Gender & Identity in 19th-Century America

A teamster in Albany, 1842

This unnamed “female husband” seems to have puzzled the New York Tribune. Oh, of course the only reason someone born female would marry a woman: money. But! Why would that person live and work as a man?

Hmm. Such a puzzle.

“Strange.” New York Tribune [New York, New York] 16 November 1842; p. 2.

Some fortnight since, a person who had been a teamster for about four years at Albany, was married to a respectable girl, who had laid up a considerable sum of money. It proved that the groom was a woman, and she was committed to jail. The possession of the girl’s money was doubtless the object of the marriage, but why the woman should have acted as a teamster, in male attire, for four years, we cannot imagine.

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