Revolutionary upheaval didn’t just reshape politics—it briefly cracked open space for people to live, love and defy gender norms in ways long written out of history.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The American Revolution is usually told as a story of founding fathers, political ideals and the birth of a nation. But revolutions do more than topple governments—they shake the social order to its core. They unsettle hierarchies, scramble norms and create opportunities for liberation and transformation.
Revolutionary America was a time of resistance—not only to British rule but also to slavery and patriarchal authority. The revolutionary era was one of surprising possibilities to express same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity. There were people who rejected binary gender, who lived as men after being raised as girls, who sought out sexual encounters with those of the same sex and who married same-sex partners. These lives were not named in the language we use today, such as transgender or gay. Often without the support of family or friends, people managed to transform their gender expression and/or create erotic and emotional attachments in the cracks of law, custom and oversight.
Anglo-American society in the 18th century rested on sharply defined gender roles. Men were expected to occupy public space—politics, commerce, warfare—while women were legally subordinated to fathers and husbands and responsible for domestic life. Clothing, labor and bodily comportment were the visible markers of this divide. When those raised as girls rejected these norms and embraced occupations typically reserved for men, they were described with the modifier of “female,” such as “female soldier” or “female sailor” or in some cases even “female husband.”
Some people raised as girls crossed these boundaries. They cut their hair, wore men’s clothes, learned trades, earned wages and moved through the world as men. For some, this crossing was temporary or strategic. For others, it became enduring. What mattered is that gender was widely understood not as an inner truth but as a social practice: something one did, not something one was. That understanding made gender surprisingly flexible.
The media encouraged this. Newspapers were hungry for sensational stories with catchy headlines. Accounts of these so-called female soldiers, sailors and husbands appeared alongside updates on trade and politics, including the growing tension and conflict between the British Crown and the North American colonies.
In 1746, the very first account of a “female husband” was published in London by Henry Fielding, a fictionalized version of the true story of Charles Hamilton, The Female Husband. Female husbands were people raised as girls who transed gender, lived as men and entered into legal marriages with women.
Hamilton was outed by their wife who wanted a divorce after a few months of marriage. The Penny London Post Advertiser reported on Hamilton’s trial, and the judges ruled that Hamilton “was an uncommon Notorious Cheat.” Hamilton was sentenced to six months in jail and four public whippings—an exceedingly harsh sentence. He challenged the idea that only men could be husbands, that marriage was inherently heterosexual and that gender was fixed, visible and obvious.
Years later, Hamilton made his way to Pennsylvania, where he was again detained by authorities. This time, the story was picked up by Benjamin Franklin’s own newspaper and key pro-revolutionary publication, The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette reported that authorities in Chester, Pa., detained Hamilton “till we see whether any Body appears against her, if not she will be discharged.”
Yes, describing Hamilton with female pronouns is offensive to our modern sensibilities, but the bigger point is this: In revolutionary Pennsylvania, there was no law against presenting oneself as a man. Furthermore, while these stories could be mocking or moralizing, they also did important work in spreading knowledge about the existence and bravery of these trailblazers.
Another British female husband story broke in 1766 about the life of James Howe and his wife, Mary (Snapes) Howe, and the North American press could not get enough of it. Major metropolitan papers such as Boston Post-Boy, The Pennsylvania Journal and The New York Gazette all covered it.
On Oct. 23, 1766, The Pennsylvania Journal relayed the entire account in detail, from how the couple met, to their life together, to the ensuing blackmail encounter that would land the female husband in court—not as defendant but as the plaintiff against his blackmailers!
The marriages between female husbands and their queer wives suggested something radical: that same-sex intimacy could be woven into ordinary social life rather than confined to secrecy, scandal or sin.
Yes, the roots of the most exciting possibilities for queer resistance to gender norms came from England. By the time the revolutionary generation took up the cause of their own liberation from patriarchal authority, a few key templates were well established by the media. Reading these accounts from the British press—which many inhabitants of the North American colonies would have had access to—may have inspired them to throw caution to the wind and embrace their own desires as well.
Perhaps one of the most important models was the female soldier, James Gray, who joined the British Army in 1745 and later the Royal Marines in 1747. Gray’s five years of military service as a man became the basis for a wildly popular book, The Female Soldier or, the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell. The text details Gray’s military service while also exploring key questions related to sex and gender: Why did they choose to live as a man? How did they pull it off? Did their shipmates ever suspect they were different? By the time the Revolutionary War began, people were aware of the existence of female sailors and soldiers.
