Deborah Sampson, Soldier in the American Revolution

Deborah Sampson, Revolutionary War Soldier (born 17 December 1760)

Born on 17 December 1760 in Plympton, Massachusetts, Deborah Sampson (or Samson) had distinguished Pilgrim ancestors. Through her father, Jonathan Sampson, she was related to Myles Standish and to Patricia Mullins Alden, both Plymouth colonists. Through her mother, Deborah Bradford Sampson, Deborah was directly descended from Governor William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth colony. 

Deborah Sampson, frontispiece,
The Female Review 

Despite this lineage, the Sampson family struggled financially. Deborah's father ultimately abandoned his wife and seven children. Although Deborah believed that her father, having decided to follow the "sea-faring business," was lost at sea, Jonathan Sampson seems to have relocated to Maine, where he lived with a another woman, Martha, and had a second family. Whether this is the same Jonathan Sampson isn't certain--but Deborah's father did return to Plympton in 1794 in regard to a property transaction.

Leaving aside Jonathan Sampson's fate, his family suffered as a result of his absence. According to Herman Mann's 1797 "memoir" of Deborah Sampson's life, the family soon experienced "indigent circumstances," and the seven Sampson children were placed out into the households of friends and relatives because her mother could not support them. When Deborah "was scarcely five years old," she was sent, first, to the home of an "elderly maiden," with the surname Fuller, who was a "distant relation" of her mother's.  

When Deborah was eight, the "honest and discreet" relative who had taken charge of the child and her education died, and Deborah's mother sought another place for the girl. Deborah spent two years in the home of a "Mrs. Thatcher," Mary Prince Thatcher, the widow of the Reverend Peter Thatcher. 

By 1770, when she was ten years old, Deborah Sampson had become an indentured servant, working in the home of Jeremiah Thomas, where she "had stronger propensities for improvement, and less opportunities to acquire it." Denied other opportunities, she got what she could from Thomas's sons, who shared what they learned at school with her.

In 1778, when she reached the age of eighteen, Deborah Sampson's term of indenture was over. She had learned enough, by whatever means, that she was able to find work as a teacher during the summers of 1779 and 1780; during the winters, she worked as a weaver.

But Deborah Sampson was restless. And so, hoping to be able to travel, she thought she could disguise herself in order to avoid the limits imposed on her as a woman. But she soon changed her mind--rather than travel, she would she become a soldier. In the story, as relayed by Mann, Deborah Sampson "determined her to relinquish her plan of travelling for that of joining the American Army in the character of a voluntary soldier":

This proposal concurred with her inclinations on many accounts. Whilst she should have equal opportunities for surveying and contemplating the world, [s]he should be accumulating some lucrative profit[,] and in the end, perhaps, be instrumental in the cause of liberty, which had for nearly six years enveloped the minds of her countrymen.

So in early 1782, disguising herself as a man and calling herself Timothy Thayer, Sampson enlisted in a Massachusetts Army unit--though she ultimately failed to join the company after her enlistment because she was recognized, and her identity as a woman was revealed.

But several months later, this time as Robert Shurtleff, Deborah Sampson enlisted in  Captain George Webb's Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. Her military career was significant. As Alfred Young notes in Masquerade, his 2005 biography of Sampson, the light infantry were elite troops--taller, stronger, and more mobile than the soldiers of regular units. 

Herman Mann's 1797 "memoir,"
The Female Review 

Young gives a careful accounting of Sampson's service, distinguishing reality from the stories incorporated into Mann's version of Sampson's military career. Her period of enlistment extended from May 1782 until October 1783. These dates preclude her participation in the battle of Yorktown (which many sources still cite), but she did participate in a number of battles; during her first, in July 1782, outside Tarrytown, New York, she was wounded in her thigh, extracting two musket balls herself, in order to avoid detection by a doctor.

In June of 1783 she was sent to Philadelphia--although the War of Independence was over, Continental soldiers were protesting delays in their discharges (and pay). There Sampson became ill from a fever. Taken to a hospital for treatment, the attending doctor, Barnabus Binney, discovered her biological sex.

But Binney did not reveal her sex. Instead, he took her to his home where she could be cared for by his wife. She was able to return to her post, though Binney sent along with her a note to her commander, General John Paterson. Without punishment or publicity, Paterson gave her an honorable discharge on 25 October 1783.

With money Paterson had given her, Sampson returned to Massachusetts. On 7 April 1785, she married Benjamin Gannett, a farmer. The couple had three children, a son and two daughters, and adopted another child, a girl.

Reduced to poverty, in 1792 Deborah Sampson Gannett successfully petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature for back pay. On 20 January, the legislature adopted a resolution granting her the sum of 34 pounds plus interest, dating from the date of her discharge. According to the resolution, "the said Deborah exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful, gallant soldier, and at the same time preserved the virtue and chastity of her sex unsuspected and unblemished."

It took longer to gain a pension for her service, however. Mann's The Female Review; or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady, was part of the campaign to secure her recognition and compensation for her service. She also undertook a lecture tour (in 1802), and secured testimonials from luminaries like Paul Revere. Such efforts were needed, since her application for a pension could not be supported by documentation of her service--while she was with the army, she had hidden her wounds and her identity.

In 1805, Congress awarded Sampson a pension of four dollars a month, placing her on the Massachusetts Invalid Pension Roll. Although a petition for an increase was denied in 1809, her pension was later increased to $6.40 a month (in 1816) and to $8.00 (in 1819).

Deborah Sampson Gannett died on 29 April 1827, but her story doesn't end quite there. Although she was not married at the time of her service, her husband petitioned for the continuation of a military pension as the spouse of a soldier. His claim was finally recognized in 1837--though he was not alive to receive the money due to him.

Deborah Sampson Gannett is buried in Rock Ridge Cemetery, Sharon, Massachusetts.

Deborah Sampson's headstone,
posted by David Allen Lambert
at Find a Grave

In addition to the 1797 account of Sampson and to Young's 2005 biography, both of which I've cited above, there are numerous excellent online resources. You may want to start with Debra Michals's entry at the National Women's History Museum site or, for context, Kaia Danyluk's essay, "Women's Service with the Continental Army," among the online resources at the Colonial Williamsburg website. (On this essay, see update, below.)

