Cousin Maude: Gender Bending in the 1950s

When I was a boy, my father’s distant cousin Maude was the most unusual person I had ever seen.  

I suppose Maude was in her late teens or early twenties during those years of the early 1950s.  I would see her when we went to funerals and reunions at my grandmother’s country church in rural North Carolina.  I identified her as a woman because she wore a skirt and had a womanly figure.  But, in every other bit of her appearance from her manly haircut to the socks and wingtip shoes on her feet, she appeared as a man.  She was always wearing a white shirt and tie.   

At these family events, Maude was no social “odd man out.”  She talked and laughed, as I recall, most often with men.  She would be so involved in conversations, I doubt she ever noticed the kid that was me, staring and trying to make out what sort of person this might be. 

On trips home from these events, I would ask my father about Maude and why she dressed and behaved the way she did, and my father would most often reply with something like, “Well, that’s just the way Maude is, she likes to wear men’s clothes.”  Just what he thought, I never knew.  But, once, when I was a bit older, my father chuckled and said that when he was Scoutmaster for my brother’s troop that Maude had caused him a little trouble.  

The Boy Scouts had spent a weekend camping on the shore of local pond, and on a morning while my father was away for a short time, the boys went skinny-dipping. Sometime after the campout, Maude’s father came to my Dad and complained that Maude had seen the naked Scouts from their farmhouse.  Dad responded that the boys shouldn’t have been skinny-dipping, but that their house was partially obscured and much too far away for Maude to have seen them from their house.  Her angry father replied, “She could see them from the upstairs windows with binoculars!” 

From what I knew of her, I imagine Maude was doggedly faithful to her true self throughout her life.  I expect that when she spied on the boys, she looked on with much more than the erotic interest her father might have imagined.  The weekend scene was not just naked boys, rather it was a whole boyhood experience.  Did, Maude with her manly style look on wishing she could have been a Boy Scout?  That she could have been a boy?  That she could be completely the true self she knew?  I imagine she did.  

Reflecting on my witness, I surely think the talkative, laughing Maude must have grown up in a loving family. Although spying on nude boys may have crossed a puritanical line, her family and many in the little community must have accepted her, as my father did, for who she was.  I understand that Maude’s self-expression as well as the apparently accepting community was unusual in 1950s America.  Yet, her being herself as well as the community’s acceptance illustrates the kind tolerance that flourishes when people love, accept, and respect the people their children become. 

[In this reflection, I have used the feminine pronoun for Maude, because I don’t know how she viewed herself.  In today’s culture, Maude might prefer male pronouns or the plural pronouns that many differently gendered people select for themselves.]