Jen Manion's Female Husbands: A Trans History is an important addition to Anglo-American queer history that traces the category of the “female husband” from its first appearance in 1746 to its demise shortly before the First World War. The book follows recent work by Emily Skidmore (True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century [2017]), C. Riley Snorton (Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity [2017]), and Clare Sears (Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco [2015]) in drawing on theories from transgender studies to highlight the instability of sex and gender. As Manion writes, “Female husband accounts offer us a window into the historic construction of sexual difference as well as precious evidence about what it meant for someone assigned female to live as a husband. Female husbands invite us to grapple with what exactly gender is” (6). Female husbands have previously been discussed as part of women's history and lesbian history, but Manion is keen to emphasize the importance of “transing” gender (11). Manion argues that the press played a crucial role in publicizing the idea of female husbands and so draws primarily on newspapers as sources.

Manion begins part one of the book, “UK Husbands, 1740–1840,” with the life of Charles Hamilton, which was fictionalized by Henry Fielding in his 1746 narrative, The Female Husband. It was Fielding's work, Manion argues, that first coined the term “female husband” (29). James Howe, the subject of the second chapter, was blackmailed by a woman who, having known Howe as a child, therefore knew that Howe had been assigned female at birth. The ensuing court case with its widespread press interest revealed—and reveled in—Howe's status as a female husband. In the analysis of the treatment of Howe, Manion is especially adept at highlighting how mid-eighteenth-century accounts of female husbands were concerned with the usurpation of male privilege, and how feminists of the period wrestled with whether the much-publicized exploits of female husbands might advance or hinder the cause of women's rights. In the third chapter, Manion addresses another group of people who were assigned female at birth and lived as men for a portion of their lives, but who were not described as female husbands. These are the “female soldiers” and “female sailors” whose stories were a well-established part of early modern European culture (69). Manion reframes these accounts beyond the plucky women framework through which they have been viewed, positing them as people who transed gender. That these soldiers and sailors were frequently working in the service of empire is not lost on Manion, who is attentive to the impact of empire, settler colonialism, and whiteness on ideas of gender throughout the book. The wives of female husbands, whom Manion terms “female wives,” are the subject of the fourth chapter (115). As Manion argues, the wives have been largely overlooked in the historiography and this chapter is significant in reinstating them into the history and ascribing them some agency and a place within queer histories.

In part two, “US Husbands, 1830–1910,” Manion shifts attention to the ways “female husband” developed as a category in the United States. The mobility of white female husbands is emphasized, as is their success in occupations deemed unsuitable for women. African Americans who transed gender, often to seek freedom from slavery, were treated far more harshly than were their white counterparts, and were not included in the designation “female husbands” by the press. The section begins with “the first female husband in the US,” George Wilson, whose story caught the media's attention in 1836 (143), and ends with a series of female husband narratives from the late nineteenth century that demonstrate the ways in which the meaning of the category changed. Annie Hindle, whose marriage to Annie Ryan was publicized by the press in 1886, is described by Manion as an actress who dressed as a man in order to marry a woman. Manion highlights this as a shift in the meaning of “female husband”: while the press referred to Hindle by the term, it denoted same-sex marriage between women rather than gender transgression. This fits with Manion's argument that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an increased belief that everyone had a “true sex” and a focus on same-sex relations. In the epilogue, “The First Female-to-Male Transsexual,” Manion considers Dr. Alan L. Hart, and how Hart, who sought medical transition in 1917, differs from the earlier tradition of female husbands.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is Manion's decision to use gender-neutral they/them pronouns for all the female husbands. In the conclusion, “Sex Trumps Gender,” Manion elaborates on this decision, first set out in the introduction: “I did this because most female husbands lived trans lives but also because their lives reveal in a significant and ongoing way the overlap between categories of gender and sexuality, refusing a simple reductive reading as one or the other as a driving force” (265). This is effective at highlighting the expansive nature of “female husband” as a category and its challenge to notions of binary gender. However, as much as gender-neutral pronouns are an apt representation of the category, a number of the female husbands discussed in the book—and especially the subject of the epilogue—are very clear that they are men, and he/him pronouns seem more appropriate. The question of assigning identities to historical queer subjects will always be a vexed one, and while I do not wholly agree with Manion's strategy when it comes to pronouns, this approach does highlight the inadequacy of language to fully describe past expressions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Manion acknowledges that “female husband” was not a category that anybody necessarily sought as a form of self-identification, but still manages to emphasize the humanity of those discussed, and that “gender was theirs for the making and that what makes a man is not the sex they were assigned at birth but the life they live, day in and day out, whether in 1746, 1906, or today” (278).