Thomas(ine) Hall

Thomas Hall, born Thomasine Hall (c.1603[1] – after 1629), was an English servant in colonial Virginia whose alternation between male and female attire and mannerisms provoked public controversy in 1629. At various times, Hall used the names Thomas and Thomasine and presented as male or female depending on the work or sexual partner they desired. The local community responded to their inconsistent gender with a physical inspection by several neighbors, and the case reached the Quarter Court at Jamestown, which ruled that Hall was both a man and a woman. It ordered them to dress in male and female clothing simultaneously. The decision was the first of its kind in early modern colonial history.

Because of the indeterminate and shifting nature of Hall's gender, Hall's given name is typically written as "Thomas(ine)" or "Thomas/ine" in scholarly literature on the case.

Early life

According to Hall's own account, she was born and christened Thomasine Hall in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.[2] Hall was raised as a female and became skilled at traditional women's crafts, such as needlework. When Hall was twelve, her mother sent her to London to live with her aunt. She lived there for ten years and observed the popularity among the aristocracy of crossover male and female fashion. These trends may have influenced her to break away from social norms.[2]

As a young adult in the early 1620s, Hall decided to change her self-representation from female to male. Hall adopted a man's hairstyle and "changed into the fashion of a man" in order to follow her brother into the all-male military service.[2] He introduced himself as Thomas for the first time at the age of 24 and served in the military in England and France.[2] Hall returned home and hoped to return to needlework and other female social conventions, so she reverted to the lifestyle of Thomasine.[2]

Resettlement

Hearing of work opportunities in North America, Hall left England and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts. She supported herself by making bone lace and other needlework.[2] Pursuing a different work opportunity, she relocated to the small settlement at Warrosquyoacke, Virginia, in an Indian village across from the James River, likely a village of fewer than 200 in the 1620s.[2] Tobacco planters in need of workers preferred hiring men.[3] Hall switched from Thomasine to Thomas to be hired as a male servant.[2]

In early 1628 Hall appears to have been arrested on a charge of receiving stolen goods, though there is a slight doubt about whether this is the same Thomas Hall.[4] Hall was living with a John and Jane Tyos. It was claimed that Hall and the Tyoses had encouraged a neighbor to commit theft and sell the stolen goods to them. The property was found in the Tyoses' house.[4]

Local controversy

In his new environment, Hall was not strict about presenting himself consistently as male. He occasionally wore female clothing, which confused neighbors, masters, and captains of plantations. When queried about wearing women's clothes, Hall replied: "I goe in womans apparel to get a bitt for my Catt",[2] apparently meaning that it allowed him to have sexual relations with men. Sometimes, even when presenting as Thomasine, Hall was rumored to be having sexual relations with women. For example, stories spread that Hall had sexual relations with the maid nicknamed "Great Besse", who worked for the former governor of Virginia, Richard Bennett.[5] This was an issue of criminal responsibility; as a male, Hall could be prosecuted for sexual misconduct with a servant.[5] Hall accused a woman called Alice Long of spreading the rumor, but Long said that the story originated with Hall's previous employers the Tyoses.[4]

Residents of Warrosquyoacke claimed that Hall's changes of dress and sexual relations with members of both sexes were causing disorder.[5] Lacking a local court or church, some of them tried to determine Hall's anatomical gender for themselves.[5] In this era, married women were considered the best resources for understanding the female body.[2] Three women–Alice Long, Dorothy Rodes, and Barbara Hall–decided to examine Hall's anatomy.[6] More than once, they entered Hall's home while he slept and observed his genitalia. They decided that Hall lacked a "readable set of female genitalia" and persuaded Hall's plantation master, John Atkins, to confirm their determination.[2] Atkins had previously claimed that Hall was female but, after inspecting Hall as he slept, agreed that he was male, having seen "a small piece of flesh protruding from [Hall's] body".[2] Hall apparently claimed also to have female anatomy, described as "a peece of an hole", but Atkins and the women said that they could find no evidence of this.[1]

Atkins ordered Hall to wear exclusively male clothing and urged the most prominent tobacco planter in the village, Captain Nathanial Bass, to punish Hall. Bass confronted Hall and bluntly asked if he were a man or a woman. Hall replied that he was both, "although he had what appeared to be a small penis".[2] Hall said that it was only an inch (2.5 cm) long and that he could not use it. Male incompetence was considered sufficient to determine female gender during the early modern colonial period, and Bass decided that Hall was not properly a man.[3] This meant that he could not be prosecuted for debauching Besse. Bass ordered Hall to wear only female clothing.

