and violence. However, for more than twenty years, Sewally found a steady stream of white male customers. Attired in women’s clothes, Sewally may have attracted male customers who considered them a woman; or who found Sewally’s fluidity attractive. Sewally’s race similarly may have appealed to white customers who wished to cross the color line, or for whom sex with an African American sex worker mattered less than the feminine appearance. Sewally’s own sexual attractions and sexual and gender identity remain unclear, however.
The glimpses of Walker’s biography that appeared in the papers suggest different choices and opportunities and potentially different motivations. Orphaned as a child, Walker moved from Liverpool to Glasgow, married a woman, and together they moved to Quebec and eventually New York. They had been married for fifteen years when Walker was arrested. Walker’s wife knew they married a “female husband,” but they convinced family and coworkers James was male. Walker’s whiteness, male identity, and marriage provided respectability, connections, and economic opportunities before their arrest threatened the security they had achieved.
Despite the differences in their experiences, Sewally, Walker, and others who transed threatened conventional understandings of sexual differences. By transing, their experiences demonstrated how individuals could fashion alternate identities and more fluid gender roles by leaving established homes and communities to begin new lives in American cities.
Reflection Questions
Why did urban conditions allow opportunities for individuals to create new identities or express their sexuality in new ways?
What role did newspapers and the police play in constraining sex and gender conventions in cities?
How did the press cover the stories of individuals who transed gender? In what ways did the tone of the coverage of Sewally’s case differ from the news of Walker? How would you explain those differences?
What motivated Sewally, Walker, and others who transed to assume their new identities? How do you know?
What media depictions of and by trans people appear today? Why may these depictions differ from the nineteenth century?
In addition to newspaper articles and police reports, what other kinds of evidence can be used to understand the experiences of trans people in the twenty-first century?
Additional Reading
Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (New York: Seal Press, 2008, 2017).
OutHistory. “Peter Sewally/Mary Jones, June 11, 1836,” https://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/sewally-jones.
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