Book Review: To Know Her by Name

A Fair Trade Book

Title: To Know Her by Name

Author: Lori Wick

Date: 1997

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 1-56507-574-9

Length: 432 pages

Quote: “To him she was every inch a female, but he realized that none of these people—neither the bank employees nor the customers—had seen her as he had.”

What you'll like about this extraordinary “Christian romance” is that it's different. It's a sweet, clean romance, but is it ever different.

What you might not like is that, instead of preaching against something the Bible forbids, Wick lets her heroine find out why the Bible forbids what she's doing.

In the nineteenth century, Anglo-American culture was besotted with a (non-Biblical, non-Christian, actually French Socialist) belief that extremely rigid definitions of sex roles would help build an orderly, Christian-influenced society. Everything people did was to be identified as either masculine or feminine, not both. If men were not allowed to learn how to do women's jobs, and especially if women were not allowed to learn how to do men's jobs, then everybody would see the advantages of living as half of a nice stable male-female pair, even if they didn't want and didn't have a real marriage. And collegial relationships would be possible only between people of the same sex, and this would prevent adultery. And if business, politics, industry, and finances were defined as men's work, and women's work was limited as much as possible to being “angels in the home,” at least (rich) women could be spared from the misery the Industrial Revolution was bringing to many workplaces...

Like the other exciting new ideas the French Socialists promulgated, including Socialism itself, this did not work. In fact, when we look back on the history of the cheese-eating, wine-bibbing, never successfully married, confused young men who promulgated these ideas, it's a wonder that anybody ever took any of their ideas seriously for five minutes. But many people seem to find ways to believe things they want to believe, and in the nineteenth century, as Europeans realized that it was possible for nations to exist without monarchs, a lot of people wanted to believe that humans were going to bring the Kingdom of God into existence, all by themselves, right here in this world. Maybe “the hereafter” had only ever meant the “negative lives” of the remembered dead. Maybe God had no interest in relationships with created beings, and collective humankind, working through democratic self-government, was what was really meant to build Paradise right here on Earth. Maybe some very smart, if confused, young men were the prophets of a new order. If nations could survive without feudal hierarchies, who knew what else might happen.

Anyway, when women were told that the only “feminine” thing to do was stay home and be like little vines clinging parasitically to sturdy trees, i.e. men, and then they didn't happen to have men to cling to, what did they do? As a matter of historical fact--they cross-dressed. Rather than agitate for "Louise's" right to work and travel as she needed to do, it was easier for Louise to be "Louis." Most men, even if they had been interested in seeing for themselves whether small, soft-spoken Louis was really male, were highly motivated not to be caught looking at Louis--so quite a few women who didn't look mannish at all were able to pass as baby-faced young men even in Army boot camp.

Men cross-dressed, too, for a variety of reasons. Some same-sex couples were able to live together because one of them cross-dressed, but in many cases of cross-dressing sexuality was not a factor at all. Cross-dressing was the safest, cheapest, easiest way to get around all those silly gender rules. It was also the safest, cheapest, easiest way for fugitives and criminals to conceal their identities. All through the English-speaking world, in nineteenth century fiction people cross-dressed whenever they wanted to get away with anything...because in fact it often worked.

Whole-Bible Christians were a minority in this period. Humanists and Socialists were usually drawn to a revisionist form of Christianity that wanted to ignore the Hebrew Bible of which Jesus was a teacher, while still claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus. There were "Red Letter" Christians who wanted to ignore everything in the Bible not represented as a direct quote from Jesus. Quite a lot of people never really learned to read, knew only as much about the Bible as they'd heard someone preach, and were not aware that the Law of Moses forbids cross-dressing.

Why? Well...To Know Her by Name is a novel about a cross-dressing, heterosexual, Christian young woman of the nineteenth century. Nobody in this novel tells Miss Andrea Mae Hackett that cross-dressing is all about lying, even when the lying is done in the service of a good cause, or that it may result in her being beaten up by men who would not knowingly have hit a woman but don't mind beating up a smaller man, or that some poor desperate female may "fall in love" with one of the male characters our heroine has such a good time playing. The plot, apart from the romance, is about how those things happen.

Historical evidence indicates that hundreds of women actually enlisted in the "all-male" Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. The best known case was exposed when one of those women liked "being" an apparently celibate man long after the war ended, and spent more of her life earning her own living as "Albert" than she'd spent as "Jennie." In historical fact, when a visit to a doctor exposed Albert Cashier or Cashire as a woman, "his" employers and friends turned on "him," and "he" was hospitalized as a mental patient and forcibly re-feminized.

