Women’s Motivations for Joining a Revolutionary War Reenactment Group and Their Experiences

Deciding to become a reenactor is a personal matter, and the motivation to take part in reenactments differs in every individual case. Interviewee 1 explained her motivation for becoming a reenactor by citing the importance of the American Revolution in the development of the United States, which she considers to be still highly relevant to her today.

As a result of this obsession, she wanted to take an active part in battle reenactments. However, the regiment she chose was not in favor of women in combat, and she was assigned the role of a camp follower. As such, her main function was to maintain supplies and to care for the soldiers. As a camp follower, she did not embody a concrete persona from the past but remained a rather unspecific character.

The reasoning of the men in charge of decision-making in the unit was that women didn’t fight back then, so they are not allowed in combat in today’s representation of the past. According to historical records, this statement is as untrue for the Revolutionary War as it is for the Civil War. Women disguised their femininity and fought as soldiers in both armed conflicts. The figure of Molly Pitcher, a nickname or common label for a number of women who either actively fought in the Revolutionary War or helped soldiers with ammunition or when they got injured, is a well- established image in American culture. However, in the case of Interviewee 1’s unit, it is believed that in the specific group being reenacted, no women were actively fighting, which provides the male leaders with arguments to restrict women from partaking in combat. It is this drive for authenticity and an apparently accurate portrayal of the past that structures gender roles in this case. Even though my interviewee explained her initial dissat­isfaction with gender restrictions, she later seemed to embrace this specific“You can’t just put men in the field and be accurate” 225 understanding of authenticity—as being true to the past events—as a value worth striving for:

Yeah, I wanted... I would have loved to fire a musket and fight but...

Authenticity in historical reenactment is a difficult term with various meanings. The reenactors’ quest for an authentic performance is mostly linked to fidelity with past events and does not take into account that these events are highly choreographed and that reenactors play roles that are “only as genuine as their costumes” (Young, 1999, p. 184). An understand­ing of authenticity as historical accuracy and fidelity supersedes the fact that it is not a given but socially constructed and negotiated (Gapps, 2020). The case of Interviewee 1 illustrates that authenticity doesn’t exist without both authorization and authentication, which makes it “a negotiable attrib­ute, reliant on an external imprimatur” (Agnew and Tomann, 2020, p. 21). Authenticity “does not assert itself” (p. 22), and what is considered to be authentic is strongly connected to the question of “who is authorized to determine the version of history that will be accepted as correct or authen­tic” (Agnew and Tomann, 2020, p. 21; see also Bruner, 1994). The question of authorization in this case is strongly related to male power structures within the reenactment unit of Interviewee 1; in the end, she embraces this approach toward the past and the representation in the present as well. In consequence, she subordinates her desire to fight as a male soldier for the sake of a supposedly authentic representation of the past. However, this clashes with her 21st-century gender identity as a woman who is emanci­pated and independent. During the interview, she describes the discrepancy between her contemporary comprehension of gender roles and those por­trayed in the reenactments, roles that are restricted to the domestic sphere and the care of male soldiers.

Interviewee 2 is another example of a woman who portrays a female char­acter in reenactment. Similar to Interviewee 1, her motivation for reenact­ing the Revolutionary War stems from the belief that these events are still relevant to the present day. However, for her, it is not combat that imbues the events with relevance; she has never attempted to portray a fighting malepersona. From the outset, she made a conscious decision to portray a female character:

I wanted to portray a woman because I am a woman, and to me, this is just another part of accuracy. I’m not trying to be a male when I’m not. [...] Because I want to speak with authority when I’m interpreting in public. [.] It’s really doing the thing you are talking about and being able to say you understand the process and this is how it works, and get people involved in that.