The Quarter Court

The villagers decided to take the case to the Quarter Court of Jamestown, just as Christians in Europe did in similar situations.[7] In Christian Europe, any individual who challenged ideas of manhood or womanhood, such as through intersexism or transvestism, was immediately brought to court.[7] Guided by the court system abroad, the Jamestown court also held the power to preserve clear gender boundaries, refuse sexual ambiguity, and force individuals to alter the way they expressed their gender.[7]

Hall's case reached the Quarter Court on April 8, 1629. Governor John Pott presided and the court heard from several witnesses, as well as from Hall. In a departure from similar European cases,[8] the court ruled that Hall had a "dual nature" gender, or what modern society classifies as intersex: "hee is a man and a woeman". Before Hall's time, any individual determined by court to be "man and woman" was forced to adopt either a permanent male or female identity.[3] Instead, as punishment for Hall's previous gender ambiguity and alternating identities as a man and a woman, the court denied him the freedom to choose a single gender identity. As a form of public ridicule, he was forced to "goe clothed in man's apparell, only his head to bee attired in a coyfe and croscloth with an apron before him".[9] In addition to the shame of this hybrid identity, Hall had to provide evidence of his good behavior to each Quarter Court.[9] Hall is believed to have endured the sentence and ridicule as expected.[6]

Nothing further is known about Hall's life or about how long the dual-gendered clothing rule was applied.[lower-alpha 1]

Significance

Until the early 19th century, theories of sexual difference were not solely determined by anatomy, according to several scholars. Many early modern medical theorists and scientists emphasized that gender identity was not constant and could be subject to change.[3] Women were not considered a separate sex but "a flawed variant of men".[3] They believed that male organs were tucked inside of women because they did not have enough heat to develop external genitalia. They believed that strenuous physical activity or even “mannish behavior” could cause testicles to exit from inside the vagina.[3] Since they believed men were perfect individuals, they explained this by stating it was "nature's unerring tendency toward a state of greater perfection".[3] Because they did not have clear definitions for anatomical sex categories, they relied on "performing" gender through consistent dress, names, occupations, and sexual relationships.[3]

Early modern theologians looked down upon people like Hall because they threatened society's use of clothing to distinguish men and women.[7] Someone who wore clothing appropriate to a gender not their own was considered "abominable unto the Lord".[2] For typical cross-dressing cases, the court ordered restorative punishment.[2] It was novel that Hall was not ordered to permanently behave and dress as either a woman or a man.

Notes

  1. ↑ Further court records have not survived. The goods of a recently deceased Thomas Hall are recorded as being disposed of in early 1633. Another Thomas Hall appears to have been living in the vicinity in the 1640s. There is no way of knowing whether either of them are the Hall recorded in this case.[4]

References

  1. 1 2 Norton, Mary Beth, "Communal Definitions of Gendered Identity in Colonial America", Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, Fredrika J. Teute (eds) Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 40ff. Hall said she moved to London at the age of twelve and chose to change gender in 1625, ten years later.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Brown, Kathleen (1995). "'Changed into the Fashion of a Man': The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth Century Anglo-American Settlement". Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (2): 171–193 – via JSTOR.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Taylor, Dale (1997). The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Colonial America. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Norton, Mary Beth, "Communal Definitions of Gendered identity in Colonial America", Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, Fredrika J. Teute (eds) Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, UNC Press, 1997, pp. 40ff.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Vaughan, Alden (1978). "The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (2): 146–148 – via JSTOR.
  6. 1 2 Meadow, Tea (2010). "'A Rose Is a Rose': On Producing Legal Gender Classifications". Gender and Society 24 (6): 814–837. doi:10.1177/0891243210385918 – via JSTOR.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Bridenbaugh, Carl (1980). Jamestown, 1544-1699. Oxford University Press. pp. 118–49.
  8. ↑ Smith, Merril (2008). Women's Roles in Seventeenth-century America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood.
  9. 1 2 Floyd, Don (2010). The Captain and Thomasine. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Enterprises. p. 251. ISBN 978-0-557-37676-6.

External links

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