For an excellent discussion of Mann's "memoir" of Sampson, written in part as support for Sampson's campaign to get her military pension, I recommend Jody Schorb's introduction at Just Teach One, resources for teaching neglected or forgotten American texts (Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life).

You should also check out the entry online at OutHistory, which explores Sampson's intimacies with women--reported by Mann, whose accounts are at times "unintelligible": 

Several suggestive and curious passages in this work refer to Sampson's romantic, though allegedly chaste liaisons with other women, while posing as a male. Quite apart from any accuracy these tales may have, their very existence in a book subscribed to by respectable New Englanders in the late 1700s is of interest. Sampson's cross-dressing and the nominally "pure," asexual character of her romances no doubt made these stories seem acceptable at the time.

Update, 2 July 2019: A recently discovered diary, kept by a Massachusetts man who knew Deborah Sampson, has cast new light on Deborah Sampson. To read Alison Leigh Crowan's New York Times story, "The Woman Who Sneaked into George Washington's Army," click here.

Update, 1 February 2021: Kaia Danyluk's essay seem to be no longer available at the Colonial Williamsburg website. I can find multiple references to the original essay online, but not the essay itself. The link here takes you to the essay as preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

Update, 16 April 2026: The USPS has issued a sheet of stamps honoring "Figures of the American Revolution." Among the twenty-five portraits on the sheet is a stamp honoring Deborah Sampson.

Back to the Future, Part 9: The 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women

Back to the Future, Part 9: The 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women 

It's been a while since I've had the heart to post another in this series of "back to the future" pieces. I guess I am just so tired of winning . . . 

But, hey, looks like the MAGA crowd will have to work a bit harder because we're not yet Number 1!

The Thompson Reuters Foundation, "the philanthropic arm of Thomas Reuters, the world's biggest news and information provider," has just published its most recent poll of "The World's Most Dangerous Countries for Women."* (The first Reuters poll of the most dangerous countries for women was published in 2011.)

Great news! The United States made the list!!!! But, darn, just barely--we're number ten on the list, last place: "The United States ranked as the 10th most dangerous country for women, the only Western nation to appear in the top 10."

Here is the list, beginning with the worst and ending with the least (?) worst: 1. India; 2. Afghanistan; 3. Syria; 4. Somalia; 5. Saudi Arabia; 6. Pakistan; 7. Democratic Republic of Congo; 8. Yemen; 9. Nigeria; 10. United States.

Criteria for ranking: healthcare; discrimination; cultural traditions; sexual violence; non-sexual violence; trafficking.

Good to know: we tied for third place Syria on the "key area" of sexual violence, but we were only in sixth place when it came to non-sexual violence. 

So we'll just have to keep trying harder to make America great again for women! Because we need to be Number 1!

And the way things are going these days, if the poll is taken seven years from now, we should be in the Republic of Gilead territory, no problem.

By the way, the reactions to the publication of the story are almost as disheartening as the poll itself. The comments at ProPublica are profanity-laden, utterly sickening comparisons of Trump and Bill Clinton--at the time I last looked, there was no reckoning at all with the Reuters poll or story. Meanwhile, over at Jezebel, most of the comments are more-or-less, "Well, we can't accept this poll because clearly Country X is worse for women than the U.S." What an argument.

In her report on the Reuters poll for Fortune, Natasha Bach notes, "The U.S.’s poor standing in this survey arrives just a week after a UN report found the U.S. to be the most unequal country in the developed world, with 40 million people living in poverty." (To read the U.N. document, "Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on His Mission to the United States of America," click here.)

Welcome to America, 28 June, 2018.

(For the previous eight posts on "back to the future," click on the label, below.)

*Update, 29 January 2022: The Thomson Reuters poll from 2018 is no longer accessible accessible, so the link I’ve provided here takes you to the study as it has been preserved at the Internet Archive. Reports about the poll from many sources are still widely available, however, so I have now linked to a United Nations report, from the same time-frame--a press release with a summary of findings (here) and the report itself, "Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls" (here).

Benedetta Carlini and Same-Sex Desire in an Italian Convent

Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God (first investigation begins, 27 May 1619)

Benedetta Carlini was born in 1590 on the night of St. Sebastian (20 January) in Vellano, a small Appenine village not far from Pescia--her father was a prosperous farmer who grew mulberries and harvested silkworm cocoons. 

At the time of her birth, it seems, her father pledged her to a life in a convent--as Carlini was later to tell the story, her mother, Midea, had a difficult labor, and the midwife told her father, Giuliano, that both mother and child would die.

Detail of two nuns embracing,
Paradise, by Giovanni di Paolo,
1445

Falling on his knees--at least as Carlini recounts the event of her birth--Giuliani prayed to God, asking him to spare the lives of his wife and unborn child. Shortly after he offered this prayer, the midwife returned, announcing the child's safe delivery.

Giuliano seems to have regarded this outcome as God's answer to his prayers. In return, he named the baby Benedetta--"blessed"--and promised that he would dedicate her to a life of God. In other words, he promised that his newborn daughter would become a nun.

Such a decision--dedicating a child to a religious life--was not uncommon for a devout family. Nor was it uncommon for such a decision to be made for financial reasons. The dowry, required for entrance into a convent, was much less than a dowry required for marriage--sometimes only a quarter, in fact. For many families, placing a daughter in a convent was as much a financial as a religious decision. (I've written about another such young woman, Arcangela Tarabotti, who was committed to a life in a convent without her assent.)

It seems that Benedetta Carlini's childhood was a happy one--and she remembers Giuliano and Midea Carlini as good parents, her home a comfortable one, with Giuliano himself educating his daughter. According to Benedetta, she knew her prayers and the litany of the saints by the time she was five, and by age six she learned to read and could begin to study the basics of Christian doctrine.  

In 1600, when she was nine, Benedetta Carlini was placed in a newly established Theatine convent in Pescia, il convento della Madre di Dio, the Convent of the Mother of God. The order of Theatines nuns, or the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, had been founded in 1583 by the Venerable Ursula Benincasa, a nun of the Order of St. Claire who had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary and of Saint Catherine of Sienna. 

(The Theatine order, the Congregation of Clerics Regular of the Divine Providence, had been founded in the early sixteenth century, specifically with the goal of combating the "errors" of Martin Luther but also to encourage the practice of virtue.)   

