Mary Read

http://www.vleonica.com/read.htm

Background

Female pirates were not exactly the norm during the height of piracy in the 18th Century. The pirate world was almost entirely male.  It was a common superstition that it was bad luck to have a woman on board a ship.  Pirating was hard laborious work, the kind most women at the time would not want to or have the ability to take part in.  Pirating was a world of men, so few women took on the life of a pirate. 

There are a variety of early pirate narratives, the most widely read compilations being the Marine Research Society's The Pirates Own Book and Daniel Defoe's A General History of the Pyrates.  These books contain the stories of many pirates, but only two females are mentioned.  Mary Read and Anne Bonny are the lone famous lady pirates.  Their stories are romanticized tales of their unorthodox childhoods and adult lives of cross dressing as men on pirate ships.   The legitimacy of how factual the descriptions of the women are has been questioned because of the romantic nature of the narratives and the rarity of female pirates.  Although the stories may not be entirely factual, the existence of these women in history intrigues us.  The historical onlooker wishes to know more about the ferocious women who were able not only to survive, but thrive in a land of men.

Early Life

Mary Read's life was destined for the unusual from the time she was an infant.  Mary's mother was married to a sailor and had her first child, a boy with her husband.  Soon after they were married, the father went out to sea and never returned, leaving behind Mary's mother and the baby.  Mary's mother happened to become pregnant again with the child of a man who was not her husband, and Mary was the product of this relationship. The baby boy died in infancy, leaving the illegitimate Mary and her mother alone. 

Since Mary's mother was a single mom in 18th Century England, she had to get creative with ways of financially sustaining the two.  She recalled that her mother-in-law was a wealthy woman.  She devised a plan that would allow her to get some money from her husband's mother.  She dressed Mary as a boy and presented her as the old woman's grandson.  The plan worked.  Mary and her mother received financial support for the rest of the old woman's life while Mary masqueraded as a boy.  As Mary was getting older, her mother explained to her that she was a girl, not a boy, in hopes that Mary could conceal her true identity better.  After the grandmother died, Mary was again used as a pawn in the financial game.  At age 13 she was hired out as the footboy to a French Lady to make some money.  It is said that she grew strong and robust and decided she did not want to live a life of servitude any longer, so she embarked on a life at sea.

Love and Life as a Pirate and Soldier

Mary played the part as the ideal manly pirate.  She dressed as a man to conceal her true identity and truly fit in in the world of men.  She was strong, valiant, courageous and fierce.  This allowed her to be able to work on a pirate ship.  However, she soon left that position and became a soldier (another male career).  It was not until she fell in love with one of her fellow soldiers, a man named Fleming, that her true gender was discovered.   When she fell in love with Fleming, it drove her mad.  Her fellow soldiers were worried that she had gone off the deep end.  Yet she somehow found a way to sleep in the same tent with Fleming and reveal her womanhood to him.  Soon after this discovery, she switched to girl clothes and the two were married. After this, they wanted to leave the army life so they set up an eating house called "Three Shoes."  The quaint life did not last long.  Read's husband died shortly after they were married so without many options, she returned to the sea.

Mary was again cross-dressing and working aboard a non-pirating ship that was captured by a group of English pirates.  Mary was spared because she was English and joined the ranks of John Rackham's crew.  This is where she encountered Anne Bonny.  These two had another interesting meeting because Anne was also dressed as a man on the ship.  Anne had romantic feelings for Mary so she revealed to her the fact that she was a woman, and then Mary was forced to do the same right back.  The two became companions after this meeting.  Anne at the time was involved with Rackham, and he started to get jealous of the women's closeness (as he still thought Mary was a man) so to abate his anger and jealousy, Mary also revealed her female identity to him. 

On board Rackham's ship, her next and final love affair took place.  She fell in love with one of the captives on the ship, a handsome artist.  She revealed her female identity to him by carelessly showing him her breasts one day when they were alone together.  Their love blossomed and Mary was once again enraptured by a man.  Her brave, manly nature played itself out in a situation where she saved her lover who was supposed duel a man on the ship.  Mary apparently thought he wouldn't be able to handle himself, so she agitated the man her lover was supposed to fight and dueled him first.  It ended in Mary slaying the man so her lover could live. 

Mary Read killing the man her lover was set to duel.

