In the company of men

In the wake of the revolutionary wars, the figure of the cross-dressed woman proliferated in novels, plays, popular tales, and real-life accounts that circulated throughout Germany. Sometimes appearing in soldier's garb and engaging in battle like Joan of Arc, other times donning overalls and plying a trade, and female cross-dresser tested the revolutionary ideas of freedom and equality. Perhaps her most provocative challenge, however, was to contemporary notions of what it meant to be a women or a man.