Unidentified women

A cabinet card portrait of two women wearing men's hats and coats. One of the women is wearing a shirt and tie and the other sports a white bow tie. Both are smoking cigars and one is shouldering a double-barrelled shotgun.

It is difficult to know at this remove in time exactly what was in the minds of young women who had themselves photographed in male attire, but in the opening years of the twentieth century the practice was a popular one on both sides of the Atlantic. The intention was certainly playful, but these cross-dressing women were also parodying male domination and questioning codes of femininity. Whether they realised it or not, their experiments in sartorial inversion were an act of insubordination. The protofeminist cross-dressers in these portraits were constructing new identities, embracing modernity and social change, and signalling their rejection of female submission.

Photographed by Henry Montague Cooper of Taunton, Somerset.