Opengender

In spite of the sexologists' efforts, the boundaries of femininity continued to expand in the early part of this century. As part of the freedoms associated with the 'New Woman,' Edwardian girls began to be permitted to take part in sport and athletics. Given the association of utilitarian clothing with (lesbian) sexual pathology, however, they were expected to wear 'normal,' feminine clothing with its heavy garments, restrictive stays, and suspenders. Hence, although genteel girls participated in athletic activities in the pages of middle-class Edwardian schoolgirls' magazines, they were not permitted practical clothing (Cadogan and Craig, 1976: 78-79).

An amazonian figure first appeared in the very un-genteel, and male-addressed, form of western 'dime novels' in the latter half of the 19th Century (Smith, 1950: 112) and in Hollywood westerns in the 1920s. Perhaps it was only at the frontiers of society that such risqué representation of women was possible. Smith argued that it was also by coding the heroine as Native American that a greater range of female activity could be represented:

One method of transforming the heroine from the merely passive sexual object ... was to introduce a supposed Indian girl able to ride and shoot who later proves to be an upper-class white girl captured long ago by the Indians. (Smith, 1950: 112)

The dime novels later began to feature crossdressed heroines as a "much more promising means of effecting a real development in the heroine" (Smith, 1950: 112). The earliest crossdressed heroine appeared in the late 1860s (113). Dime-novel crossdressed heroines were armed and often actually fought.

Cadogan and Craig associated the appearance of the crossdressed figure in female-addressed mainstream culture with the entry of women into the professions in greater numbers during the 1920s and 1930s (304). Mainstream representations of this new kind of career girl popularised a new kind of adolescent heroine — the tomboy. The terms in which this figure is here articulated recall the lesbian-feminist model of a refusal, or transformation, of femininity:

[T]he two professions which, in the 1930s, lent themselves most readily to an up-to-date, popularized interpretation were those of girl reporter and girl detective — interestingly enough, these carry with them implications of initiative, mental alertness, deductive ability, physical mobility, courage, technical skill and personal ambition — all qualities which had for so long been out of bounds to women ... (Cadogan and Craig, 1976: 304)

In literature aimed at girls and young women, however, the tomboy's image was "hedged around with compromise" (304). It was in popular cinema, in films such as His Girl Friday, that the tomboy really hit her stride:

The image of the 1930s girl reporter belongs indubitably to the cinema, where it was redefined, enlivened, shown in accelerated motion and embodied in Rosalind Russell or Joan Crawford. (Cadogan and Craig, 1976: 304)

The tomboy figure might thus be seen as a trope which effected some sort of compromise in the struggle between conservative constructs of femininity and an increasingly popularised feminist discourse of "emancipation."

It is interesting to note that this figure maps easily over a Freudian psychoanalytic model of a gender-undifferentiated infantile libido which becomes pathological (lesbian) in women only if retained into sexual maturity (see Freud, 1905; 1925; 1933; and Mulvey, 1981). Love and Abbot (1985) noted the relative acceptability of tomboyish behaviour in pre-adolescent girls (or at least in young, unmarried girls) which would not be permissible in sexually mature women. Pleasure in 'masculine' pursuits would, in a sexually mature woman, inevitably be associated with lesbianism.

Girls going through a tomboy period are not imitating boys as much as they are experiencing a fuller range of activities that will be permitted until puberty brings an end to their freedom ... she [the lesbian] learns that she is "not a woman" if she persists in being competitive or aggressive and independent. (Abbott and Love, 1985: 21-23)

Olson also recalled that the tomboy figure seemed to have no adult analogue:

On screen, tomboys were socially acceptable. As a young butch dyke coming out in 1986, I looked for their grown-up counterparts. I couldn't find anything. (Olson, 1994: 58)