Although the convent in Pescia was not as prestigious (or expensive) as other convents near by, the Theatines were an order devoted to the the reforming of lax morals. It was also, at the time of Carlini's entry in 1599, not yet fully established—this effort, underway at the time of Carlini's entrance, might also have made her admission possible. 

Benedetta Carlini began her religious life in the convent-in-the-making quietly enough, though not entirely without incident. She claims that, on the night of her arrival, she prayed to the convent's statue of the Madonna--and that the Madonna nodded to her. 

Then, not long after, Carlini says that when she was at prayer, the Madonna "leaned over the small altar." The girl thought that the statue of the Madonna was intending to kiss her--but she was so frightened that she knocked over the statue and screamed. This resulted in nothing further--except that the "Mother Superior . . . ran over and set her straight"--that is, she returned the statue to its original place.

But, in 1613, when Carlini was twenty-three, she began to experience religious visions that she reported to the Mother Superior and to her confessor. She saw gardens, then she saw herself surrounded by animals, then she was given a vision of the "Mount of Perfection." 

In raising the topic of her experiences with the abbess of her convent, Carlini did not at first assume they were divine--both women also considered diabolical sources. Advised to fight against her visions, Carlini resisted them for two years.

In 1615, she began to suffer terrible illnesses, in particular at night, including paralysis. Physicians were unable to diagnose the source of her maladies. She continued to suffer--quietly--for another two years.  

In 1617 her visions, which she had tried so hard to suppress, returned--now, rather than visions of Jesus and the Madonna, she experienced visions of young men who pursued her, beating her with all sorts of weapons--chains, swords, and sticks. The beautiful leader of these young men also tried to seduce her, offering her a ring to seal their bond. 

So great was her torment that the convent's superiors assigned another young nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, as a companion--she was to share Carlini's cell, keep watch over her, and assist her. During her visions, Carlini spoke in the voice of angels and of Jesus, and she also seems to have appeared to observers as a beautiful young man. (Interestingly, the founder of the order of Theatine nuns, Ursula Benincasa, also had visions and ecstasies, for which she was called to Rome and examined by the pope.) 

All the while, Carlini also was an excellent manager of the convent's resources, in particular of their silk works. The convent was near completing its new building, and it was hoping that its long-sought status as a regular convent was soon to be granted. And then, on the second Friday of Lent, 1618, in the middle of the night, Carlini claimed that Jesus appeared to her one and spoke to her, an event that resulted in the stigmata appearing on her hands feet and side. Her companion, Crivelli, confirmed this miraculous event. 

Benedetta Carlini's successful management of the convent, along with the gift of stigmata, seems to have led to her election as abbess in 1619, at some point between February and May, when she was thirty years old.

And then things got crazy. Carlini, now abbess, began delivering sermons within the convent--women did not normally preach, even heads of convents--and while she preached, the listening nuns scourged themselves with whips. Her confessor was present, and he seemed to have had no objections to Carlini's sermons.

There were more visions and visitations, including one from Catherine of Siena, another from a beautiful guardian angel named Splenditello, and more visits from Jesus. One night he told Carlini to rip the heart out of her body--which Crivelli confirmed, saying she had felt the empty space in Carlini's chest. Jesus returned three days later and put his own heart into the abbess's body. 

On 20 May 1619 she had a vision that would lead to her downfall. On that night, she claimed that Jesus appeared to her and said he wanted to marry her. He provided her with all the details of the ceremony, the decorations, the attendant celebrations, and the guests to be invited. Again her confessor was aware of the vision and of her plans.

At the wedding, as the other nuns watched and listened, Carlini claimed that Jesus had a golden wedding ring for her and that, as he put it on her finger, the Virgin Mary looked on. Then, speaking through Carlini, Jesus gave a sermon--in it, he expounded on Carlini's extraordinary qualities.

Image of Theatine nun,
1714

''I would like that this, my bride, be empress of all the nuns,'' Jesus said. He also commanded that the Grand Duke of Tuscany should be informed about her greatness. And, he added, anyone who did not obey, believe and cherish Carlini would be punished. 

But observers of this ceremony--especially those from the town--grew concerned, particularly at Jesus's warning, delivered through his bride, Carlini: "And he who does not believe in my bride shall not be saved." 

The provost of Pescia, Stefano Cecchi, the leading ecclesiastical officer of the city, ordered all who had witnessed the ceremony not to speak of it. And Carlini was removed as abbess of the convent. 

The investigation of Benedetta Carlini began on 27 May 1619--or, at least, that's when the record of the testimony begins. 

Carlini was first subjected to a physical examination--in particular the sites of the stigmata were examined, and testimony was taken from Carlini about the "how those wounds came to be on her body." The stigmata were examined again on 7 June, and then they seemed to be healed. A week later, on 14 June, the wounds on her hand, feet, side, and head seemed fresh and were again bleeding.  

But, by July, the investigation was drawn to an uneasy end, and Benedetta Carlini was restored as abbess. For another two years, she managed the convent and continued with her mystical visions. But then she went too far--on Annunciation Day ( 25 March) 1621, Carlini died. 

The frightened nuns called the confessor, who immediately arrived. He commanded Carlini to rise--which she did. And Carlini, "restored to life," began recounting all that she had seen while she was dead, including her vision of Paradise. Once again Stefano Cecchi was summoned.

This time, he did not conduct the examination himself. Instead, two papal investigators were summoned, and they began their examination with a quick summary of the premises with which they opened their report from 1623: "all novelty is dangerous and all unusual events are suspect." They believed Carlini was "deluded by the Devil."

They began to reinvestigate Carlini's claims to have received the stigmata and also her claims, not investigated earlier, about her extraordinary fasting. 

Two nuns were examined who reported seeing Carlini poke herself with a needle in order to produce her bleeding stigmata. There were also questions about the gold wedding ring Jesus had given her during their marriage ceremony. It was at first invisible to everyone except Carlini, but it miraculously appeared on her finger during the examinations. This "proof" was undercut, however, when strange yellow marks were also noted--suggesting that the "gold" ring was some kind of fake.  

This was followed up by another remarkable revelation that would be funny if it weren't so tragic. One of the great manifestations of Carlini's holiness was her fasting, and in particular her refusal to eat meat--but she was reported to have been seen eating--in secret--salami!

