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Cross-dressing as Familial Care: Revising Gender in “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2025
Abstract
What happens when parents tell their ostensible daughters to dress as boys? This essay reconsiders the trope of cross-dressing through two antebellum stories, “Theresa: A Haytien Tale” (1827) and “Lucy Nelson; or the Boy-Girl” (1831), that include this plot point. By imagining unconventional approaches to teaching girlhood, the stories explore what shapes each character’s gender attachments. In “Lucy Nelson,” the titular character’s gender identity emerges through a struggle between the child’s own tastes for masculine-coded behaviors and the parents’ efforts to impose normative femininity, whereas “Theresa” represents a mother and her children who resist colonial violence by reconfiguring their gender roles. Read together, these disparate stories emphasize the families’ influence on gender expression and reveal that these different texts treated efforts either to deny or to affirm the children’s identities as care. The stories thus evoke debates – over how to care for children who fall outside gender norms – that remain with us two hundred years later.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies.
References
1 S., “Theresa: A Haytien Tale,” Freedom’s Journal, 18 Jan., 25 Jan., 8 Feb., 15 Feb. 1828. Reprinted in Just Teach One: Early African American Print, ed. Eric Gardner and Nicole Aljoe, Winter 2015, at https://jtoaa.americanantiquarian.org/welcome-to-just-teach-one-african-american/theresa-a-haytien-tale. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
2 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Daniel A. Cohen, The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-dressing and Urban Vice in America’s Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
3 Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2008), 100, argues that, in nineteenth-century literature, “Female cross-dressing tends to problematize the notion of gender itself, the gendered identities of other characters being measured and assessed against the cross-dresser’s masculine performance.”
4 In this depiction of cross-dressing as part of a collaborative element to evade racial violence, “Theresa” resonates with William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, ed. Barbara McCaskill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), where Ellen Craft cross-dresses in collaboration with her brother William.
5 Eliza Leslie, “Lucy Nelson; Or, The Boy Girl,” Juvenile Miscellany, 1, 2 (Dec. 1831), 149–59. OutHistory, 2014. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
6 Jen Manion, “Transgender Children in Antebellum America, 1775–1861,” OutHistory, 2014, at https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/transgenderchildrenantebellum/introduction, 149.
7 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, 18, 2 (1966), 151–74.
8 Peter Boag, “The Trouble with Cross-dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 112, 3 (2011), 322–39, 327.
9 Travis Foster, “Girly-Boys,” conference presentation at The End: Eighth Biennial Conference, C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 14 March 2024, Pasadena, CA.
10 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9.
11 Jody Norton, “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn (Brooklyn), 23, 3 (1999), 415–36, 421.
12 Manion.
13 Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager, “After Trans Studies,” TSQ, 6, 1 (2019), 103–16, 108.
14 Ibid.
15 Frances Smith Foster, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Theresa?”, African American Review, 40, 4 (2006), 631–45, 634.
16 Jean Lee Cole, “Theresa and Blake: Mobility and Resistance in Antebellum African American Serialized Fiction,” Callaloo, 34, 1 (2011), 158–75, 161.
17 Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 294.
18 Theresa links her family with Blackness, by asking God, “didst thou not cover us with this sable exterior, by which our race is distinguished” (S., “Theresa,” 4). This language leaves open the question whether to read Paulina, Amanda, and Theresa as Black, as gens de couleur libre, or as enslaved Black people. Brigitte Fielder, “‘Theresa’ and the Early Transatlantic Mixed-Race Heroine: Black Solidarity in Freedom’s Journal,” in Jasmine Nichole Cobb, ed., African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 202–26, 206, persuasively argues for reading them as “gens de couleur libre,” given that Paulina is “not apparently enslaved herself.”
19 Etsuko Taketani, “Spectacular Child Bodies: The Sexual Politics of Cross-dressing and Calisthenics in the Writings of Eliza Leslie and Catharine Beecher,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 23, 3 (1999), 355–72, 359.
20 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 49
21 Here I draw on Aoibheann McLoughlin et al.’s definition of humiliation as where one is “debased or forced into a degraded position by someone who is, at that moment, more powerful.” Aoibheann McLoughlin, Anvar Sadath, Elaine McMahon, Katerina Kavalidou, and Kevine Malone, “Associations between Humiliation, Shame, Self-Harm and Suicidal Behaviours among Adolescents and Young Adults: A Systematic Review Protocol,” PLoS One, 17, 11 (Nov. 2022), at https://doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0278122.
22 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 58.
23 Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, hosts, “‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Part 1: The Cooties Theory of Transgender Identity,” Maintenance Phase, Buzzsprout, 9 May 2024, at www.buzzsprout.com/1411126/15036559; S. Rachel Skinner et al., “Recognizing and Responding to Misleading Trans Health Research,” International Journal of Transgender Health, 25, 1 (2024), 1–9.
24 Eagen Dean, host, “Studying Transness in the Nineteenth Century,” C19 Podcast, season 7, episode 1, 2024, at https://soundcloud.com/c19podcast/s07e01-studying-transness?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing.