During the 1840s and ’50s, when the abolition of slavery began in the U.K. (the U.S. would follow in the 1860s), social elites became concerned about the physical health of white women due to restrictive clothing and a lack of exercise. Amid fears that white people would become a minority as more immigrants arrived and abolition neared, white women were encouraged to lead more active, outdoorsy lifestyles. The tomboy became a perfect cure for white malaise. It would, in theory, better prepare young white women “for the physical and psychological demands of marriage and motherhood,” as Abate writes, and further ensure that the white race would not die out.

The tomboy showed up everywhere in pop culture in the coming years, in some cases reaffirming white-supremacist ideas. Abate cites Capitola, the tomboy main character in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, as an example. In the novel, Capitola, who is white, chops off her hair and dresses up as a boy to escape a life of dire poverty. Young Cap’s life becomes easier after her transformation, but she continues to treat black characters as poorly as she had when she dressed as a girl. Abate describes a scene in which Capitola threatens to beat her uncle’s slaves if they don’t listen to her, and notes that Capitola frequently insults her black friend, inadvertently demonstrating the ways that tomboyism was a lifestyle that would benefit white women at the continued expense of black people.

The tomboy’s rise coincided with first-wave feminism, in which women fought against the patriarchal establishment for (white) suffrage. But rather than liberate women from the bounds of traditional gender roles, as the modern conception of the tomboy might suggest, the original tomboy was a role built to solidify the vigor of future mothers to white progeny.

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Though the tomboy’s roots are mixed up in racism, the concept has changed over time. In particular, the tomboy has been a significant identity for queer girls. In her 1999 essay “Tomboys and Cowgirls: The Girl’s Disidentification from the Mother,” the psychoanalyst Dianne Elise notes that more lesbians report having been tomboys in their youth than straight women and girls, for reasons related to sexuality.

Elise theorizes that for many straight girls, the tomboy phase ends with adolescence, when young girls become sexualized and inherit a new set of gender-conforming expectations. Yet these expectations can be damaging to a girl’s self esteem and self respect, no matter her sexual orientation, Elise finds. Lesbian tomboys, in her view, have found a workaround: The identity becomes a role of self respect.

Today’s queer tomboy reclaims some of the altered gender norms that were once promoted among (white) antebellum girls. Of course, women of various sexual identities continue to be tomboys into adulthood (and many queer women were never tomboys). But Elise’s take—that adolescent gender ambiguity gets left behind when heterosexual teenage girls abandon tomboy ways—suggests that by providing a label that is free from the mandates and judgment of sexual orientation, the tomboy demonstrates that gender expression is not necessarily tied to sexual orientation.