Broadside regarding a female foot-boy

Commentary

Broadside beginning 'FEMALE FOOT BOY! / An account of the Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Catherine Wilson, an interesting young woman, about twenty years of age, daughter of respectable parents, near Perth, who assumed man's apparel at the age of fourteen, and hired herself to a drover, when she came to Edinburgh, and got into a respectable gentleman's family as a foot boy'. This broadside was printed by R. Reynolds, 489 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh.

According to this account, an individual assigned female at birth lived as a 'boy' or young man named John Thomson from the age of around fourteen to twenty. John Thomson worked in several manual labour jobs which were usually male occupations and married a woman named Mary Gray. The broadside demonstrates a conflicted attitude to gender non-conformity. It begins seeming to affirm one identity for this person: 'A young woman, of the name of Catherine Wilson', with the pronoun 'she'. But it also uses the name 'John Thomson' in sentences which imply a male identity, such as 'poor John found it was no easy matter to maintain a wife and ...'. The account ends by saying how to leave an unhappy marriage 'she... resumed her petticoats' and once more lived as Catherine Wilson. Although the large headline suggests that readers will be shocked by this story, the body of the text depicts this person positively as a virtuous hard worker whose difficult circumstances are viewed with sympathy. This broadside highlights the economic pressures faced by young women without male protection - both 'Catherine Wilson', who 'states' that this was the motive behind adopting a male identity, and Mary Gray, abandoned by the father of her child - and the insecure life of a working-class teenage boy forced to move from job to job.        

Broadsides are single sheets of paper, printed on one side, to be read unfolded. They carried public information such as proclamations as well as ballads and news of the day. Cheaply available, they were sold on the streets by pedlars and chapmen. Broadsides offer a valuable insight into many aspects of the society they were published in, and the National Library of Scotland holds over 250,000 of them.

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