The final devastating revelations were made by Carlini's companion, Bartolomea Crivelli, who revealed to examiners that at night Carlini claimed to be transformed into the beautiful angel Splenditello. As Splenditello, Carlini made passionate and frequent love to Crivelli. 

During the day, while teaching Crivelli to read and write, Carlini, as Splenditello, kissed Crivelli, touched her breasts and called her his beloved. In her testimony, Crivelli said that she was the unwilling object of these erotic attentions.  

On 5 November 1623, the papal examiners issued their "final report." They noted that all traces of Carlini's stigmata had disappeared--along with them "her angels, visions, apparitions, revelations, and ecstasies." When asked about them, Carlini said that they had all gone. She also said everything she had believed and done had been because she was under the influence of the devil. The visions and her actions were not the result of her consent or of her own will--"they were done while she was out of her senses by the work of the devil." 

Things did not turn out as badly as they might have, however. Bartolomea Crivelli seems to have been unpunished for her role in events, and in particular for her sexual relationship with Carlini, perhaps because she claims to have been an unwilling participant.

But Benedetto Carlini survived what might have been a disastrous end. She disavowed all her visions.  According to the investigators, she then began living the life of an "obedient nun" under a new abbess, presumably still at the convent in Pescia. 

But, something does seem to have changed--decades later, on 7 August 1661, an unnamed nun wrote "Benedetta Carlini died at age 71 of a fever and cold pains after eighteen days of illness. She died in penitence, having spent thirty-five years in prison." While it is not clear, this entry suggests that, some time after the documentation of her life ends, Benedetta Carlini came to be more strictly held, and thus a "prisoner." 

In writing extensively about Benedetta Carlini--in fact, her archival work brought Carlini's life out of its hidden past--Judith C. Brown speculates that Carlini must have gotten herself into some kind of trouble again some three years after her investigators reported her living as an obedient nun under a new abbess--something that resulted in her imprisonment. But no further details survive.

Brown's Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, details her discovery of the documents relating the life of Benedetta Carlini.

Her subtitle--her identification of Carlini as lesbian--resulted in some controversy, not so much for her claims of same-sex relationships between two women as her identification of the modern concept of lesbian identity with a seventeenth-century woman's experiences. But the book remains a terrific read, and I recommend it highly.  

Thomas/ine Hall, "Changed into the Fashion of a Man"

Thomas/ine Hall (appearance in court, 25 March 1629)

According to the records of a 1629 trial in the General Court of Jamestown, Virginia, Thomas Hall claimed to be both a man and a woman--but his/her neighbors were in some doubt. While some agreed that Hall was both man and woman, others claimed that Thomas was a man, still others insisting she was a woman.

The colony of Virginia, 1624

According to the testimony Thomas Hall offered on that occasion, he had been born "at or near Newcastle upon Tyne" around the year 1603. 

Under examination by a Virginia court, Hall said that he was christened as "Thomasine" and was dressed "in women's apparel" as a child. As a girl, she had been sent from Newcastle to live with an aunt in London when she was twelve years old. 

Hall spent the next ten years living in the city, continuing her life as a girl, then young woman, until an older brother was forced into military service, at which point Thomasine Hall became Thomas Hall. 

Thomas Hall testified that when he was twenty-two years old, he "Cut of[f] his heire and Changed his apparell into the fashion of man," following his brother into the British army and fighting in France in the 1627 campaign against Catholic suppression of the Huguenots.

Returning home after his stint in the military, Hall began living once more as a female, this time in Plymouth--in his words, he "changed himself into woeman's apparell" and worked in female-dominated trades, making "bone lace" and doing "other worke with his needle." 

But then Hall moved on again, deciding to travel to the colony of Virginia; as Hall describes it, he once more changed "his apparel into the habit of a man and so came over into this country." Arriving in Jamestown, probably around 1627, when he would have been twenty-four years old, Hall seems once again to have lived and worked at least some of the time as a woman, before relocating to Warrosquyoacke, a small settlement across the river from Jamestown where tobacco planters were in need of workers--preferably male workers. In Warrosquyoacke, Thomasine Hall once again became Thomas Hall. 

This transformation triggered rumors among his neighbors (especially his female neighbors), particularly focused on Hall's sexuality, and there were reports of Hall's having "layen with a mayd of Mr. Richard Bennetts." 

To settle the case, Hall was examined first by a group of women, and after a physical "searching" of Hall's body, the three women agreed that "hee was a man." But John Tyos, Hall's "master," disagreed with these findings, insisting that the women were wrong and that Hall was, in fact, a woman.    

These conflicting views of Hall's sexual identity--and his body--produced the statement that confounded his initial examiner in Warrosquyoacke. When Hall was brought for further examination by Captain Nathaniel Bass, Bass asked Hall directly whether "he" were a man or, in fact, a woman. Hall replied "he was both man and woman."

At this point, Hall offered Bass a description of his genitals. He had "a peece of flesh growing at the . . . belly as bigg as the topp of his little finger [an] inch long," but that "hee had not the use of the man's p[ar]te." That is, he had a penis, but this penis did not work. Bass decided that, if Hall's penis didn't work, or work correctly, that physical evidence was decisive. Bass ordered Hall to wear women's clothing.

But Bass's decision didn't end the matter. While Hall's new employer, John Atkins, remained convinced that Hall was a woman, the women who had examined Hall weren't satisfied. The group examined Hall's body once more, this time without his consent. As Hall slept, the women inspected Hall's body, confirming their original findings: Hall was a man. And they went further, insisting that Atkins examine Hall's body for himself.

Yet Atkins seemed to be so convinced that Hall was a woman--and thus, certain that for him to examine "her" body was inappropriate--when the sleeping Hall (whom Atkins described as "shee") moved in her sleep, Atkins decided he couldn't remove a woman's clothing or inspect her body underneath her clothing and refused to investigate Hall any further. 

Since the case was still unclear, the group decided that there had to be a third inspection of Hall's body, to take place on the following Sunday. On this occasion, Atkins did inspect Hall's "peece of flesh," and after doing so, asked Hall "if that were all hee had." Perhaps Atkins, like Hall himself, doubted the significance of the small "peece of flesh." 

Hall then revealed to Atkins that he also had "a peece of an hole." Atkins told Hall to "shew" what he assumed was evidence that Hall was, indeed, a woman, but when the group was unable to find a vulva, Atkins concluded that Hall was, after all, a man, ordering him to "bee put into" men's clothing. 