Interviewee 2 argues along the lines of historical accuracy as well. However, her understanding of accuracy is closely related to her gender identity as a woman, and she simply could not imagine convincingly rep­resenting a male character. On the other hand, she argues: “You can’t just put men in the field and be accurate.” Here she makes the point that the representation of the past must include women, or else it remains incom­plete and is thus inaccurate. Another aspect of her motivation stems from a desire to position women in history and to show that it was not just men on the battlefield who won the war. She argues that without the active support of women, victory would have been impossible, and that is why it is highly important to her to portray women in Revolutionary War reenactments.

Interviewee 2 has been active in the reenactment community for over 15 years. She thus belongs to a group of women who have developed strategies for bypassing or subverting the male-dominated discourse. In these cases, female reenactors gain agency, which allows them to develop their own interpretations of the past. Interviewee 2 is a good case in point. On the surface, her reenactment persona is that of a camp follower responsible for washing, drying, and mending laundry. It thus remains in the typically “female sphere” and adheres to the norms of an authenticity-driven performance. Yet, in her case, the decision to represent a female character concerned with laundry is not informed or restricted by a male-driven authenticity discourse. Setting up her own reenactment group was inspired by her interests in the historical period and stems from the feeling that this aspect of the past has been underrepresented in stagings of the Revolutionary War. This group for civilians and camp followers stresses socioeconomic aspects of the war in society through the example of laundry in the late 18th century. They aim to show the hard physical labor involved in washing, drying, and maintaining laun­dry, and with her performance, Interviewee 2 intends to overcome the perceived naturalness of gender roles. From Interviewee 2’s point of view, embodying a woman from the 18th century is not necessarily a“You can’t just put men in the field and be accurate” 227 restrictive act that reinforces stereotypical interpretations of women’s roles in the past. On the contrary, she is actively trying to overcome attempts to uncritically reproduce and amplify female roles from the late 18th century. Her case illustrates how historical representations can be augmented by incorporating the perspectives of female reenactors.

It’s the women in the house and in the camp who are doing the laundry and making sure that there’s food to eat and keeping the garden up and, you know, all that. So, it’s like the primacy of that to the men’s roles, it is just as important. And there’s a lot of us in the hobby now who are really pushing that. And the success of that in the past few years, I think, has finally started to break through that kind of ‘We’re the guys, we run the thing’ [laughing] attitude that they’re really used to.

With her focus on laundry, Interviewee 2 makes aspects of the “female sphere” visible to a broader audience during reenactments. This goes beyond a stereotypical reception of gender roles; rather, it provides insights into female realities of the late 18th century. This example does not challenge the established authenticity discourse and thus is not questioned by those male reenactors who are in the position to authenticate what is perceived as authentic. On the contrary, it has—from the perspective of Interviewee 2—an emancipatory feature because it increases female visibility and accords women a place in contemporary narratives about the American Revolution.

The next two interviewees differ from the first two in the way they per­form during reenactments. Identifying as women in the present, they both portray male roles in the reenacted past. It could be assumed that mas­querading as a male not only offers the chance for women to indulge them­selves in an imagined past but provides them with the opportunity to “be” somebody else by playing a role and consequently traversing heter- onormative gender boundaries. Following this line of thought, reenacting an imagined past would provide a space to reformulate or negotiate con­cepts of the self, including gender roles and perceptions. However, when asked for her motivation to dress up as a male, Interviewee 3 explains that it is not primarily rooted in the desire to play a role or pursue an alterna­tive identity. She turns herself into a male soldier whom she perceives as one of her male ancestors in order, she says, to honor her family history. She wants to pay tribute to her great-great-grandfather who fought in the Revolution. But the reasons for this do not solely stem from the wish to keep the memory of her family history alive. She argues that it is a reasonable choice for women to portray male roles because “honestly, when you go to a reenactment, there is not a lot for women to do.” However, covering up her femininity and portraying a male persona comes at a certain price. She reports that her choice to cross-dress initially met with opposition from her male peers. This seems fitting with Hunt’s (2008) finding that battlereenactment can reinforce the negotiation and manufacturing of perceived traditional masculinities by drawing boundaries with the feminine. Thus, performed maleness by female reenactors seems to be particularly provok­ing in the realm of military and combat, where male camaraderie stabilizes male self-definition. Interviewee 3 explains that she had to work harder to create a convincing impression of a male character than did the male reen­actors. Despite these difficulties, she feels it was worth the effort, and she no longer encounters much resistance from her male counterparts.

