THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it. I will be making a copy of Part Two when it becomes available but the history of the word “woman” is fraught with sociological connotations and has had nothing to do with biological sex most of the time.

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The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part One: 1608 – 1950)

There’s distinct irony in trans haters — especially women — becoming offended when the term “cis-women” is used, then claiming that usage is intended to eliminate “biological women.”

The concept of “biological women” and “gender roles” as distinct from legally and culturally accepted definitions of “woman” did not exist before the 1950s, caught on slowly thereafter, and is at odds with modern science.

In this introductory segment we’ll consider the many adjectives and nouns applied to women throughout American history to discover that “I am not a cis-woman, I am a woman without adjectives or qualifications” reflects an ahistorical modern myth rather than objective reality

In the colonial, Revolutionary, and Federalist periods, the noun “women” without the adjective “negro,” or synonyms “negress,” “wench,” or “fancy girl” always meant “white women.” This was also true for Native American women. (1) (2)

The term “woman” was never intended to be a universal designation for all “adult females.”

Another critical term for white women in early America was the legal reference “femme covert.”

This codified the reality that all white women were legally defined not as individuals, but in relation to the “responsible” male in their lives: “daughter of,” “sister of,” “wife of,” etc.

“Femme covert” literally means “hidden woman/female,” a status in which all of her property and legal rights were controlled by that male. (3)

While that status began to disappear during the 19th Century, the basic reality remained: in a political and legal sense: “women” could accurately be defined as “individuals with fewer rights than men.” This remains true today, despite all social advances.

The formal designation of simply being “women” also excluded lower-class white women: indentured servants, prostitutes, whores, and … witches.

None of these distinctions involved as-yet-undiscovered chromosomes or genitalia/breeding.

That was why the US Ambassador to Mexico in 1845, Joel Poinsett, found himself in a quandary when an individual seeking a visa to enter the United States diplomatically, and said individual presented with both male and female genitalia. “A true hermaphrodite,” Poinsett wrote, and refused to stamp either “male” or “female” on the papers. (4)

Medical science prior to the American Civil War was largely ignorant of even basic female anatomy. Midwives usually attended births because male doctors had so little idea what they were doing.

You can find serious contemporary references to the clitoris as “the little penis” or “the woman’s penis,” complete with speculations about precisely what the organ did. (5)

Instead the terminology for “women” involved racial, social, and economic distinctions — created by men for the benefit of men.

Had someone in 1781 written, “Indentured women are women” or “Negro women are women,” they’d have been in trouble.

During much of the 19th Century the dialogue about “women” centered around what’s known as “the Cult of True Womanhood.”

The “True Woman” was white, of course, and belonged to the elite, professional, or tiny emerging middle classes.

Four primary virtues defined her: Piety, Purity, Submissiveness, and Domesticity. I don’t have to go deep into the definitions for you to have the idea what this all meant — it was the foundation of today’s Christian nationalist “tradwife.” (6)

Meanwhile, let’s take a swipe at the categories of adult females who were NOT considered “true women”: Black women (slave or free), Native American women (“squaws”), Asian women (“chinks”), servant women (“Bridgets,” “biddys” or “wenches”), employed women (“working women” or “mill girls”), prostitutes (“fallen women,” “soiled doves”), women who chose to remain single (“spinsters”), politically active women (“viragos”), or lesbians (“Uranians,” “Jacks,” “Sapphists,” or “Tribads”).

Speaking of prostitutes, there were trans women (“fairies”) documented among the bawdy houses of American and European cities as far back as 1830, as in the case of “Mary Jones” in New York City. Her “dead name,” to use modern parlance, was “Peter Sewally.” (7)

Remember Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” speech?

Well, she wasn’t — at least not to the white men who made the rules and the Stockholm-Syndrome-infected white women who served as their obedient handmaidens.

The definition of “women” in America has always been entangled not in science, but in race and class.

The Page Act of 1875 excluded all female Chinese immigrants from the same category of “women” (thereby barring their entrance into the country) by characterizing them as all prostitutes (carriers of STDs and “moral corruption”). (

Women’s rights activists (suffragettes and early feminists) were consistently removed from the category of “true womanhood” as “unsexed” or “unwomanly” (mid-19th Century); “man-haters” (early 20th Century); “Battle Axes” or “Castrating bitches” (mid-20th Century), or “Feminazis” (late 20th Century).

Meanwhile, those white women who opposed feminism and the expansion of women’s rights were heralded as “traditional women,” “conservative women,” or even “real women.” Since much of this occurred during the late Jim Crow/Civil Rights era, Black women were (again!) generally excluded from these terms with a very few exceptions.

Shall we discuss the biological elements here?

