Cross-dressing as Familial Care: Revising Gender in “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson”

Abstract What happens when parents tell their ostensible daughters to dress as boys? This essay reconsiders the trope of cross-dressing through two antebellum stories, “Theresa: A Haytien Tale” (1827) and “Lucy Nelson; or the Boy-Girl” (1831), that include this plot point. By imagining unconventional approaches to teaching girlhood, the stories explore what shapes each character’s gender attachments. In “Lucy Nelson,” the titular character’s gender identity emerges through a struggle between the child’s own tastes for masculine-coded behaviors and the parents’ efforts to impose normative femininity, whereas “Theresa” represents a mother and her children who resist colonial violence by reconfiguring their gender roles. Read together, these disparate stories emphasize the families’ influence on gender expression and reveal that these different texts treated efforts either to deny or to affirm the children’s identities as care. The stories thus evoke debates – over how to care for children who fall outside gender norms – that remain with us two hundred years later.