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/read,maryt5.jpg

End of Life

Mary, along with man of the others from Rackham's crew, was tried by the English courts.  Mary pleaded that they spare her life because she was pregnant.  The courts did just that, but it did not matter because Read died when she was in jail. 

Why the Piracy?  Why the cross-dressing?

An interesting question for the reader  to ask regarding these fantastic tales is why would a woman in her right mind would decide to join the ranks of pirates.  Why would she not find a job or a husband on solid ground and stay away from the dangers of brutal sea faring?  One can only speculate as to the reasoning behind these two famous female pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, making such a decision.  An interesting observation from both of their childhood stories is the fact that they were both dressed as boys instead of girls growing up.  This fact may have contributed greatly to their taking on a male role as a pirate.

Gender Psychology and Mary Read

Gender is not necessarily black and white.  There are many factors that influence how a person views his or her own gender.  These factors are social, psychological and biological.  Obviously, one identifies with a particular gender because one is biologically of that gender.  But cultural, social and psychological influences are equally important in the formation of one's gender identity.  A child begins to understand and identify with a particular gender by about age two.  This identity is influenced in large part by the parents or primary caretakers of the child.  Whether a child considers him/herself a little boy or girl is due in large part to what their parents have told them.  Factors like the social interactions, dress, and activities also help a child to form an identity linked to a particular gender.  A central purpose of adolescence is forming a gender identity.  An adolescent develops their own concept of just how much maleness and femaleness they have.  This gender identity formation carries one through life and can guide later behaviors and choices.

We do not know whether at the age of two when gender identity begins to form if Mary was dressing as a boy or not.  She may have still been a girl to her mother at that time.  But regardless of whether she had already begun this childhood cross-dressing at the age where identity begins to be formed, a great deal of gender confusion would have had to be present in her early life. She either began identifying herself as a boy at age two when gender starts forming, or she formed her identity as a girl and was later confused when she had to start dressing like a boy.  In either circumstance, significant distortion of herself and her gender were present.  Her mother, the person who probably had the greatest influence on her at the time, dressed her as a boy and treated her as a boy.  Mary was was only told of her female gender in late childhood.  Mary dressed as a boy, played as a boy, and worked as a boy.  This identification with being male was something Mary would have had to cope with upon discovering she was female.  However, if the fact that she was dressed opposite her own sex and acted like a boy for all of her childhood was not sufficient to cause her confusion, she was also not able to act as a female until significantly later in life.  After discovering her true identity she continued to work as a boy and as she got older she chose male careers over female ones.

An important part of being human is fulfilling the roles of society.  These roles are based on the cultural norms of a given society and are lived out by its members.  One finds an identity within a particular role.  Most young women in Mary Read's time would fit into the female role of wife and mother and perform female tasks typically associated with women.  Not Mary.  She was working as a man on a pirate ship or fighting as a soldier in the army.  Much of this may have to do with her identification with the male gender. Identification with the male gender would lead her to be comfortable taking on male roles than female ones.  She would have had the desire to fulfill a male role because from close to the beginning of her life she identified with the male gender.  It would have been natural for her to continue following a life characterized by maleness.  It is difficult to escape from a preexisting role.  If Mary had identified herself in situations where she behaved as a male throughout her whole upbringing, it would not be a stretch to say that it was relatively normal for her to continue in that role.  Living as a woman would mean changing her whole identity.  This may have been why she continually reverted back to piracy and the male-dominated life at sea.

Although we cannot fully know Mary Read's motivation for pirating, we can try to explain it.  The rough life of a man at sea was not one typically chosen by women.  Mary Read crossed the gender barrier that exists in the pirate world.  She embraced the male role and thrived in doing so.  We can attribute much of this anomaly to her unorthodox upbringing and her identification with the male gender from early in her life. 

References

Defoe, Daniel. A General History of the Pyrates. New York: Dover Publications, 1972.

Rediker, Marcus.  Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Marine Research Society. The Pirates Own Book: Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

DeVault, Christine; Sayad, Barbara; Strong, Bryan; Yarber, William; Human Sexuality: Diversity in Contemporary America. New York: McGraw Hill Publications, 2008.

Myers, David. Social Psychology. New York: McGraw Hill Publications, 2005.

Cohen, Yecheskel. Gender identity conflicts in adolescents as motivation for suicide. Adolescence,  Vol. 26, Issue 101.

Kirkpatrick, Martha. The Nature and Nurture of Gender. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Vol 23(4), 2003. (558-571).