Det i Mandfolksklæder vidt bereiste Fruentimmer, E. M. Stokkenbeck, som Skrædersvend, Gottfried Jacob Eichstedt, merkværdige Begivenheder paa hendes Reiser til Lands og Vands, i Danmark, Holland, Tydskland, Bømen, Polen og Spanien, indtil hendes sidste Ankomst til Kiøbenhavn, hvor hendes Kjøn blev røbet. Udgivet af hende selv.
Trykt i Haderslev: [H. Luckander], 1806. Woodcut portrait on title-page. Unbound as published, with original papered spine. Unopened and untrimmed. 32 pp. Paper tanned and spotted; some creasing and small marginal tears and losses. Otherwise a well-preserved, unsophisticated copy.
A scarce autobiographical account of Engelbrecht Maria Stockenbeck, who lived and worked for several years as a male journeyman tailor before obtaining royal permission to practise her trade openly as a woman, and was later recognized as one of the first women’s rights defenders in Danish history.
An early nineteenth-century edition of the autobiographical account of Engelbrecht Maria Stockenbeck (1761–after 1794), with a woodcut portrait on the title-page representing Stockenbeck in male dress. Stockenbeck left an unhappy marriage, assumed a male identity, and spent several years travelling and working as the journeyman tailor Gottfried Jacob Eichstedt. More than a tale of disguise, the book records how adopting a male identity gave Stockenbeck access to a skilled trade, independent travel, and the itinerant culture of male craftsmen otherwise largely closed to women. After her sex was discovered in Copenhagen in 1784, she successfully petitioned Christian VII for the exceptional royal privilege of continuing to make men’s clothing and employing a journeyman, allowing her to practise openly as a woman the trade she had learned while living as a man.
Stockenbeck relates how, unable to find employment after leaving her husband, she travelled to Kiel, acquired a complete male wardrobe, bound her body to conceal its shape, and devised a cow-horn apparatus allowing her to urinate standing among other men. Having learned tailoring, she travelled as Eichstedt through Denmark, Germany, Holland, Bohemia and Poland, and by sea as far as Spain, moving between workshops, inns, and groups of journeymen. Her adventures include tavern fights, encounters with military recruiters and authorities, military service in Denmark, and romantic complications with women who believed her to be a man. In Poland a master’s widow wished to marry her; Stockenbeck writes that she wished she had been born a man, but eventually fled rather than reveal her sex. She later became Oldgesell, or senior journeyman, in Schleswig before returning to Copenhagen in 1784, where she was recognized, arrested, and her sex disclosed.
Archival research has confirmed the essential framework of Stockenbeck’s account while revealing considerable embellishment. Ejnar Stig Askgaard identified her as Ellen Maria Stokkebye, born at Ærøskøbing in 1761 to a day labourer, rather than, as she claimed, the daughter of a Hamburg goldsmith born in 1759; her marriage, adoption of male dress, work abroad as a tailor, position as Oldgesell, and eventual exposure are nevertheless independently corroborated. After obtaining her royal privilege she initially worked in Copenhagen, but later resumed an itinerant life, now openly as a woman practising the trade she had learned while living as a man. Her unusual position repeatedly brought her into conflict with authorities and guilds at Hillerød, Odense, Ribe, and Nibe, where in 1794 testimony confirmed that she continued to earn her living as a tailor.
The work was first published in Danish by Peder Boje Horrebow at Copenhagen in 1784, shortly after Stockenbeck’s return and exposure, and was almost immediately translated into German; further Danish editions appeared at Haderslev in 1785, 1787, 1806 and 1811. Stockenbeck thus turned her extraordinary experiences into a repeatedly published first-person narrative. In 1790 she submitted a copy to the Odense police as evidence of her identity; it remains preserved with the court papers.
Despite its repeated publication, the work is extremely rare. Writing in 2009, Askgaard knew only a handful of surviving examples: a Copenhagen 1784 printing and four copies representing the Haderslev editions of 1787, 1806 and 1811; his investigation of the Odense court records brought to light Stockenbeck’s own copy of the previously unrecorded 1785 edition.
Stockenbeck’s life was later interpreted in the context of women’s emancipation. Writing anonymously in Ude og Hjemme in 1933, Hans Scherfig declared: “One cannot but admire this woman’s energy and courage. She is in fact the first Danish champion of women’s equality with men, the first emancipated Danish woman.” As Askgaard observes, Stockenbeck was thus hailed as one of the earliest champions of women’s rights in Danish history.
Her story is remarkable not simply for her successful assumption of a male identity, but for what followed its discovery: she persuaded the Crown to allow her to continue the profession she had entered as a man, resumed an independent itinerant working life as a woman, and saw her experiences transformed almost immediately into a first-person narrative that remained in print for decades.
References: Askgaard, E. S. (2009). På fersk gerning. Fynske Minder, 29–42. Museum Odense; Krogh, T. (2013). Kvinder i mandsklæder. Historisk Tidsskrift, 113(1), 39–79.
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Price: €3,000.00