Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Cross‐Dressing in Popular Turn‐of‐the‐Century College Fiction

"Education should push sex distinctions to their uttermost," stated prominent turn-of-the-century educator G. Stanley Hall, "[and] make boys more manly and girls more womanly" (589). In an era when men and women were increasingly intermingled, Hall and other conservative educators, such as David Starr Jordon, believed education should function as a bastion of 19th-century conservatism, preserving what Hall regarded as essential differences between the genders. Emphasizing these differences was particularly important because many educators, social scientists, and others concerned with turn-of-the-century education feared that education (particularly higher education) was making women more masculine and men more feminine. Hall was not the only educator to raise questions about whether education was having a masculinizing effect on women; David Starr Jordan also expressed his concerns about what coeducation could do to women. Similarly, Theodore Roosevelt and others worried that higher education was producing increasingly effeminate, foppish males, unfit for leadership or fatherhood. The fears of these men about education blurring gender distinctions seem to be substantiated in college fiction, in which both male and female collegians take an inordinate delight in dressing up as members of the opposite sex, both for theatrical purposes and for playing jokes on fellow students. Depictions of cross-dressing in turn-of-the-century college stories are a valuable source of information if we are to understand how cross-dressing can be made to seem less of a threat to social norms of acceptable gender behavior by its representation in popular texts designed for a mainstream, heterosexual audience. In college fiction, a safe zone is established for cross-dressing: the texts carefully prescribe certain places and times when cross-dressing is tolerated and when it is not. Thus, cross-dressing is acceptable for college men and women only when they are students. They must conform to the various cultural dictates that prescribe limits to their cross-dressing. Not surprisingly, middle-class men are granted more freedom than women with a similar class background; for instance, males can venture into public areas (streets and buildings outside the college) while cross-dressed women must stay within the college confines. As we shall see, college stories (and other popular, heterosexual-oriented representations of cross-dressing) defuse the threat that cross-dressing poses to gender norms by showing the artificiality of cross-dress for both men and women; cross-dress attire is depicted as a costume that is acceptable for a theatrical stage or for a student prank, but college fiction warns that it is inappropriate elsewhere. Of course, social fears about the transgressive nature of cross-dressing were not confined to the Progressive Era; there have been negative references to cross-dressing throughout history. The following exhortation appears in the Old Testament: "A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God" (Deut. 22:5). In 18th-century England, females were arrested for masquerading as soldiers and sailors. In the same century, Defoe's fictional Moll Flanders, who dressed as a man in order to better pursue her career as a pickpocket and a petty thief, was indicative of society's concern about the threat posed by cross-dressers. In 19th-century Paris and Berlin, women had to receive special permission (permission de travestissement) from the police to wear male attire (Casselaer 39). In late 19th-century New York, bars catering to a male, homosexual clientele were periodically raided and their cross-dressed patrons clapped into jail. In that same period, most cities and states in America had laws prohibiting the wearing of clothing of the opposite gender, except inside private homes and on Halloween (Hirschfeld 277). …