Sarah E. Edmonds
During the Civil War, Sarah Edmonds crisscrossed Confederate and gender lines. She enlisted in the Union Army as Frank Thompson, a nurse. And, as a Northern spy, she masqueraded as Charles, a Southern sympathizer, and as Cuff, a male slave.[1][2]
Edmonds married a man. But she recounted a time when, passing as a “famous” male bookseller, she “came near marrying a pretty little girl who found that I should not leave Nova Scotia without her.”[3] Later, she was pigeonholed by census takers. Of them, she remarked, “[A]nd then—well, you know how the census takers sum up all our employments with the too easily written words, ‘married woman.’ That is what I became.”[4]
Sources
1. “Sarah Edmonds,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/resources/person.htm?id=169.
2. S. Emma E. Edmonds, The Female Spy of the Union Army. The Thrilling Adventures, Experiences, and Escapes of a Woman, as Nurse, Spy, and Scout, in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, and Co., n.d.), 107, http://books.google.com/books?id=z7gZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=purest+motives+and+most+praiseworthy+union+spy&source=bl&ots=BbpGZwMLjR&sig=NZeqVdeLI0TycJiY6Esb5hMq-wk&hl=en&ei=v6C2TuOcM8Xq0gHk-Zy_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false.
3. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary: In Which Is Contained… (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1983), 194.
4. Katz, 194.
