Abstract
In April 1912, the News of the World (NOTW) published the sensational story of how a young working-class woman had passed as a man, under the headline: ‘Woman As Husband. Amazing Romance of Two Chiswick Girls’:
People will do much for friendship’s sake, but not often does it happen that a girl, for love of another girl, will put on men’s clothes and live and work as a man, playing ‘husband’ to her friend’s ‘wife’. Yet this is the bold escapade in which a Chiswick girl has just been detected. Since last August Adelaide Dallamore, 23, a servant, has been working in West London as a plumber’s mate in workman’s clothes, and during a large part of that period her girl chum has been sharing her lodgings as ‘Mrs Dallamore.’ They are such devoted ‘pals’ that, rather than yield to a threat to separate them, they adopted this startling device.1
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Notes
Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978, Oxford, 2009, p. 263.
Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of the World Story: 150 Years of the World’s Bestselling Newspaper, London, 1993, p. 13.
Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper, Manchester, 2013, esp. Chapters 1 and 5, pp. 215–16; Bingham, Family Newspapers, Chapter 4; Gail Savage, ‘Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of divorce proceedings in England’, The Historical Journal 41 (2), 1998, pp. 511–28.
Alison Oram, Her Husband was a Woman! Women’s Gender-crossing in Modern British Popular Culture, London, 2007.
Chris Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain’, in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge, 1998.
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–1930, Chicago, 1997, Chapter 9.
Emily Hamer, Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians, London, 1996.
See Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, New York, 2001, for a more nuanced account. Also discussed in Rebecca Jennings, A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500, Oxford, 2007.
Andy Medhurst, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London, 2007, Chapter 5.
Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge, 1998, Chapter 6.
Michael Saler, As If. Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford, 2012.
Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographical Review,’ American Historical Review 111 (3), June 2006, 692–716.
Owen Davies, ‘Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period,’ Journal of British Studies 37, April 1998, 139–65.
Anna Clark, ‘Twilight Moments,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (1–2), 2005, 140–56.
Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain, Oxford, 2004.
Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain, Oxford, 2006.
Alison Oram, ‘“Love Off The Rails” or “Over the Teacups”?: Lesbian Desire and Female Sexualities in the 1950s British Popular Press’ in Heike Bauer and Matt Cook (eds), Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, London, 2012, pp. 41–57.
See, for example, Lucy Delap, Knowing their place: domestic service in twentieth-century Britain, Oxford, 2011.
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© 2016 Alison Oram
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Oram, A. (2016). ‘Woman as Husband’: Gender, Sexuality and Humour in the News of the World 1910–50s. In: Brake, L., Kaul, C., Turner, M.W. (eds) The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392053_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392053_10
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