Atkins also urged Captain Bass to punish Hall for his "abuse," and Bass decided to reverse his earlier ruling--he proclaimed Hall a man. Hall's situation was, if possible, even worse--now other members of the colony felt free to examine Hall's body for themselves.

Two men, Francis England and Roger Rodes, had heard that Hall, as a man, "had layen with a mayd," Bennet's servant named "Great Besse." (This is the rumor that had first triggered the investigation into Hall.) As Rodes said, "Hall thou hast beene reported to be a woman and now thou art p[ro]ved to bee a man, I will see what thou carriest." The two men wrestled Hall onto his back. As Rodes later testified, when he "felt the said Hall and pulled out his members," he found him to be "a perfect man."  

Unsure of what punishment Hall should suffer for his transgressions, officials in Warrosquyoacke sent Hall to the General Court in Jamestown--which decided not to inspect Hall's body. Instead, the Court decided to hear the testimony of Francis England and John Atkins and then to hear Hall's story as he told it.   

After listening to the evidence, the Court decided that Hall should be compelled to wear men's clothing--but that in addition to men's "breeches," he must also wear "a Coyfe and Croscloth with an Apron before him"--that is, that he, like a woman, must cover his head with a coif and that he wear a woman's garment, an apron, over his male clothing. 

Historian Kathleen Brown describes the final judgment of the Court:

Both the evidence gathered by the community and Hall's own historical narrative of identity figured in the General Court's sentence of Hall. Compelling Hall to don men's breeches, the court acknowledged the weight of the physical manifestations of sex that were of such importance to the diligent matrons of Warrosquyoacke. . . . But the court did not find the physical evidence or the sentence of an imposed (and permanent) male identity sufficient.

Thus his "identity" as a man was to be overlaid with signs of womanhood.  

On the one hand, this punishment seems not as harsh as it might have been. Fornication was a crime, but nothing came of Hall's purported sexual act with "Great Besse." Hall's possible sexuality was further confused when he told Francis England, who wanted to know why he sometimes dressed as a woman, "I go in woman's apparel to get a bit for my cat," by which he could mean that he "dressed as a woman in order to obtain sexual access to a man," or, as Brown suggests, that he dressed as a woman so he could earn money as a prostitute.

Hall could have been charged with an even more serious crime: cross-dressing was a capital offense, punishable by death. But Hall was not prosecuted for this crime either. 

On the other hand, the punishment ordered by the Court was not designed to accommodate Hall's identity as "both man and woman" but, rather to "publish" Hall's case so that "all the Inhabitants there may take notice thereof"--and, of course, to insure his "good behavior" until the Court decided to "discharge him." And the punishment meant Hall could no longer move back freely and freely between identities as male or female, as he might desire or circumstances, like employment opportunities, might dictate. Nor, dressed in this way, would Hall be able to maintain privacy within the community

After the 1629 General Court case, Thomas/ine Hall disappears from the record. 

For this account of Thomas/ine Hall, I have relied on Kathleen Brown's "Changed . . . into the Fashion of Man": The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 2 (1995): 171-93. This essay, along with the original documents of the 1629 examination of Hall, is included in Kathy Peiss's Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality: Documents and Essays.

Hall's case is also detailed in Mary Beth Horton's Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.

An excellent summary of the case and original documents is at Outhistory. 

Catalina de Erauso, "the Lieutenant Nun"

Catalina de Erauso (escapes her convent, 18 March 1600)

According to her autobiography, Catalina de Erauso was born in 1585, although the surviving record of her baptism notes a date of 1592--just a small indication of the confusion about many of the details of her tumultuous, adventure-filled life.

But, really, even if Erauso has exaggerated (or even misrepresented) some aspects of her life, what a life it was!

Catalina de Erauso, c. 1626,
attributed to  Juan van der Hamen

Born in the Basque town of San Sebastián, Catalina was the daughter of Miguel de Erauso, a captain in the Spanish army, and of Maria Pérez de Gallarraga y Arce.

When she was four years old (she gives the year as 1589 in her autobiography), the girl and her two sisters were sent to be educated at the Dominican convent of San Sebastián el Antiguo, where her mother's sister was prioress. 

Catalina says nothing more about convent life, noting only that, when she was fifteen, she had a series of increasingly heated encounters with members of the community.

Finally, seeing a chance of escape, she took it, fleeing the convent on the night of 18 March 1600 and entering a world that she "had never seen before." 

At that point, she changed her identity. "I don’t know where I headed," she writes, "but I ended up in a chestnut grove out behind the rear of the convent. There I hid out for three days tracing and cutting clothing. I made myself a pair of trousers from a skirt of blue cloth that I had, and a shirt and leggings from the green shift that I wore underneath. Not knowing what to make of the rest of my habit, I left it there. I cut off my hair and threw it away."

From this moment on, Catalina de Erauso lived much, but not all, of her life as a man. Her decision seems at first purely practical, a way to avoid being identified and returned to convent life, but also a way to avoid the perils of traveling alone as a woman. At the same time, however, her life as a man seems also to correspond to other needs and desires as well. 

As you can well imagine, gender and sexuality scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the both the "real" life of Catalina de Erauso (as it can be reconstructed) and the written (and constructed) life of Catalina de Erauso, la monja alférez ("the lieutenant nun"). 

Catalina de Erauso first came to my attention in 1996, when Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite Nun in the New World, translated by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, was published. In her introduction to the volume, gender theorist Marjorie Garber focuses the attention of the reader on difficulties of addressing questions of gender and identity in Catalina de Erauso's autobiography. "How can we assess the erotic, social, and political effects of cross-dressing at a remove of almost four centuries, in the context of a culture very different from our own, and as described in a Spanish-language text?" asks Garber. "The short answer, of course, is that we can't.”

When Catalina de Erauso fights duels, steals money, leads soldiers into battle, rescues a woman in distress, evades the marriage plans of hopeful widows and their daughters, and marches across league upon league of uncharted Peruvian terrain, it is tempting to see in her tale an allegory of early modern woman's emergent subjectivity. . . . When Catalina flirts with two young women, "frolicking" and "teasing," it might seem intriguing to read this as lesbianism avant la lettre, an instance of female homosexuality or, at the very least, love play between women. Yet all these readings are allegorical--that is to say, they are readings of her story as a story about something else--as indeed saints' and others' lives have been offered in the literary annals of her time and ours--as exempla, as indications of deeper or higher truths.

