![]() Thanks to the widespread digitization of old out-of-copyright books, you can now find the text of most of these ordinances online. In the ensuing half-century, more than thirty other cities, from Pensacola to Peoria to San Francisco, adopted similar municipal ordinances, and still more cities followed suit in the early years of the twentieth century. Citing the need to uphold traditionally conservative standards of morality, decency, and order, dozens of municipal governments passed laws to criminalize and suppress certain public expressions of personal identity that the powers-that-be considered aberrant and “disorderly.” One of the earliest and most popular of these laws was a prohibition against what is commonly known as “cross dressing.” Columbus, Ohio, bears the honor of being the earliest-known city in the United States to pass such a law, in the year 1848. In cities across America in the second half of the nineteenth century, a segment of the population objected to non-mainstream expressions of sexual identity on the grounds that they violated a largely-unwritten code of “correct” public behavior. While relatively suppressed in traditional rural communities, where folks generally knew their neighbors’ business, however, these issues of personal identity became increasingly visible as urban populations became more crowded and diverse. Homosexuality and transgender identity have existed in the animal kingdom and human civilization since time immemorial, of course, and certainly were not new or unique to the industrialized cities of the mid-nineteenth century. ![]() Among the diverse city dwellers expressing themselves were men who were attracted to men, women attracted to women, and people whose personal gender identity differed from the gender assigned to them at birth. Empowered by the new-found sense of belonging and comradery, these new urbanites took steps to express their personal identities against the backdrop of the increasingly impersonal, mechanized world. Across the industrialized world, people of diverse backgrounds created new urban communities based on shared values and interests, gathering into new sorts of tribes that had not existed in previous generations. Steam power and railroads fostered a new era of personal mobility, enticing people to flock from tight-knit, homogenous rural communities to the more anonymous and heterogeneous cities. The most conspicuous change was the rise of the industrial city, with its factories, machinery, and swarms of laborers. Let’s begin our investigation of this topic by looking at the big picture first and then narrowing the focus to the cross-dressing concerns of post-Civil War Charleston.īeginning in the late eighteenth century and gaining steam in the ensuing decades, the Industrial Revolution unleashed a wave of innovation and expansion that had significant and lasting effects on the social fabric of the United States and all of Western Europe. That body of scholarship can certainly help us understand the broad cultural context for this local phenomenon, but it does not include any engagement with the specific historical conditions and circumstances that were unique to Charleston at that moment in time. In recent years, a number of scholars investigating the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT+) issues have examined the roots and legacies of these early anti-cross-dressing laws in a pretty thorough fashion. ![]() It was, in fact, the local manifestation of a larger wave of similar prohibitions that swept across the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ordinance ratified in 1868 by Charleston’s City Council prohibiting what is commonly called “cross dressing” is more than just a curious part of this community’s colorful history. Today we’ll explore the context of this 1868 law and its long-lasting impact on the freedom of gender expression in our community. In the spring of 1868, the City of Charleston passed an ordinance making it illegal for a person to appear in public dressed in a manner “not becoming his or her sex.” Why would they do such a thing? The answer is wrapped in the confusing world of post-Civil War Charleston, a place filled with Union soldiers enforcing federal laws, formerly-enslaved people starting new lives, and members of the old guard trying to make sense of a topsy-turvy new world.
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