Conservative leaders often evoke a nostalgic vision of a past where “men were men,” but Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Eagan Dean challenges this notion with a radical proposition: what if rigid gender categories never truly existed? In his forthcoming book, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century Literary Gender and its Uses, Dean argues that 19th-century American writers played a pivotal role in constructing the era’s gender norms structures that served specific political and cultural purposes. Drawing on a wide range of fiction, essays, and archival materials spanning 1797 to 1902, Dean demonstrates how literature was a key site for shaping, experimenting with, and enforcing ideas about gender.

In a recent faculty research fellows talk, Dean focused on two influential figures of 19th-century literature Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott and their Civil War nursing memoirs: Specimen Days and Hospital Sketches. He explored how these works mobilized gender nonconformity to promote visions of national unity and racial identity.

In Specimen Days, Whitman departs from his usual image as a poet of democracy, instead adopting a maternal, nurturing persona in his role as caregiver to wounded soldiers. He describes intimate acts of care kissing foreheads, holding hands, offering comfort writing of one soldier: “I loved him much, always kiss’d him, and he did me.” Dean described this as “androgynous patriotism,” where Whitman’s performance of femininity made his otherwise “queer” behavior publicly acceptable by aligning it with patriotic service. However, this inclusive vision was limited. Though he mentions Black soldiers, Whitman’s imagination for national healing centers reconciliation between white men, rendering his gender fluidity permissible through its attachment to white federalist nationalism.

Similarly, in Hospital Sketches, Alcott presents the character Tribulation Periwinkle, a gender nonconforming nurse who celebrates her boyish demeanor, rejects conventional femininity, and wishes she had been born “a lord of creation instead of a lady.” Based on Alcott’s own letters and experiences, Trib navigates her caregiving role by blending maternal tenderness with masculine energy, even performing mundane tasks like washing soldiers with “manful” resolve. Yet, as with Whitman, Trib’s access to patriotic belonging is racially exclusive. Despite occasional gestures toward abolitionism, Black individuals in the narrative are marginal, often appearing as background figures or stereotypes.

Dean uses these case studies to confront a powerful and dangerous contemporary myth: that gender diversity is a modern aberration from a once-fixed, binary past. Today’s cultural and legislative debates often portray trans and gender-nonconforming identities as deviations from an imagined historical norm. Dean’s work dismantles this myth by showing how 19th-century literature already featured fluid and dynamic expressions of gender framed not as subversive, but as central to patriotic identity. These authors didn’t just reflect the gender understandings of their time; they actively shaped them for ideological purposes.

Through the critical lenses of trans studies and Black feminist critique, Dean’s Inventing American Gender urges a reexamination of how gender has been constructed and weaponized through literature and culture. At moments of national crisis, figures like Whitman and Alcott made gender nonconformity legible to the public by aligning it with white nationalist ideals. In contrast, today’s political climate often presents strict gender conformity as a return to moral and cultural “tradition.” Dean exposes these contradictions, reminding us that the narratives of gender in American history are neither fixed nor neutral they are constructed, contested, and deeply political.

Source: https://gender.stanford.edu/news/patriotic-fictions-inventing-american-gender-through-19th-century-literature