In 1996, when this English translation of Erauso's autobiography was published, the identification of a seventeenth-century figure as "transvestite" was controversial and contested. Now, more than twenty years later, the discussion is still complicated, with many scholars of gender and sexuality suggesting Erauso was transgender, still others continuing the debate about trying to understand the identity of a seventeenth-century person using twenty-first century concepts.

What follows here is just a brief summary of Catalina's life. After leaving the convent, Erauso has a series of adventures in a number of Spanish cities, serving a variety of masters in a variety of roles under a number of different names, including Pedro de Orive, Francisco de Loyola, Alonso Diaz Ramirez de Guzman and Antonio de Erauso. At times Erauso either meets or serves some members of her own family--cousins, her aunt, even her father--who never recognize her.

At last Erauso decides to travel to the Americas, where, as a man, he lives a riotous life, the autobiography recounting all kinds of madcap adventures, fights and brawls, and sexual misadventures. At one point, "he" is almost forced to marry a woman, at another, "he" is dismissed when caught in a compromising position with a young woman.

Eventually Catalina joins the Spanish army, using the name Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán. As a man, Erauso serves in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, eventually earning the rank of lieutenant, recognized for brutality and efficiency.

After another dizzying array of adventures and misadventures--he is promoted, he is suspended, he is imprisoned, he deserts the army, he commits heinous crimes, including murder, for which he is condemned to death and then reprieved--in 1623 Erauso is forced to reveal "her" identity as a woman. Her revelation is a last desperate act; about to be executed, she "confesses" to the local bishop, Francisco Verdugo Cabrerathat she is not only a woman but that she is a virgin, having been brought up in a convent. 

As she tells the story in her memoir, the "truth" is this: "I am a woman; that I was born in such-and-such a place, daughter of such-and-such man and woman; that I was placed at a certain age in such-and-such a convent with my aunt so-and-so; that I grew up there, took the habit and became a novice; that, about to take the vows, I ran off; that I went to such-and-such a place, stripped, dressed myself as a man, cut off my hair, travelled here and there, went to sea, roamed, hustled, corrupted, maimed, and murdered, until coming to end up here at his Lordship’s feet.”

Sent back to Spain, Catalina gains notoriety and attempts to get a military pension, in recognition for her years of service. The documents in her petition include her relación de méritos y servicios ("account of merits and services") and a number of testimonies of witnesses. These records from her 1625-26 appeal preserve a great deal of the verifiable information about her. It is during this same period that she is said to have written or dictated (accounts vary) her memoir. 

Catalina de Erauso is eventually awarded her military pension. In addition, she is also granted another, more unusual request: she asks to be allowed to continue living as a man, and she receives official permission to do so. In 1630 Erauso returns to the Americas, living the last twenty years of his life in Mexico as Antonio de Erauso. 

Notions about Catalina de Erauso's gender and sexuality are thus confused and confusing. In the memoir, she uses female pronouns to refer to herself when she is living as a woman, male pronouns for her life as a man, a practice I've tried to reproduce here, though I remain unclear about which pronouns to use--if she were transgender, I would use the pronoun s/he (or "they") prefers to use--but I'm not at all sure about what "correct" usage might be in Erauso's case. 

There are also questions about the genre of Catalina's work--is it autobiography? Or confession? Or an adventure story? Is it "true" at all, in any sense of that word?

1829 edition of Catalina de Erauso's
memoir

And there are questions about the authenticity of the memoir, which wasn't published until the nineteenth century. Did Catalina de Erauso "write" this story of her life? There is no surviving manuscript, nor is there any copy of a supposed seventeenth-century printed edition. There is a reference to an earlier manuscript in the eighteenth century, a "copy" of which was eventually published in France in 1829. 

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, though I do enjoy the lively scholarly debate about Catalina de Erauso and the memoir attributed to her. And, while I never taught this text, I did share it with a number of students in the years that I taught, for one of whom it proved to be a transformative text.

I could see the young woman in my class was struggling--she was absent far too many days, she wasn't doing the course reading, and she was missing assignments. She also missed the day students signed up for topics for an independent research assignment--when she came by my office, she was uninterested in the few remaining topics on the list. So I handed her a copy of the 1996 English translation of Erauso's memoir--maybe she'd be interested in this, I suggested. 

She took the book. I'd like to say it saved her life--she didn't do all that well in the course, but she did complete it, and she didn't commit suicide, which is what she was threatening to do (and what I feared).

And two years later, happy, writing like mad, and active in the gay and lesbian group on campus, she stopped by my office one day to say thank you. The story of Catalina de Erauso had been an inspiration. 

The 1996 English translation of Catalina de Erauso's memoir is still in print--you can access it by clicking here. And, if you search "lieutenant nun" on the Amazon website, you will see a number of critical works, focusing on gender and sexuality, about Catalina de Erauso, and while they seem to be out of print, used copies are available.

For an introduction to the critical issues, I recommend Isabel Hernández's essay, "From Spain to the Americas, from the Convent to the Front: Catalina de Erauso's Shifting Identities," originally published in L'Homme, available online through Eurozine (click here).

While you can buy a copy of the memoir, you can also access it freely online. In English, the memoir is available through the Early Americas Digital Archive; the translation, by Dan Harvey Pedrick, can be accessed by clicking here. For a Spanish edition, available through the Biblioteca virtual de Miguel Cervantes, click here.   

Jennie Hodgers Becomes Albert Cashier

Albert Cashier/Jennie Hodgers (born 25 December 1843)

When reporter Ida Tarbell queried the Adjutant General's Office in 1909, asking whether any women had participated in the Civil War, the answer she received from the U. S. Army was unequivocal. According to the Records and Pensions Office,

. . . no official record has been found in the War Department showing specifically that any woman was ever enlisted in the military service of the United States as a member of any organization of the Regular or Volunteer Army at any time during the period of the civil war. It is possible, however, that there may have been a few instances of women having served as soldiers for a short time without their sex having been detected, but no record of such cases is known to exist in the official files.

