SHE MASQUERADED IN MALE ATTIRE (1894)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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Poor Mrs. Emily Lund.
She was not prone to wearing men’s clothing – at least not in public.
But the night in 1894 that she did dress so, she was arrested and tossed in the slammer.
Officer Michael Quinn of the Hamilton Avenue police station arrested Lund, on Van Brunt, in Red Hook (or “South Brooklyn”) near William. The 55-year-old domestic had been discovered there attired “in a pair of trousers, a vest and a long mackintosh.”
THE NIGHT IN JAIL
After spending the night in jail, she was arraigned in the Butler street police court the next day. Her husband, who could not bring himself to even show his face, had his mother appear in his place.
She brought “an outfit of women’s clothing” for his wife.
When “Emily could make no coherent reply to Justice Tighe’s questions as to why she masqueraded in male attire,” Mrs. Lund’s mother-in-law told the court that her daughter-in-law’s “mind was affected.”
POSTSCRIPT: “WHAT HAPPENED TO EMILY?” OR “THE POWER OF PUBLIC SHAMING”
Whether that was the truth or Emily’s mother-in-law simply found the explanation convenient and a good cover up of the actual truth, it is not known. What we can guess, though, is that the Lund family was probably the butt of some quiet and not-so-quiet jokes in the coming days and years.
Mrs. Emily Lund was not mentioned, though, in the papers again, slipping quietly into history – and probably out of the city.
A year later, a woman by the name of Emily Lund, who was working as a “domestic,” was suddenly found to be living at 29 Oneida Street in Utica, NY.
The power of public shaming.
And after her court appointment ended for “masquerading” in men’s clothing, the judge sent Emily into the prisoner’s pen to change out of her men’s trousers, vest and mackintosh – and into her women’s clothing – for the long ride home.
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