In the spring of 1822, a female was discovered to have been working as a plasterer, dressed in men's clothing and living publicly as a man. Her case was recorded in the Glasgow Chronicle and also related in Bowen's Life and Sketches of Curious and Odd Characters of early nineteenth century society, published in 1840.
Helen Oliver was brought up in the Saltcoats area of Scotland, in North Ayrshire. She lived in the coastal town until her early twenties, when, at around the age of 21 she started work as a servant in a house in Greenock, West Kilbride. At around this time she met and began a relationship with a ploughman. The couple were seen in 'quiet and sequestered places' and 'regarded as lovers', when it was discovered that the ploughman was in fact female, and dressed as a man. In 1818, when she was 23 years old, Helen made a significant decision. She asked her mother to forward a letter to her employers stating that she was leaving their service. Early in the morning of 5 January that year she took a suit from her brother John's room and left the house.
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| Rijksmuseum, 1797-1802, Public Domain |
Soon afterwards, Helen came across someone who knew her from Saltcoats and to avoid the discovery of her identity she moved again, this time to Kilmarnock. She was known to share living quarters with other men while working and was repeatedly believed to be a young man by those who employed her. She told one master that she had previously been a butcher as well as a drummer in the Greenock volunteers, so these are possible other professions she had undertaken as John Oliver (she sometimes also took the name John Thomson). Helen managed to fit in and remain generally undetected, at least at first. She almost certainly conducted lesbian relationships, at least two of them detailed in the press, although writers were reluctant to believe the 'deception' of Helen's identity had been known to both parties. It is particularly meaningful that Helen felt she had to move from town to town, to avoid the fallout from detection and start her life again. It must have been difficult for her to leave loved ones and regular employment and take her chances in a new town further away, just to maintain her chosen life as a man. There are also other women of the period who lived and dressed as men, creating lives for themselves in local government, the military and in the navy during a time when women were unable to hold these positions. Some were motivated by the prospect of a more free and fuller life, while others were undoubtedly attracted to other women. It is clear too, that Helen's contemporaries saw her as a curiosity. Her story reveals something of early nineteenth century attitudes to cross-dressing and potentially also towards lesbianism; adding to the growing evidence for women living and working as men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Liked this? You might also like the LGBTQ stories of Mary East and Samuel Bundy.
Sources:
The Life and Sketches of Curious and Odd Characters, Abel Bowen, 1840.
https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=15324&transcript=1
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