Remember that during the 1930s Nazi Germany modeled its eugenics laws (including the sterilization of the “mentally deficient — male or female) on those existing in the United States. (9)

Remember that any white person (especially women) could lose their status forever due to the transfusion of a unit of “negro” blood. The same people today telling you that an individual cannot change their gender don’t want you to study the history wherein a drop of blood could change your race. (10)

Remember that Black women from the 18th through the middle of the 20th Century were considered appropriate subjects for medical experimentation without their consent because they lacked the cultural and legal protections of “real” women. (11)

Remember that the US government continued an active (though covert) program of involuntary sterilization of Native American women into the 1970s because their consent, unlike that of white “women,” was considered unnecessary. (12)

What’s also notable here is that between the colonial period and the mid-1950s, despite all the other aspects we’ve noted, there was never a separation in the definition of “woman” between “biology” and “gender.”

“Woman” was considered to be defined by a host of traits, some social and some physiological. The idea of splitting the definition into “sex” or “biology” versus “gender.” had yet to occur.There was widespread recognition in the medical community in the late 19th century that many women possessed physiological and psychological traits that significantly diverged from what was considered “normal.”

The term “sexual invert” was coined to describe women who physiology, sexual attractions, and gender presentation significantly differed from that norm. The term “passing woman” describe what were effectively trans men — women who lived their entire lives as men, even marrying and having families. (13)

Possibly the most famous (at least in retrospect once historians reconstructed their biography) sexual invert/trans man, was Albert Cashier, a Civil War veteran soldier whose close family and friends, as well as attending medical practitioners, were aware possessed female genitalia … but no one “outed” Cashier publicly, even after death. (14)

Though the role of XX and XY chromosomes was generally understood by 1902-1905, significant karyotype variations weren’t discovered until 1956 – 1959, decades after Dr Magnus Hirschfeld performed the first known complete bottom surgery for a trans woman named Dora Richter in 1922, leading directly to many more at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science until Germany’s transgender population — like homosexuals, the mentally challenged, and the Romany — joined Jews as targets for genocide. (15) (16)

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University during the 1950s piloted the idea that “woman” as a definition needed to be divided into two major categories: biology and “gender.”

Biology dealt with anatomy and “sex.” Gender covered all those aspects of how society viewed and enforced cultural roles on women. The researchers — as scientists — predictably concluded that the biological definition was determinative.

How that happened, and why it was a disaster, is the topic for next time.

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SOURCES

(1) Allsup, Carl, “Women and racism” (EBSCO) (2022) https://www.ebsco.com/research…/history/women-and-racism/

(2) Caren Holmes, “The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishization of Black Women” (Black & Gold) (2016) https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi…

(3) Catherine Allgor, “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should” (Nation Women’s History Museum) (2012) https://www.womenshistory.org/…/coverture-word-you…

(4) Reel M-97, “Despatches From U.S. Ministers To Mexico, 1823-1906,” (Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State) (National Archives, Washington DC)

(5) Virginia Vigliar, “A brief history of the clitoris.” (Antidotes) (2022) https://virginiavigliar.substack.com/…/a-brief-history…

(6) Jennifer Kurtz, “Introduction-Women and the Cult of Domesticity,” (Lumen Learning) (2023) https://viva.pressbooks.pub/…/introduction-women-and…/

(7) Jonathan Ned Katz, “The ‘Man-Monster’” (Out History) (2011) https://outhistory.org/exh…/show/sewally-jones/man-monster

( “Page Law (1875)” (Immigration History) (2019) https://immigrationhistory.org/item/page-act/

(9) Beth Daley, “Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people,” (The Conversation) (2023) https://theconversation.com/historians-are-learning-more…

(10) “The Color of Blood,” (Smithsonian) (ND) https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/color-blood

(11) Benjamin Anderson, “Author Harriet Washington Lectures on Medical Apartheid,” (Hamilton University) (2014) https://www.hamilton.edu/…/celebrated-author-harriet…

(12) Erin Blackmore, “The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women,” (JSTOR Daily) (2016) https://daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the…/

(13) Rodolfo John Alaniz, “Darwinian Sensualities: Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, and Late Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory,” (University of Texas) (2017) https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/…/gender-symp-hps…

(14) Amy Benck, “Albert D. J. Cashier: Woman Warrior, Insane Civil War Veteran, or Transman?” (OUT History) (ND) https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/albert-cashier

(15) Samantha Reidel, “Remembering Dora Richter, One of the First Women to Receive Gender-Affirming Surgery,” (THEM) (2022) https://www.them.us/…/dora-richter-first-trans-woman-to…

(16) Jaycek Z. Kubiak, Małgorzata Kloc, and Rafał P. Piprek, “History of The Research on Sex Determination,” (Biodmedical) (2020) https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.004194.php

(17( Alexander Rony and Hagit Caspi, “Author Interview with Sandra Eder: How the Clinic Made Gender,” (UC Berkeley Letters & Science) (2023) https://ls.berkeley.edu/…/author-interview-sandra-eder…