Swiped from GD: Top Ten Men Who Were Really Women.

Interesting topic.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8169511&mesg_id=8169511

I saw that, but didn't read it.

I've been re-reading all the "Sherlock Holmes" stories, after I saw the movie. (I loved the stories when I was a kid, but haven't read them since) In several of the stories the plot revolves around women who, having no rights to their own income without marriage are threatened with some sort of violence, or resort to subterfuge to marry against family wishes etc. In fact the movie uses the character "Irene Adler" as a romantic subplot--she was one of the few who had bested Holmes.

I'd been thinking about that, how Sir Author Conan Doyle, didn't seem to question the rights or wrongs of women as property, simply using the situation as a story plot. (Although Sherlock Holmes bounced between contempt and wary respect of women)

So many of the women on the list you posted come from similar times, and far from considering it romantic and adventurous, I think how desperate some of them had to have been, how angry, how hopeless.

Here's to the women in our past, those risk takers who knew, on some level that was denied them to acknowledge out loud, that they were equal and capable and fully human. How many more I wonder disguised themselves out of that desperation? Interesting too, is how in the past men dressing and disguising themselves as women immediately put them in a sexualized and degraded category, women disguised as men in a (more or less) productive one. Nothing like gender politics.

...to see if films attempt to paint that aspect of our histories accurately (or not). More often than not, it's glossed over and used as a subplot. :eyes:

Though it wasn't a very good movie Bad Girls, the western w/Madeline Stowe and Drew Barrymore attempted to address it to a degree. The whole, "women as second class citizen." A couple of the characters worked as "saloon girls", one was an outlaw who rode w/men, and the other a widower attempting to make claim to her husband's estate.

But as a woman....well, apparently a woman (widow or not) couldn't own land, have a bank account, hold titles, etc. So for the sake of that story, becoming an outlaw (to claim what was hers) made sense.

It's a Laurie R. King novel, written from the perspective of one of the female characters who interacted with Holmes in the series.

Like I said, I've always liked Sherlock Holmes, probably because he's such a flawed and usually unlovable character, but that sounds like a book I'd love, thank you!

x(