An evolution in perceptions? In the 1930s, Minerva, an illustrated women’s weekly with an interest in the Hollywood scene, contributed to the cult of androgynous stars: Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn. This positive vision of masculine women was rare throughout the 19^th century which would spill over to the next. Humour was the expression of an almost exclusively male milieu. Humour was lethal to likes of emancipated-gay-masculinised women: battled against, defeated, pariahs time and time again and then glorious, masculine women fascinated. What was the source of this particular seductive appeal?

Children knew all too well about it as they enjoyed the legendary adventures of girls disguised as boys. Changing gender was an adventure. It meant leaving your sex behind and experiencing the forbidden world of the other. The cross-dresser was a defector. She crossed the boundary of religious and civil prohibition. Her courage inspired respect, even admiration.

In the continuum of masculinisation, most “masculine” women were content with a few “signs”. One would be enough. Sometimes a detail. Hélène Brion’s pussy-bow, for example. In the 19^th century, this sign was interpreted psychologically (perversion-inversion) or politically, as a symbolic expression of rebellion against the status of women. This would be enough to fuel a famous debate!

Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote in his misogynistic essay, Les Bas Bleus (1877): “One does not leave with impunity these skirts, which make a woman more so than one thinks by veiling her...”. If skirt = veil, trousers = unveiling? What are we revealing?

Trousers = an attack on modesty and mystery

In La Femme en culotte, John Grand-Carteret gave a voice to 19^th century writers. This quote from Emile Blavet (1838-1910), a novelist, vaudevillist, and journalist, taken from Le Petit Bleu, the newspaper he launched, is particularly representative of the descriptions given at the time about the mechanisms of male desire.

John Grand-Carteret, La Femme en culotte, 54 original sketches by Fernand Fau, Gustave Girrane, 219 documentary images, Paris, Flammarion, no date, p. 384:

“Women, because of their physical structure, are made to be draped, not moulded. Anything that moves away from draping towards clinginess is anti-artistic. In men’s clothing, the woman is no longer a woman; she is not a man; she is an androgyne; in other words, something undefined, insexual, less disturbing than odious. This usurpation, by abolishing sex, has the disadvantage of highlighting graces that a slight indication would make more enviable; of offering brutally what it would be clever to leave to be desired; of making an easy prey of what should be a slow conquest, full of delicious episodes. Isn’t the whole charm of women, as a modern moralist said, in suggestion, almost in illusion; and isn't the love we have for them, which should be their sweetest objective, fuelled by something else?... And isn't the greatest attraction of what we see what we don't see?”