DPhil Research Presentations – Oxford Centre for the History of Childhood

“This Boy is Really a Girl!”: Youth Cross-Dressing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
Hannah Stovin (Mansfield College, Oxford)

On 19 March 1889, an anonymous Daily Telegraph columnist expressed alarm at what he called a revived “craze” for girls “masquerading in boys’ clothes,” warning that it threatened to spread “to the proportion of an epidemic” and speculating that doctors might soon classify it as a “novel form of hysteria.”

Taking this anxious polemic as its starting point, this paper examines the “girl-boy” as a distinctive and disruptive figure in the late nineteenth-century popular imagination. While historians have explored female-to-male cross-dressing in this period, such work has often assumed adult subjects, overlooking the central role of youth—both literal and perceived—in shaping contemporary interpretations. Labels such as “girl” and “boy” were frequently applied irrespective of chronological age, revealing how gender performance was understood through ideas of immaturity, development, and life stage.

By positioning the “girl-boy” alongside more familiar archetypes such as the “female husband,” the paper argues that this figure was similarly pervasive yet remains underexamined. Attending to youth, it suggests, is essential to understanding both the motives attributed to such behaviour and the social anxieties it provoked, highlighting how late nineteenth-century gender was structured not only by fluidity but also by temporality.

Rescuing Orphans, Reimagining Futures: International Jewish Humanitarianism and Orphan Migration After the First World War (1919-1924)
 Charlotte Canizo (St Hugh's College, Oxford)

This paper examines how Jewish humanitarian organisations responded to the mass orphan crisis that followed the First World War and the Russian Civil War. Between 1919 and 1924, anti-Jewish violence, war, and famine in Eastern Europe left thousands of Jewish children orphaned or separated from their families. In response, Jewish organisations developed transnational relief networks linking Eastern Europe to Western Europe, North America, Palestine, and South Africa. These networks supported orphaned children in situ and, when possible, arranged their relocation abroad.

Focusing on this pivotal moment, the paper argues that Jewish child relief after the First World War became a site where humanitarian, ideological, and political projects intersected - demonstrating that the rescue of orphans was not only about survival, but also about shaping Jewish futures. For some organisations, emigration to safer environments abroad offered both protection and the promise of rebuilding Jewish life elsewhere. For others, supporting children within Eastern Europe remained necessary in the face of restrictive immigration policies and limited resources. In practice, relief strategies often combined migration schemes with local assistance.

Drawing on archival sources from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), the Federation of Ukrainian Jews, and other Jewish relief organisations, the paper explores how organisations selected which children could migrate, negotiated immigration restrictions, and increasingly sought to address the emotional and psychological needs of orphaned children as part of postwar reconstruction. In doing so, it shows how the rescue of orphaned children became central to reimagining Jewish futures in the aftermath of wars, pogroms, and famine.