And yet, as you might have guessed, that response was not quite true. By 1909, as DeAnne Blanton writes in an essay for the National Archives, the Adjutant General's Office did indeed have more than ample documentation of "the service of women soldiers."

Albert Cashier in his army uniform

According to the website of the Civil War Trust, there are  over 400 documented cases of women disguising themselves as men in order to fight for the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War.

I've already posted about one of these four hundred women, Sarah Emma Edmonds, who returned to her life as a woman after the end of the war, eventually marrying. She was even granted a pension in 1886 for her service as a soldier. She is now hailed not only for her military service but as a significant figure in GLBTQ history.

Today's post highlights an equally complex figure, Albert Cashier, who has now been recognized for his role as "a transgender pioneer." He is featured in the We've Been Around documentary series of short films celebrating the lives of just a few of these remarkable men and women. (For the film on Albert Cashier, click here.)

Born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Ireland on 25 December 1843, Cashier was generally evasive about his early life and, when pressed, produced contradictory details and stories.

According to some much later accounts, the young Jennie dressed as a boy in order to find work--frequently this cross-dressing is attributed to Jennie's stepfather, who needed the child's income to support the family after the boy's mother had died.

Newspaper stories at the time of Cashier's death reported that he had arrived in New York as a stowaway, though the year of his arrival in the United States is not clear. According to many accounts of his life, Cashier was eighteen when he arrived in the United States from Ireland.  

Once in the country, Cashier found a home in Belvidere, Illinois, and lived there as a man, supporting himself as a laborer and farmhand. (See update, below.)

On 6 August 1862, Cashier enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry, Company G, as Albert D. J. Cashier, serving three years. As part of Grant's Army of the Tennessee, Company G fought in some forty battles, including the battle of Vicksburg, where Cashier fought well. (The Illinois 95th traveled nearly 10,000 miles during the war.)

As reported by the National Park Service, 

In May, 1863, Private Cashier participated in the Siege of Vicksburg, during which time he was captured while performing a reconnaissance mission. He escaped by wrestling a gun away from a Confederate and was chased on foot, narrowly reaching the safety of the Union lines.

After Vicksburg, Cashier's exploits continued. In Jean Freedman's account,

[Cashier] served in Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s Red River campaign in the spring of 1864, marching for miles in the Louisiana heat; by December of that year, [he] was in Nashville, fighting with the Army of the Cumberland in its hard-won victory over John Bell Hood’s forces. [His] final combat experience came during the siege of Mobile, Ala., a fight that did not end until after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

Along with the rest of his regiment, Cashier was mustered out of the army at the end of the war, on 17 August 1865.

Cashier's headstone,
Sunny Slope Cemetery,
Saunemin, Illinois

Cashier continued his life as a man after leaving the army, returning to Belvidere, where he seems to have opened a gardening business with a fellow soldier.

About 1869, he relocated to Saunemin, Illinois, working as a farmhand and at a variety of odd jobs, including lamplighter, janitor, gardener, and chauffeur. As a man, Cashier voted in elections and claimed his army pension.

He lived productively and quietly for over forty years after the war--until an unfortunate accident in 1911. While working on an automobile for a former employer, Cashier broke his leg and had to be hospitalized. Although his female body was discovered by the doctor who treated him, the doctor agreed to keep his anatomical "secret."   

Cashier was transferred to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, Illinois, where his identity was also respected. Although his story eventually leaked out, he continued to be visited and supported by members of his former military company, and public pressure ensured that his pension continued to be paid. (For a deposition providing testimony about Cashier's military service, evidence taken after Cashier's complex sexual identity had been revealed, click here.)

But his story was picked up and published in several newspapers, and by 1913, suffering from declining physical and mental health, Cashier was judged to be "insane," transferred to Watertown State Hospital for the Insane. As Jason Cromwell writes in Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities, the commitment "seems dubious at best."

There he was placed in the women's ward and forced back into female garments--so restrictive and cumbersome to Cashier, in his physical decline, that he tripped and broke a hip. Never recovering from his accident, he died on 10 October 1915, six months after entering the mental hospital.

Frequently moved and much restored,
Albert Cashier's home,
Saunemin, Illinois

Cashier was given a funeral with full military honors in East Moline.

His body was returned to Saunemin, where he was buried in his uniform, his headstone reading, "Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf."

In the 1970s, another headstone was provided for his grave, adding to Cashier's name his long-discarded birth name, "Jennie Hodgers."

Albert Cashier is the subject of a musical, The Civility of Albert Cashier, now in development For information about the musical in progress, click here.

Update, 24 January 2022: Some of the music from The Civility of Albert Cashier can be heard on SoundCloud.

Update, 25 January 2026: Information about Albert Cashier used to be freely available from the National Park Service. All mention of Albert Cashier has now been suppressed by the Trump regine. We are truly living in Orwellian times--but, thankfully, the NPS information has been preserved by the Internet Archive. The links here now take you to the information that has been disappeared by the regime.

Anne Lister, "the First Modern Lesbian"

Anne Lister (born 3 April 1791)

Recently, the BBC and HBO announced the production of an upcoming drama, Shibden Hall, from writer Sally Wainwright. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the eight-part drama will focus on the life of the remarkable Anne Lister, a Yorkshire landowner and renovator, mountaineer, and diarist.

Anne Lister,
portrait by Joshua Horner, c. 1830

Lister's extensive diaries, partially written in a code of her own devising--and which extend from 1817 to 1840--have led to the television series.

Born on 3 April 1791, Lister was the eldest daughter of Jeremy Lister and Rebecca Battle, who made their home in the West Riding of Yorkshire. 

The young Anne Lister attended a variety of schools, where, in addition to developing her intellectual abilities, she had a number of romantic relationships with young women.

She created a code for recording the details of her feelings for Eliza Raine, her first love, Isabella Norcliffe, whom she met in 1810, and Marianne Belcombe, with whom she had a passionate affair, even after Belcombe's marriage--these entries make up much of the early part of her diaries. 

In 1826, Lister inherited Shibden Hall from her uncle, dedicating herself to the management and improvement of the estate. About Lister's business acumen, Helena Whitbread notes,

Her entrepreneurial flair, her acquired knowledge, over the years, of mathematics, geology and engineering and her sharp negotiating skills with her male business rivals made her a formidable businesswoman in the newly-emerging world of industrialisation, as is indicated in the following exchange with her defeated rival in the fight for selling coal in the area. . . . 

