LADY HUSBANDS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1715, 11 January 1905, Page 24

LADY HUSBANDS

WOMEN WHO' HAVE M A SQL ER ADHD AS MEN AND MARRIED WOMEN.

The story of Catherine Coome, which was recently related in a London policecourt-, recalls other instances of women who have been accustomed to live the lives of men, dressing in male attire. About the year 173-6 a young woman named Mary East, on the execution of her lover for highway robbery, made a vow to remain single all her life. She was acquainted with another girl, who, having been crossed in love, had made a similar resolution, so she proposed to the latter that they should live together.

It was decided that one- should put on a man’s apparel, and that, they should live as man and wife in some part where they were not known. They settled who was to be the man by tossing up a halfpenny. The lot fell on Mary East, who was then about sixteen years of age, and her partner seventeen. Mary bought a man’s outfit, and assumed the name of James How, m which name she took a little pubhehouse in Eipping, afterwards removing to the White Horse, Poplar.

In 1750 “James ITow” was blackmailed by a Mrs Bentley, who knew •fins” sex, having known Mary East, and threatened to reveal it unless bribed to silence. “How” complied with her extortion, fearful of the revelation, and the secret was kept some time longer, “How” living with his supposed wife “in good credit.” and serving ail the parish offices in Poplar, excepting constable and churchwarden.

In 1765 Mrs Bentley, who had been regularly and systematically bleeding “Bow” of money under repeated threats of exposure during the past fifteen years, dissatisfied with her payments, got two ruffians to personate Justice Fielding’s men, and proceed to the White Horse, and threaten to arrest her, or “him” for a trumped-up. crime, if she did not pay them £IOO. ‘How” defied these fellows, called out a neighbour, a pawnbroker named Williams, and told him she was rea Hy a woman, as the man stated, but innocent of the charge they accused her of. Williams went to Sir John Fielding, and, in his absence, the two pseudo constables forced “How” to give them a draft on Mr Williams for Mrs Bende.y. On presenting herself for the payment of the draft, M”s Bentley was arrested, and, along with her, one of the two ruffians. The blackmailers received severe sentences.

In 1822 a woman was discovered to have been working for some time as a plasterer in a man’s dress. Her real name was Helen Oliver, but she had assumed the name of her brother John. She came originally from Saltcoats, Ayrshire, and was twenty-seven years of age when die was unmasked, having passed for five years as a man. T 1 'e revelation led to another- It appeared that before she adopted a man’s attire and duties, she had been a maid-servant in a farmhouse in West Kilbride, where she had made the acquaintance of a young ploughman. The pair walked out together, and eventually were married. It tnen came out that the “ploughman’’ was not a man at all, hut another woman. They lived together for a time, then Helen returned to her parents’ houses at Saltcoats, helped herself to a complete suit of her ■brother’s clothes, and disappeared, without giving the least intimation of what, she meant to do, or where she was going. Dressed m her new a Hire, she reached the house of a cousin in Glasgow. Her relative took her ror “the real John Oliver ” and failed to detect the Land.

A plasterer stop-red at Die time in the same house, and she resolved to learn that badness. She went to Paisley, where she worked at the trade for three months, then betook herself to Johnstone.

There, either for amusement or some other reason, she courted a young woman, and carried the joke so far as to induce the girl to leave her service to be married. She never stopped anywhere for long, and went from Johnstone to Kilmarnock, then visited Lanark and Edinburgh. Ultimately, however, a workman in the employ of the same master disclosed her sex. She at first indignantly denied her metomorphosis, hut at last owned to it, and was sent home to her parents. The doubtful sex. of the Chevalier D 1 ’ Eon, some years prior to the French Revolution of 1789, for long exercised the curiosity of all Europe. In the reign of Louis XV. she served as a soldier and won certain distinction. A severe wound she received in one of the engagements she took part in led to the discovery of her sex-

Ai prominent Tammany politician, liv-

ing under the name of “Murray Hall,’* who for thirty years masqueraded as a man, was found on his death, sometime back, to be a woman.