1. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 8. Valerie R. Hotchkiss argues that the variety of responses to female transvestites in the Middle Ages indicates that there were no universal notions of gender as either biological or cultural but rather a view that male characteristics and behaviour were superior: Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 126.
2. See also John Tosh, ‘The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850’, in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 217–38 (pp. 231–3).
3. See for example Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 152; and Michael McKeon, ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28.3 (1995), 295–322, (p. 301).
4. See for example, Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 56; and Pat Rogers who argues that ‘since there was no attempt to portray anything other than a notional or stylised masculinity, the actress did not risk losing any glamour or sex-appeal — usually, quite the opposite’, ‘The Breeches Part’, in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 244–58 (p. 249). For Rogers the actress’s overt femininity was central to the effect (255).
5. Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p. 90.