The estate produced income from its reserves of coal, water, stone and timber and, in addition to those extractive industries, there was an income stream from canal shares, Turnpike Road Trusts and pew rents. It was, however, the stable income, which rents from the farms and cottages on the estate generated, that gave Anne a firm base from which she could branch out into riskier investments.

Shibden Hall

Anne Lister's financial independence and her business success allowed her a certain freedom to live her life as she chose.

In and around Shibden Hall, she was known as "Gentleman Jack," a woman who preferred to dress in male attire, and who pursued not only her business affairs but her romantic interests.

In 1832, Lister met Ann Walker, who came to live at Shibden Hall in 1834. Although their union was not formally recognized, the two married, and remained a couple until Lister's death in 1840 while traveling in the Caucusus. Their relationship was, like many marriages, troubled at times, and Lister's frustrations and resentments also found their way into her diary.

Lister left Shibden Hall to her cousins, but in her will she also left Walker a life interest in the estate. Walker spent only three years at Shibden Hall after Lister's death, however--her mental health deteriorated, she was declared unfit and evicted, and eventually confined in an asylum. Walker lived until 1854, while Shibden Hall reverted to the Lister family.

Lister's diaries, some 26 volumes, are over 4 million words long. The diaries include a great deal about her daily life and about the social, economic, and political events of the early nineteenth century. In 2011, Anne Lister's diaries were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, dedicating to preserving the "documentary heritage" of humanity. The citation announcing the inclusion of Lister's diary refers to the work as a "comprehensive and painfully honest account of lesbian life and reflections on her nature"; these "unique" diaries "have shaped and continue to shape the direction of UK Gender Studies and Women’s History."

Anne Lister's diaries, showing her "secret" code

Selections from Lister's diaries were first published by Helena Whitbread in 1988; for I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840, click here. A later volume (2010), published by Virago Press, is The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (click here).

For Ellen Chaffee's excellent essay on Lister from the now-archived GLBTQ Encyclopedia, click here. (Which takes you right to the article as preserved in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine!)

Update, 17 April 2019: The HBO broadcast has been given a new title, Gentleman Jack. The eight-episode series premieres on 22 April 2019.

"A Woman Playing a Woman? Where's the Trick in That?"

The Role of Desdemona Performed by a Woman on the English Stage (8 December 1660)

The title of this post ("A Woman Playing a Woman? Where's the Trick in That?") is a line from the 2004 film Stage Beauty--the question is posed by the actor Edward Kynaston, who had become famous on the English stage by playing female roles. The English diarist Samuel Pepys called Kynaston "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life."

Margaret Hughes, 1670,
portrait by Peter Lely
(I'm not deciding between Hughes and Marshall
as the first professional actress--
I just can't find a portrait of Anne Marshall)

From the beginning, all the roles in the Elizabethan public theaters had been played by men--in contrast to the practices on the continent, where women performed the roles of women.

But on 8 December 1660, shortly after the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, an English woman played the role of a female character for the first time on the stage of a commercial theater.

(Notice all the qualifications here--women had regularly taken part in conventual theater of the medieval period, like that of Hrotsvita of Gandersheim or Katherine of Sutton, for example, but it was not "commercial," and there are records of continental actors, including women, performing on stage in England well before 1660. Aristocratic Englishwomen regularly performed in court masques throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--but, again, they were not professionals.)

It's interesting that we know the role that the woman played--Desdemona, from Shakespeare's Othello. We know the company with whom she performed--Thomas Killigrew's King's Company. We know the theater--the Vere Street Theatre. But we don't know the name of the actor.

It may have been Margaret Hughes or it may have been Anne Marshall, both of whom went on to gain fame as actors on the Restoration stage. 

If you'd like to read more, I recommend starting with Stephen Orgel's foundational essay, "Nobody's Perfect: Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?" originally published in 1989 in the South Atlantic Quarterly.  This essay also begins Orgel's 1996 Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England.

Selma Lagerlöf, the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize in Literature

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (born 20 November 1858)

Well, I was planning to write just a quick paragraph or so about Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn't know much about her beyond the fact that she had won the Nobel in 1909, and for whatever reason I didn't feel like writing much today. So, I thought, for once, why not just snag a bit of info from Wikipedia, slap together a quick paragraph, and be done with it? 

Selma Lagerlöf at her desk

That was my plan, anyway.

But then I started reading, beginning with the biographical information at the Nobel website and moving on to the extraordinarily long list of novels and short-story collections. I am not qualified to write more, but I know that I definitely want to read more.

So, as an introduction to the writer Selma Lagerlöf and her work, I do recommend starting with the Nobel website. There you will find biographical information, a bibliography, the Presentation Speech delivered on the occasion of the award, the full text of Lagerlöf's acceptance speech (which makes for wonderful reading), and a photo gallery. The "Other Resources" tab links you to a 1926 video of Lagerlöf at her home as well as to the Selma Lagerlöf Society.

There is also excellent information in Ulla Torpe's entry on Lagerlöf at The History of Nordic Women's Literature website. Torpe notes that Lagerlöf's  work "focuses on strategies for young women to survive physically, mentally, and morally in a patriarchal society."

And, although her "official image" portrayed her "as an unmarried author whose sole passion was writing," Torpe indicates that Lagerlöf's correspondence, made widely available only in the 1990s, reveals her intense and enduring relationships with women, including Valborg Olander, a Swedish suffragist, and with the Swedish-Jewish writer Sophie Elkan. There is now a well-informed literature about Lagerlöf's sexuality.

Selma Lagerlöf died on 16 March 1940. Shortly before her death, she managed to help secure the release of the German-Jewish writer Nelly Sachs and her mother from Nazi Germany. Sachs would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.

English translations of Lagerlöf's work are freely available at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, but there is also a handsome Penguin edition of her first great work, The Saga of Gösta Berling, published in 2009, on the centenary of Lagerlöf's Nobel Prize, and a Dover edition of her children's classic, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

Fun fact: Greta Garbo's first screen role was in the 1924 silent film version of Gösta Berlings saga.

Update, 20 November 2023: The History of Nordic Women’s Literature seems to be no longer online—I’m hoping this is a temporary absence. In the mean time, I’ve changed the link to a preserved version of Torpe’s essay at the Internet Archive.