In 1627, a professional lace-maker named Thomasine Hall boarded a ship in England and arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, to become a maidservant in the household of a man named John Tyos. Women of English origin were scarce in that part of the New World, amid the recently established and extremely laborintensive tobacco plantations. A count conducted in 1624 recorded only two hundred and thirty adult women among the twelve hundred and fifty Europeans living in Virginia. Women were urgently needed for marital fellowship and procreation, and male settlers paid the Virginia Company the considerable sum of a hundred and fifty pounds a head for the transportation of prospective wives across the Atlantic. Females were also in demand for their gender-specific domestic skills. This was Hall’s value to Tyos. As an experienced seamstress, Hall, who was twenty-five or so, would have made clothing and other items. Additional duties would likely have included cooking, cleaning, candle-making, and other forms of women’s work.
But was Hall really a woman? After Hall had been living in Tyos’s household for a year or two, rumors started to spread that the supposed maidservant was—in the assessment of one male neighbor—“a man and woeman.” It fell to three local women to perform a physical examination of Hall’s genitals and make their own determination. When their investigation convinced them that Hall was male, the matter came to the attention of Captain Nathaniel Basse, whose military rank and past service in colonial government made him the community’s unofficial leader. Basse asked Hall, Are you a man or a woman? According to a partially surviving record of the exchange, from the Virginia General Court, in Jamestown, Hall “replyed that hee was both.”
This story is from the September 02, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the September 02, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Drug of Choice - The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work.
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made. Bacteria produce numerous molecules that could become medicines, but most of them aren’t easily identified or synthesized with the technology that exists today. A small percentage of them, however, can be constructed by following instructions in the bacteria’s DNA. Burian helped me search the sequence for genes that looked familiar enough to be understandable but unfamiliar enough to produce novel compounds. We settled on a string of DNA that coded for seven linked amino acids, the same number found in vancomycin. Then Burian introduced me to Robert Boer, a synthetic chemist who would help me conjure our drug candidate.
Screams from a Marriage
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Fly with Me
The children’s books of Katherine Rundell.
The Mystery of Pain
Garth Greenwell’s novel of extreme affliction and ordinary happiness.
The Show Must Go On
What if Ronald Reagan’ Presidency never really ended?
LAST COFFEEHOUSE ON TRAVIS
For a few months, I stayed with my aunt's friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there.
Tales from the New World
The novelist Richard Powers considers our changing earth.
Land of the Flea
What America 1s buying and selling.
The Dark Time
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
The Post-Moral Age
If conscience is merely a biological artifact, must we give up on goodness?