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Jen Manion: Female Husbands (Hardcover, 2020, Cambridge University Press)

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women …

We've always been here!!!

This was a fascinating read. It charts 200 years of women's (and "women's") queerness in the US and UK. It never goes so far as to label the female husbands it selects as particular subjects of study in specific ways (e.g. "She was definitely a lesbian!" "He was for sure a trans man!") and also uses they/them pronouns for each of them, and I appreciated how much it centered the ambiguity of what being a "female husband" meant. The ways that the term changed, both as it came into fashion and then eventually fell out of it, the ways it and the female husbands themselves interacted with waves of feminist politics and social mores--just a thoroughly good read (or, in my case, listen). Definitely a book I'd like to own a physical copy of for reference at some point.