The Revolutionary War disrupted families, emptied households of men and created labor shortages that made rigid gender restrictions difficult to enforce. Soldiers, sailors, workers who were enslaved, indentured and free all passed through cities and ports in record numbers. In this world of motion and instability, gender nonconformity could pass unnoticed—or be excused as necessity. By the time Robert Shirtliff (formerly known as Deborah Sampson) enlisted in the Continental Army, people would not have been outright shocked by such a decision. That didn’t mean it was common or easy. The Massachusetts native enlisted for the Patriot cause in 1782, serving for 17 months before being outed while hospitalized in Philadelphia. Shirtliff’s legacy as a queer/trans trailblazer is contested by the elevation of Sampson as “the first woman” to do various things, such as receive a pension for her service. These things need not be at odds, as both are true.
Religion was also transformed by the revolutionary moment. The First Great Awakening had challenged established churches and emphasized personal revelation over institutional authority. In this context, charismatic figures could claim spiritual authority that bypassed traditional hierarchies, including gender hierarchy. Jemima Wilkinson, later known as the Public Universal Friend, exemplifies this possibility. After a near-fatal illness in 1776, the Friend declared that Jemima Wilkinson had died and that a genderless spirit now inhabited the body.
Rejecting all gendered pronouns, the Friend preached celibacy, gathered followers and traveled widely. While critics mocked and condemned the Friend, supporters respected their refusal of gender classification. Here, gender nonconformity was framed not as deception or immorality but as divine transformation—a powerful alternative in a society steeped in religious language. Revolutionary America offered the hope of a greater degree of freedom regarding gender and sexual transgression—at least for a time.
As noted above, there were no laws that explicitly named cross-dressing as a crime. People under suspicion might be held on a vagrancy charge, especially if they were thought to be violating some other statute. They might be detained for up to sixty days, but the law required their release if no other charge was brought. This was a significantly lighter punishment than what was enacted in England and fit into the revolutionary commitment to reform punishment.
Similarly, the legal landscape surrounding sexuality was shifting. In several states, lawmakers revisited colonial-era penal codes in the wake of independence. Some revised or eliminated statutes that had once made sodomy a capital crime. Pennsylvania was the first to abolish the death penalty for sodomy, replacing it with a maximum prison sentence of ten years. This reform aligned with broader revolutionary efforts to replace corporal and capital punishment with incarceration.
Prosecutions for sodomy remained relatively rare. The burden of proof was high—two witnesses were required—and the will to prosecute was low. Same-sex intimacy, even when officially condemned as an “unnatural crime,” was treated with a striking degree of indifference.
This did not signal broad acceptance of same-sex relationships—far from it—but it did reduce the most severe penalties and, in practice, limited the reach of the law into private life. Like gender transgression, same-sex intimacy existed in a gray zone: condemned in theory, inconsistently punished in practice. That ambiguity mattered. It created room to maneuver.
What unites these disparate stories—soldiers, sailors, sodomites, husbands, religious visionaries—is not a shared identity but a shared historical condition. The Revolution destabilized authority and made rules negotiable. Gender, in this period, was understood less as an inner truth than as a set of external practices: clothing, labor, demeanor.
Because it was something one did, it could also be undone, explained away or strategically performed. People who crossed gender boundaries often emphasized necessity rather than desire when confronted by authorities. They claimed economic need, patriotism or divine calling. These explanations worked not because they were always believed, but because they fit within a culture that understood gender as flexible under pressure.
This flexibility did not last. By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, American society moved to reassert order. Cities passed laws regulating dress and behavior. Medical and legal authorities increasingly framed same-sex desire and gender nonconformity as pathological. What had once been seen as temporary, situational or strategic increasingly became understood as innate and deviant. The window of possibility that the revolutionary era had opened began to close.
Yet that earlier moment matters. The queer possibilities of Revolutionary America remind us that gender and sexuality have histories—that they are shaped by law, war, religion, labor and media. They challenge the myth that the past was uniformly repressive until modern enlightenment arrived. And they expose the lie that gender diversity is a recent invention or dangerous innovation. From the nation’s earliest years, Americans lived, loved and desired in ways that exceeded the categories available to describe them.
In a moment when LGBTQ+ people are again being told that they do not belong in the nation’s story, Revolutionary America offers a different lesson. From the very beginning, the struggle over liberty has included people who lived at the edges of gender and sexual norms. They did not wait for recognition. They navigated ambiguity, exploited instability and carved out lives where they could. The Revolution promised freedom. Some people found it.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
- Making Disability Visible in History: A Conversation With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany
- Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash, Nimisha Barton, lecturer at Cal State Long Beach and a DEI consultant in higher education
