Abstract
In 1938 the News of the World reported that a young woman, 24-year-old Doris Purcell, was about to undergo ‘a series of operations to have her sex changed to that of a man’. This was one of a whole string of stories in the Sunday newspapers in the 1930s, reporting both spontaneous change of sex and ‘sex change’ operations, mainly involving young women turning into men. Purcell was being treated at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, by ‘the famous surgeon, who has brought new hope and happiness into the baffled lives of many men and women who were desirous of changing their sex’.2 This and a number of similar reports clearly suggested that changing one’s sex was medically possible before the Second World War. Although the appearance of ‘sex change’ as a sensational newspaper story is often regarded as a development of the 1950s, the possibility of deliberately changing one’s sex was established in the British popular press as early as the interwar period, through a number of stories similar to that of Doris/ Donald Purcell above. This chapter will focus on the representation of sex change in British popular culture, analyse how it gradually developed from the years before the First World War through to the 1930s, and examine the incorporation of new scientific ideas about indeterminately sexed bodies into existing forms of explanation in the creation of this novel concept.
News of the World (hereafter NoW), 29 June 1924, p. 3.
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Notes
But see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall (1995) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
For heterosexual knowledge and birth control see Kate Fisher (2006) Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
For the American press and ideas about gender and love between women see L. Duggan (2000) Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
For women’s cross-dressing and lesbianism in British mass culture see Alison Oram (2007) Her Husband was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London: Routledge).
Joanne Meyerowitz (1998) ‘Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on Transsexuality in the United States, 1930–1955’, GLQ, 4:2, 159–87;
Joanne Meyerowitz (2002) How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). US tabloids had a more marginal status than the mainstream mass circulation NoW and People in Britain, discussed in this chapter.
Alice Domurat Dreger (1998) Doubtful Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
Geertje Mak (2005) ‘The Hermaphrodite’s “Self” at the Start of the Twentieth Century’, GLQ, 11:1, 65–94;
Bernice L. Hausman (1995) Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
For discussion of sexual modernity and modernity in general see Sally Alexander (1996) ‘The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds) Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge), p. 163;
Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds) (1999) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press);
Bernhard Rieger and Martin Daunton (2001) ‘Introduction’ in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg).
Michael Saler (2006) ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographical Review’, American Historical Review, 111:3, 692–716, p. 700.
Between 60 and 75 percent of people in the south and the Midlands read the News of the World and/or the People in 1937. Matthew Engel (1996) Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press (London: Victor Gollancz), pp. 221, 228;
Political and Economic Planning (PEP) (1938) Report on the British Press (London: PEP), pp. 84, 243, 247.
Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge); Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life, pp. 169–75;
L.R. Broster, C. Allen, H.W.C. Vines, J. Patterson, A.W. Greenwood, G.F. Marrian and G.C. Butler (1938) The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality (London: Chapman and Hall). Also see Dreger, Doubtful Sex; Hausman, Changing Sex, p. 2.
See Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment’; Owen Davies (1999) Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press):
Karl Bell (2007) ‘Breaking Modernity’s Spell — Magic and Modern History’, Cultural and Social History, 4:1 (March), 115–22.
For the increasing pressure on girls to work on their feminine appearance as central to modernity see Penny Tinkler (1995) Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England, 1920–1950 (London: Taylor and Francis), chapter 6.
For modernity and identity see Anthony Giddens (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press), especially pp. 99–107.
The foreword to a book on freaks in 1930 argued that science would soon solve these puzzles. C.J.S. Thompson (1930) The Mystery and Lore of Monsters; reprinted (1996) as The History and Lore of Freaks (London: Random House), p. 11.
Nadja Durbach (2007) ‘Monstrosity, Masculinity and Medicine: Re-examining “the Elephant Man”’, Cultural and Social History, 4:2 (June), 193–213; see esp. pp. 196–201.
Gary Cross (ed.) (1990) Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s (London: Routledge), pp. 73, 77–82, 117:
John K. Walton (2000) The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 94, 100;
Vanessa Toulmin (2003) Pleasurelands (Sheffield: National Fairground Archive), p. 43;
Ricky Jay (1987) Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (London: Robert Hale), chapter 9;
John K. Walton (1983) The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 181, 191. For the continuing popularity of fortune-telling in the twentieth century, see Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, pp. 265–71.
Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, pp. 192–201; Peter Gurney (1997) ‘“Intersex” and “Dirty Girls”: Mass-Observation and Working-Class Sexuality in England in the 1930s’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8:2, 256–90, pp. 284–6;
James Vernon (2000) ‘“For Some Queer Reason”: The Trials and Tribulations of Colonel Barker’s Masquerade in Interwar Britain’, Signs, 26:1, 37–62, pp. 52–5.
Toulmin, Pleasurelands, pp. 41–4; A. Featherstone, ‘Showing the Freak: Photographic Images of the Extraordinary Body’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds) (2000) Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (Trowbridge: Flick Books), p. 136.
Owen Davies (1998) ‘Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period’, Journal of British Studies, 37:2, 139–65, esp. pp. 163–4;
Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne (1999) ‘Women’s Medicine, Women’s Culture: Abortion and Fortune-Telling in early Twentieth-Century Germany and the Netherlands’, Medical History, 43:3 (July), 376–392. Also see Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment’ and Bell, ‘Breaking Modernity’s Spell’.
Michael Saler (2003) ‘“Clap if you Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity c.1890–c.1940’, Historical Journal, 46:3, 599–622; Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, pp. 271–2.
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© 2011 Alison Oram
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Oram, A. (2011). ‘Farewell to Frocks’ — ‘Sex Change’ in Interwar Britain: Newspaper Stories, Medical Technology and Modernity. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_6
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