‘Woman as Husband’: Gender, Sexuality and Humour in the News of the World 1910–50s

  • Alison Oram
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media book series (PSHM)

Abstract

In April 1912, the News of the World (NOTW) published the sensational story of how a young working-class woman had passed as a man, under the headline: ‘Woman As Husband. Amazing Romance of Two Chiswick Girls’:

People will do much for friendship’s sake, but not often does it happen that a girl, for love of another girl, will put on men’s clothes and live and work as a man, playing ‘husband’ to her friend’s ‘wife’. Yet this is the bold escapade in which a Chiswick girl has just been detected. Since last August Adelaide Dallamore, 23, a servant, has been working in West London as a plumber’s mate in workman’s clothes, and during a large part of that period her girl chum has been sharing her lodgings as ‘Mrs Dallamore.’ They are such devoted ‘pals’ that, rather than yield to a threat to separate them, they adopted this startling device.1

Keywords

Popular Press Female Marriage Male Homosexuality Sexual Modernity Gender Boundary 
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Notes

  1. 9.
    Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978, Oxford, 2009, p. 263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 11.
    Cyril Bainbridge and Roy Stockdill, The News of the World Story: 150 Years of the World’s Bestselling Newspaper, London, 1993, p. 13.Google Scholar
  3. 12.
    Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper, Manchester, 2013, esp. Chapters 1 and 5, pp. 215–16; Bingham, Family Newspapers, Chapter 4; Gail Savage, ‘Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of divorce proceedings in England’, The Historical Journal 41 (2), 1998, pp. 511–28.Google Scholar
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    Emily Hamer, Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians, London, 1996.Google Scholar
  8. See Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, New York, 2001, for a more nuanced account. Also discussed in Rebecca Jennings, A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500, Oxford, 2007.Google Scholar
  9. 24.
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  11. 30.
    Michael Saler, As If. Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford, 2012.Google Scholar
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    Anna Clark, ‘Twilight Moments,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (1–2), 2005, 140–56.Google Scholar
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    Alison Oram, ‘“Love Off The Rails” or “Over the Teacups”?: Lesbian Desire and Female Sexualities in the 1950s British Popular Press’ in Heike Bauer and Matt Cook (eds), Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, London, 2012, pp. 41–57.Google Scholar
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    See, for example, Lucy Delap, Knowing their place: domestic service in twentieth-century Britain, Oxford, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Alison Oram 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Alison Oram

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