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after being wounded in 1783, to be a woman. She received an honorable discharge and in 1785 married Robert Gannett. In a few years’ time they had three children. Sampson Gannett was relatively unknown until 1797 when, in conjunction with the writer Herman Mann, she published a semifictional narrative of her time as a cross-dressed Revolutionary soldier. It was titled The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady, Whose Life and Character Are Peculiarly Distinguished—Being a Continental Soldier, for Nearly Three Years, in the Late American War. The work was a straightforward tale that touched on the author’s possible homosexuality through descriptions of titillating, affectionate interactions with women. Sampson Gannett’s intention in publishing the narrative was to gain public attention for her attempt to be awarded a military pension.
    In 1802 Sampson Gannett commenced a series of public lectures about her life. She spent much of her time on stage—after stating that she could not explain why she chose to cross-dress and join the Continental army—extolling traditional gender roles for women. Near the end of the presentation, she left the stage, returned dressed in her army uniform, and executed complicated and physically taxing military drills. Her presentation was extremely popular in Boston, and she repeated it in other New England cities. In 1816, after years of petitioning and with help from Paul Revere, Sampson Gannett was finally awarded the full pensions she deserved by both the state of Massachusetts and Congress.
    The Female Review and Sampson Gannett’s public performance were popular because her dual public image as a brave soldier and a traditional woman tantalized the post-Revolutionary audience. By consciously refusing to be cast firmly in either gender role, Sampson Gannett insisted that she would be both and neither at the same time.
    This transgressive approach to gender identity was also present in an 1815 work of fiction titled The Female Marine, or the Adventures of Miss Lucy Brewer. Most probably written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, an obscure Boston literary figure, it is a breathless, first-person narrative that frequently references Sampson Gannett’s life. The Female Marine tells the story of a young woman who is seduced, impregnated, loses her child, and then is forced to work in a Boston brothel. She escapes and, dressed as a man, spends three years on the USS Constitution as a sailor. After many adventures, including potential romantic entanglements with women, she marries well. 15
    The Female Marine was so popular that it brought forth five sequels, testifying to the enormous reader interest in cross-dressing literature. These sequels included a self-defense from the madam of the brothel in which Lucy had been sequestered and a new story of male impersonation by a character named Almira Paul.
    The public interest in the topic of female transvestism was not isolated to stories about these three strikingly different women. Late eighteenth-century American literary and popular culture was obsessed with this new notion of the cross-dressed female warrior. 16 Novels such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, or The Secret Witness ; the memoir of famous cross-dressing British sailor Hannah Snell, a popular version of which was published in Thomas’s New-England Almanack ; several plays based on the life of Joan of Arc; numerous broadsides of popular ballads detailing the exploits of cross-dressing female soldiers and sailors—all were extraordinarily popular with audiences.
    These sermons, books, lectures, pamphlets, novels, plays, and ballads struck a chord with the new American audience. Female and male readers saw themselves at the center of a whirligig, a quickly evolving culture that was breaking from the old world but not yet settled in the new. Howard Zinn points out that “between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were