The practice of female reenactors dressing up as male sheds light on another aspect of representing the past in historical reenactment. The case of Interviewee 3 indicates that masquerading as a man during the reenacted past is nothing out of the ordinary for her. When asked for a detailed report about how the transformation from a present-day woman to a male soldier from the past takes place, she remains unspecific and does not want to go into too much detail. This reveals a rather pragmatic approach toward questions of gender representation. For her, adopting a male character seems to be the only way to participate in the success story of the American Revolution. Contrary to Interviewee 2, who wants to show the variety, importance, and impact of women’s roles in the American Revolution, Interviewee 3 argues that women’s roles during the late 18th century are not an attractive option for her to perform. Portraying a woman, from her point of view, means “doing all the work in the camp. [...] I cook and clean my house all day long. I don’t need to go away on the weekend and do that again. I don’t mind cooking. But I don’t want that to be the only thing I do.”

She further reports that, according to her experience, female and male socioeconomic roles are divided in the present as well as in the past that she intends to perform. Getting away from her present-day female obligations around the house and playing a male soldier who lived in the past provides her with a twofold opportunity. Dressing as a man opens up a much broader field of self-realization in the reenacted past, which she experiences not as restrictive but as beneficial for herself, as the anticipated male role provides her with not only a short-term change of perspective but also an extended framework to experience and act. Cross-dressing grants her access to prac­tices and experiences like fighting, combat, and the related camaraderie which are otherwise inaccessible in her identity as a present-day woman. These activities associated with military and combat seem far more impor­tant and attractive to her than the female roles from the late 18th century. Thus, from the perspective of Interviewee 3, gender representation or high­lighting women’s roles in the past are not important issues when reenacting the Revolution. Instead, it is her declared aim to portray a credible display of the achievements of the Revolution as such:

I’d like people to understand what [the Revolutionaries] did—they were real people, facing very difficult choices. And we have it much easier today [.] thanks to them. I’m sure that our country, this continent,“You can’t just put men in the field and be accurate” 229 would look different than it does today without that war. [...] Otherwise we would look a lot like Europe, with small little countries, and we would be having those kinds of battles all along.

For her, the successful outcome of the Revolution has helped to shape the United States up to the present day, and her intention behind pub­licly displaying the past is to promote the presumed higher values of the American Revolution; she prioritizes these values over questions about the importance of female roles in the past. With her performance, she does not want to stress the fact that women were not only present but played a crucial role in the success of the war and the revolution. Further, it doesn’t seem to matter to her whether her present-day female gender identity is in sync with the gender role she performs through her 18th- century persona. Gender norms and stereotypes do not seem to be at stake, and switching gender roles between male and female is unproblem­atic for her. On the other hand, it is not only her choice to portray a male character; this choice is also informed by a necessity. Under the given conditions that most reenactment units allow women for combat only if they disguise their femininity, she can participate in the greater success narrative of the American Revolution only if she turns herself into an 18th-century man.

