When this photograph of the young Mme Colette Willy was taken, c. 1896, it was illegal for a woman to appear publicly in men's clothing in France without an official government cross-dressing permit (to be renewed every six months). Exceptions could be granted to performers but, in general, the permit did not include public gatherings. Before Colette's time, the writer and noblewoman George Sand (born Auruore Dudevant) had flouted the law, often passing for a man to gain access to places barred to women. The artist Rosa Bonheur kept her permit for decades, claiming she needed comfortable garb when she visited horse fairs and slaughterhouses to make sketches. Image credit: Unidentified photographer, reprinted in Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1999.
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5 comments:
A cross-dressing permit! O la la! How very regulated of the French.
Yes, indeed. Around the turn of the last century in Paris there was a significant community of Lesbians, as they understood the term. I have yet to read about their run-ins with the law, but there must a book about it somewhere. Sometimes I've thought of making a list of books that should be written - if only because alert readers would be happy to correct my ignorance!
Perhaps because the French regulated this in such a how-French-can-you-get kind of way one sees it now as a particularly French obsession. But in England right the way into the 1970s, maybe even the 80s, girls were forbidden to wear trousers to school, on pain of expulsion.
Neil, the thought of all the cross-dressing women in Belle Epoque Paris constantly applying for permits or dodging the police... Renee Vivien, Nathalie Clifford Barney, Djuna Barnes, and so on... reminds us how little it took to make outlaws out of women and to upset men.
I just remembered that when I was a teenager, while on vacaction in Ontario province, my mother took my picture in front of an old stucco tavern by the roadside. There were two entrances to the bar - I stood by the one labelled "Ladies & Escorts." She wanted me to know how restricted life had been like when she young.
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