In To Know Her by Name, Lori Wick imagines that out West, where people were less bound by convention, tall, skinny "Pup" Hackett might have served under a commanding officer who liked her acting talent and continued to employ her as a spy for the Treasury Department, investigating corrupt banks, after the Civil War...and that a man who's fallen in love with "Pup" while she's dressed as the woman she really is will appreciate the work she does while undercover as a man.

The closest thing we have to an historical precedent for this kind of thing was Harriet Tubman. There was a tiny bit more understanding that an ex-slave helping to rescue other slaves might have a valid reason for cross-dressing than, in historical fact, there ever was that a young lady might have such reasons. In historical fact, when White women were caught doing "men's jobs," "just like a man, and better than some," everyone seems to have scrambled to brand them insane. And Tubman was a slave, so nobody cared that she had been married. A single White woman, whose marriageability was supposed to depend on her being not only a virgin but "innocent" even of how babies are made, might have been considered unfit for marriage if it were known that she'd ever travelled alone. Could any Victorian employer have lived with the idea that he was allowing a single woman to have adventures? To become an adventuress?

Harriet Tubman had, in historical fact, just a tiny bit of brain damage; though certainly intelligent--some said a genius, some said a prophet inspired by God--she was subject to narcolepsy. Perhaps that's why Wick gives Pup a different kind of minor brain damage. Her immediate family have always called her Pup, as in "clumsy little...," because her physical clumsiness is continuous and conspicuous enough to constitute a disability. (Psychology tells us that this sort of thing can be a mild form of cerebral palsy in which only a few muscles are consistently spastic, or an extreme form of dyslexic-type brain overactivity in which neurological messages are occasionally transmitted across the wrong synapses.) Oddly, when pretending to be someone else Pup is able to activate different neurological circuits that seem unaffected by her disability. When she's at home she spills things at every meal; when she's undercover, whether as a man or as a woman, she's not a conspicuously messy eater.

In this novel, Pup's boss, his motherly wife, and her admirer McKay, are all completely sympathetic to the peculiar brainquirk, unhappy home life, and poor prospects for conventional marriage that seem to justify Pup's cross-dressing, play-acting, and spying. And she's good at it; she catches a lot of crooks, and her boss really hates the idea that she might find someone to marry and give up being an undercover T-man--although Pup seems the type who can pass as a very young man but will become less plausible after age thirty.

For me it was hard to suspend disbelief in this fictional premise. I've read too many factual accounts of women whose rejection of rigid, silly gender roles was construed as "insanity" to believe that even three Victorian Americans would conspire to help Pup Hackett infiltrate the "men's world" of banking. The silly gender roles and rules, like "Women as an entire half of humankind are too math-challenged to be competent bank employees," had to be made very rigid--and any flexibility had to be made dangerous or at least expensive for a lot of people--in order to work for even one or two generations. In real life women like Mrs. Wallace were aware that their own comfortable unemployment was endangered if any female admitted that even counting the pennies she was paid for sewing was less than a fearful burden on her feeble brain; they were the ones who enforced the social rules that said a girl who was known to have cut off her hair, much less appeared in public in trousers, was socially ruined for life. In real life Pup's generation was the one in which a lot of women agreed that voting for school board members would have put an unbearable strain on their fragile minds...

In real life Wyoming was the home of the women who first successfully exposed sexism as the biggest, most glaring flaw in the Socialist dogma. Before women's votes were counted in national elections, they were counted in Wyoming. Maybe, just maybe, in Wyoming Pup's story could have been a romantic comedy rather than an unmitigated tragedy. But I'm skeptical...and anyway the story is set in Colorado.

Harvest House, I suspect, was banking on the belief that many readers don't care whether it's historically plausible or not. They just want a clean, chaste romance in which a Nice Girl attracts True Love by developing a good character rather than merely flirting and looking cute. To Know Her by Name qualifies. In the course of the story Pup's merely nominal or cultural Christianity matures into the serious kind that makes her reconsider her undercover activity. Before letting themselves blather about being "in love" she and McKay go through some decorous Victorian stalling displays. Everyone needs to know that Pup is sincerely concerned about the people mourning the untimely deaths of the fictional men she pretended to be, in different towns, on different jobs.

Have I given away the plot by now? I have not. "Christian romance" presupposes that romance is part of the plot, and ought to presuppose (although sometimes it doesn't) that a character's or characters' moral or spiritual growth is another part. How Pup and McKay go after those crooked bankers, I've left readers to find out.

To find out and also help this web site encourage living writers, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address from the bottom of the screen. (Salolianigodagewi is a mail-sorting account not a Paypal account; when you e-mail "Saloli the Message Squirrel" about a book or other product advertised here, "she" will reply with the current correct Paypal address.) From this total cash price we'll send 10%, or $1, to Wick or a charity of her choice. Two of Wick's longish, wholesome romances will fit into one package, for a total cost of $15 (or e-$16), from which Wick or her charity will get $2.