While watching a recent telecast of the Academy Awards, I was struck by the number of beautiful women dressed in what looked like men's clothing. Whitney Houston showed up in a white tuxedo, and Janet Jackson wore a tux jacket and palazzo pants. Even Whoopi Goldberg switched into a set of Giorgio Armani tails for part of the show. All that cross-dressing reminded me of a famous incident in the 1860s when Eliza Ann Hurd DeWolf was arrested for appearing on the streets of San Francisco dressed in male attire.

Eliza DeWolf was an early-day feminist who arrived in San Francisco in 1865 to give a series of lectures on the "Causes and Preventatives of Female Weaknesses" and "Dress Reform--the New Costume for Women." She appeared on stage wearing "breeches and boots." (No, fellas, not just "breeches and boots.") This was scandalous enough, but then she took a stroll down Montgomery Street attired in "full masculine apparel," including pantaloons, a bobtail-coat, and "fashionable don't mention 'ems." She was accompanied by a gaggle of "yelling and hooting boys" who ridiculed her as she made her way through the heart of the city's financial district.

All this was too much for the defenders of public morality and decency. No less a personage than Bret Harte denounced Eliza DeWolf, complaining that in San Francisco "there is already too great a lack of feminism, bashfulness, exclusiveness and timidity in our women." He warned against any innovation in attire "which tends to lower the standard of female modesty" or which makes women "more masculine and confident." A letter to a San Francisco newspaper, signed Propriety, declared  "any woman who appears on the street arrayed in a suit of men's clothes insults the whole sex." Propriety demanded that the police apprehend this flagrant miscreant and "put a stop to such carryingons ere (or) others imitate the example." One of San Francisco's finest obliged and arrested Eliza, charging her with violating a city ordinance that expressly prohibited cross-dressing by men and women.

Eliza DeWolf was convicted and sentenced to county jail but served only a few days behind bars before a sympathetic judge threw out the city's cross-dressing ordinance. She celebrated her victory by returning to Montgomery Street and promenading most conspicuously in a pair of "glaring green bloomers." So it was that Eliza Ann Hurd DeWolf won for herself a permanent place in the colorful history of old San Francisco as "DeWolf in Men's Clothing."