Waterloo Cross-Dressing Archive

Welcome to the Waterloo Cross-Dressing Archive. This website gives you access to a growing historical database of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodical records of the real-world adoption of gender-variant garb.

If you were living around 1800 and made the decision to adopt differently gendered garb, how would someone in the future know about what you did, why you did it, or how you felt about doing it? How would your actions have been understood at the time, and how may we understand them now? This archive is meant to collect records that will help us explore, and seek answers to, these questions.

For the purposes of this historical archive, “cross-dressing” refers to the material practices of donning gender-variant clothing. While the term “cross-dressing” implies a binary understanding of gender, here the phrase is intended as a neutral synonym for gender variant garb—with the proviso that, in some contexts, dressing in differently gendered clothes may be just “dressing.”

For an example of the layered complexity of historical cross-dressing practices, consider a report from February 21, 1786 about the death of a “woman” who “constantly appeared in the disguise of man’s apparel” for over 30 years while working as a shepherd and paver, who proposed marriage “to several young women,” and who, if only they had found “a professional man in whom she could have safely reposed confidence,” would have gone to their death as a man. Was this cross-dressing instrumental (to work as a man), sexual (to pursue other women), or expressive (to be a man)? Take a look at the WXDA record to explore this matter for yourself.

Happy searching!