Interviewee 4 also identifies as a woman in the present and performs as a man in the restaged past; however, her case slightly differs. She does not fight for the emerging new nation; rather, she is part of one of the rare reenactment units that portray the British side—the so-called Loyalists, American settlers who fought alongside the British forces to reestablish the old power structures in the colonies. She has been very successful in her unit: she not only portrays a man when she reenacts but has advanced to the rank of sergeant through her hard work, and she is able to lead her unit into reenacted battles. Also, as a chairperson of the reenactment organiza­tion, she has a prominent role and is responsible for many organizational and financial issues related to present-day matters of her reenactment group. Her advancement as a male character in the reenacted past could be interpreted as being in sharp contrast to her university degree in women’s studies—which, over the course of the interview, she often references as a marker for gender sensibility and awareness of the hierarchies between gen­ders. However, her frequently mentioned awareness regarding gender seems to be at odds with the practice of reenactment if it is only possible for her to advance as a male character. She reflects on this when she confesses, “I was playing by their [the men’s] rules, and I still do.” This seems to stand in irreconcilable contradiction to her gender consciousness. However, she was not willing to talk about this contradiction in great detail. Instead, she preferred to stress her success as a fighting male soldier rather than elabo­rate on how the male environment frames and influences her reenactment possibilities as a woman.Interviewee 4 differs from the rest of the women with regard to her under­standing of authenticity. Interviewee 3—who, as a woman, portrayed one of her male ancestors when asked—further justified her cross-dressing performance with reference to the few known and source-based examples of women who disguised their femininity and fought in the Revolutionary War, like the well-known example of Molly Pitcher. In contrast, Interviewee 4 confesses outright that she is not aware of any source that would provide evidence for women fighting in the Crown Forces: “There is no documenta­tion that I’m aware of, ever, anywhere, that says women were in the Crown Forces.” However, the missing evidence for Interviewee 4’s character in his­torical sources does not bother her too much. On the contrary, she believes the reason for the lack of evidence that women fought is actually due to incomplete historical records, which refer solely to the military sphere and therefore, by their very nature, would not have documented women. Even though her reenactment is inauthentic in terms of historical evidence, she feels she is doing justice to the women of the past, who also played an impor­tant role. In short, she is convinced: “As a woman, it’s important to me, because it’s my history too.” Interviewee 4, much like Interviewee 3, believes that equal and adequate participation in representing the past seems to be available only as a male character. Contrary to Interviewee 3, however, she actively pursues a gender agenda while reenacting and uses her camouflage to actively address gender roles in public:

When we come off the field, and all of a sudden you see a woman’s eyes get wide, and she’ll realize some of these are women. They couldn’t see us close enough to see that when we were on the field fighting. And then they go, ‘Oh my God. [...] You mean I could do this too?’ This is very empowering.

When addressed in public regarding her gender identity while in charac­ter, Interviewee 3 would always stick to her historical persona, Samuel B. But Interviewee 4 uses her gender performance to open up a dialogue with the women from the audience about gender identity. She openly addresses the oscillation between her present-day gender identity and the one she takes up in the staged past. This provides a space to challenge essentialist understandings of gender and reveals the construction of gender identity for the audience. The example of Interviewee 4 shows that moving beyond the denoted biological gender roles both tests and questions the norms sur­rounding gender in reenactment. The seemingly convincing performance of a woman who fights as a male soldier shows that gender is not necessarily “the expression of identity, but a becoming and an effect of repeated acts,” and that “gender and other performatives are not expressions of the ‘true’ or essential nature of identities” (Holman Jones, 2020, p. 90). Thus, the gender performance of Interviewee 4 in historical reenactment clearly provides a playful space to rethink gender norms and essentialist understandings of“You can’t just put men in the field and be accurate” 231 gender identity in the past as well as the present. However, the practice of actively challenging established gender representations only works because Interviewee 4 has a certain gender sensibility and awareness. As we have seen in the case of Interviewee 3, the practice of cross-dressing does not nec­essarily lead to questioning gender norms and representations. Traversing the boundaries of female and male gender identities in present and past is neither a primary feature of her reenactment experience nor her declared aim. When cross-dressing in public, it is not the intention of Interviewee 3 to challenge the gender order. In contrast, cross-dressing is a necessary endeavor that provides her with the opportunity to become an acknowl­edged part of the (male) success narrative of the American Revolution.