Exchanging Hats

Born in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop grew up when the law and entertainment used fashion to dictate gender. During the previous century, cross-dressing vaudeville stars won acclaim while everyday people dressing outside of their assigned gender faced harassment and jail time.

Masquerade laws, ordinances that restricted people from obscuring their face with makeup or coverings or wearing disguises, such as the clothing of a different sex, became popular in the mid-19th century to capture those who would attempt to disguise themselves to evade tax collectors. However, these laws became increasingly used to punish people who defied gender norms. Some states, such as New York and Ohio, even had laws specifically barring people from wearing clothes that did not, from the state’s perspective, align with their sex. 

Clothing became a way to distinguish women from men and vice versa. Gender-appropriate clothes reflected gender roles: Men's pants enabled freedom to move around on a job while the more complicated dresses denoted women's status as ornamental or domestic. As a result, the masquerade laws frequently targeted LGBTQ+ people and women. 

Although women gained more leeway in fashion by the 1920s, people who defied fashion norms still could suffer legal consequences. In 1913, New York City police arrested a transgender man for breaking the masquerade law. A judge let him go because the law stated his “costume” had to be in service of another crime. However, police quickly re-arrested and re-tried him for another charge with a different judge. The new judge convicted him to three years in a reformatory under the reasoning that only a morally “twisted” woman would dress in men's clothing.

The same year Bishop turned 27, Helen Hulick went to jail for five days for wearing pants to testify during a burglary case. Women's pants were not accepted as a consistently gender-appropriate fashion choice until the 1960s. The only socially acceptable way to cross these sartorial gender lines for much of Bishop's youth and adulthood was through humor and irony. Published in 1956, her poem “Exchanging Hats” demonstrates the ways people casually played with gender while reinforcing a clear line between men and women. 

Uncles try to get at laugh by wearing a woman's hat, thus the implied punchline is that a man dressed femininely is absurd and silly. The joking nature also marks the crossdressing as temporary. It is an aberration in the uncle's gender identity and not a significant facet. 

Bishop also places the aunts' crossdressing within the framework of absurd, temporary group entertainment. As the aunts try on “the yachtsmen's caps,” they respond “with [an] exhibitionistic screech” (Line 11-12). The screech could be drawing attention to one of the aunt's jokes, the laughs from the other aunts upon seeing the joke, or both. While the screech expresses joy, it also hints at a line where the “exhibitionistic” crosses over into the horrified. Like the uncle's joke, the other relative's jokes rely on a perceived absurdity coming from how seemingly ill-suited one gender is to take on the other gender's role. When the aunts put on the caps, the hats are too big for their heads, resulting in “the visors hanging o'er the ear” (Line 13). Bishop amplifies the aunt's amusement by pointing out that the hat's lopsidedness makes it look like the anchor on it “drag[s]” (Line 14). The aunts and uncles' jokes fit into a larger cultural template around crossdressing.

Throughout the 19th century, entertainment depicted crossdressing as either an illusionary art or a freak-ish act. Vaudevillian cross-dressers drew a clear line between their stage personas and off-stage lives. Newspapers often highlighted the performers' heterosexual marriages and skill at deception. “In framing gender crossings as magical illusions, female impersonators ultimately confirmed rather than threatened the ostensibly natural and immutable gender divide,” explained The Advocate in a 2015 article. 

Dime museums and freak shows doubled down on the rhetoric, framing crossdressing as deviant and bizarre. Unlike their Vaudevillian counterparts, Freak Show cross-dressers did not draw a line between an on-stage persona and an off-stage gender-conforming identity. The venues often provided the only employment for non-gender-conforming people after a public outing or arrest.

The dime museums and freak shows isolated and highlighted a person's “deviant” features from the rest of their body and self, creating “a fantasy of permanent inherent difference between the normal and the abnormal.” The aunts' hyper-femininity clashing with the masculine caps evokes how a freak show often framed bearded women as refined ladies to amplify their condition's tragedy and funny absurdity. By framing those who did not follow gender roles as freaks, they promoted clear-cut gender differences as the norm. 

Despite their differences in approaching crossdressing, vaudeville and freak shows produced similar stigmas. Both vaudeville and freak shows made a game out of trying to guess the person's true gender. They also positioned crossdressing and other a-typical gender behavior as containable—a person can see a show with a cross-dresser and then go home without feeling challenged in their prescribed gender role. Bishop's “Exchanging Hats” reflects this idea. The women try on the hats while on vacation. The speaker isolates the crossdressing uncles through a lack of visual details. Comparingly, the aunts get two stanzas depicting the specifics of their crossdressing. The uncle's crossdressing only spans two lines, with the rest of the stanza dedicated to the speaker's embarrassment. Bishop isolates the uncle's hat-wearing as contained and temporary through these choices. 

By only viewing crossdressing as temporary and humorous, the aunts and uncles defang any meaningful consideration of gender roles, identity, or discrimination the act might evoke. Bishop proposes that any challenges to commonly held ideas about gender scares many people. If the distinction between genders goes away, it might take other commonly held beliefs with it. The speaker asks what a bishop's miter means if gendered items, such crowns and opera hats, went unworn (Lines 21-22). Bishop implicates religion with gender roles. Through this comparison, she reveals the root of many people's worry: Who will get the power in this new world? How will people understand the world around them now? What does it mean for humanity's place in the universe if everything they thought is wrong?