Lois Schwich, the Female Errand Boy : Narratives of Female Cross-Dressing in Late-Victorian London

K. Hindmarch-Watson

On November 13, 1886, twenty-one-year-old Lois Schwich was sentenced to eight months' hard labor for stealing high-end clothing worth £50?£60 from her former employers. More troubling for the judge and the London newspapers, however, was that she had passed herself off as a fifteen-year-old boy while doing so and, even more shocking, had smoked and gone out drinking with male friends. That Schwich was on trial as much for her gender transgressions as for theft is hardly news to those who have studied passing women in European history. The newspaper coverage of her trial demonstrates the extent to which Schwich's passing masculinity disturbed, intrigued, and tickled the reading public, and different groups fought over the meanings they wished to attribute to Schwich and her criminal behavior. The cross-dressed female body remains a hotly contested cultural symbol in current debates over gender and sexuality. In my treatment of Lois Schwich, I demonstrate the extent to which narratives of cross-dressing varied in a moment of fluctuating gender regulations in...