The tomboy tale did, however, spawn an adult escapist version in Britain where there was an existing literary and theatrical tradition of female crossdressing from which to draw a relative respectability. There was also the aristocratic class which the British middle-class traditionally viewed as disgracefully decadent and onto which 'perversity' could easily be projected and distanced. Romantic fictions eroticised tomboy fantasies by the addition of a male desire-object. This male object of desire is often almost as adrogynously presented as the tomboy heroine herself, however — and thus often seems rather to (homo)eroticise the inversionary undertones to the tomboy persona than guarantee her heterosexuality. It would not seem, therefore, that the figure of the pro-active woman can be entirely successfully re-stabilised within heterosexual-feminine parameters. The following extract is from These Old Shades, one of the most popular British romantic novels of its era (reprinted 19 times between 1928 and 1935), aimed primarily at young, middle-class women. This heroine is a teenaged girl passing as a page-boy who falls in love with a foppish and sinister aristocrat (whose presentation strikingly recalls male homosexual stereotyping of the time) in a French, ancien régime period setting. As though the 18th-century weren't quite distance enough, a geographic displacement also seems necessary to open out a safe space for an articulation of resistance, or at least ambivalence, towards the feminisation process.

This is the tomboy's reaction on being obliged to wear feminine clothing for the first time:

"Bah!" said Leonie, and gathering up her skirts, walked carefully across the room. "Certainly I shall burst," she sighed ... "I cannot wear women's clothes. It is as though I were in a cage." (Heyer, 1926: 119)

This unimpeachably-heterosexually-addressed novel does not appear to have had any particular following amongst lesbians, but it was enormously popular with female readers more generally. Another of the same author's popular romances featured a heroine who also passes as a man (also in a period setting) and includes her participation in a sword-fight.

Daphne DuMaurier was another extremely popular writer of romantic novels in the 1930s and 40s. The following extract is from Frenchman's Creek, one of her period romances. The heroine here is a mature wife and mother who has an illicit affair with a freewheeling, sensitive, and artistic lover — the titular Frenchman (again, the British notion of France as already somewhat sexually suspect provides some cultural distance). Again, her crossdressing denotes both rebellion against the limitations of the female role and a fantasy of proactivity:

"If you lend me a pair of your breeches I could climb better", she said... The blood was running from the cut on her chin, and she was soaked to the waist, but she did not care ... (Du Maurier, 1941: 130-2)

This heroine begins the novel roistering with 'roaring boys' in Restoration England — a signifier of female rebellion from the early-modern period (Rose, 1984). Possibly due to gossip regarding the author's personal sexual orientation, sub-textual homoeroticism floats much closer to the surface and Frenchman's Creek, along with du Maurier's still more perverse anti-heroine Rebecca, did appeal to lesbians. The 1970s TV adaptation of Rebecca was included in the British National Film Theatre/Museum of the Moving Image's Out of the Archives III lesbian TV season (screened in July 1994, and reviewed in Diva, #2, 1994, p.42). The film version of Frenchman's Creek, made in 1944, is also specifically referred to by one of Whitaker's (1985) lesbian interviewees:

I really like Joan Fontaine's 1940s film Frenchman's Creek ... She runs away to sea with the pirate, kills a man who tries to rape her, and wears trousers with blousey shirts ... She's in drag, looking like an adolescent boy. (Interviewee quoted by Whitaker, 1985: 109)

The fantasy of sharing a sensitive lover's outlaw adventures in the persona of an androgynous cabin boy might evoke a lesbian-eroticism, but the narrative ends in heterosexual adjustment to dutiful marriage and motherhood. For heterosexual women, the innocent tomboy, unlike the more alarming mannish figure, could function as a comfortably nostalgic fantasy figure upon which the frustrations and conflicts of the feminine role might find a fantasy resolution. Crossdressed adventure can thus signify a temporary flight from the oppressive patriarchal imposition of femininity. However, it also opens out to a lesbian interpretation — as a more permanently real-isable refusal of the restrictions of a heterosexual feminine role.