Do Not Covet Your Neighbor's Wife

    

 

     In July 1903 a wire story about a woman masquerading as a man appeared in newspapers across the United States.

      A criminal trial revealed the sex of Miss William Ray, the young woman who succeeded in passing herself off as a man for eight years in Prentiss County, Mississippi.

     Jim Gatlin, a farmer in the neighborhood, was arrested and placed on trial for assault and battery on William Ray. The testimony was conclusive.

     Ray’s eyes were blackened and his face badly cut. A verdict of guilty seemed probable when Gatlin threw himself upon the mercy of the jury with a plea, always strong in southern states, that Ray had been too intimate with Gatlin’s wife and he had assaulted him on that account.

     Ray was not nonplussed, but met the charge by declaring and proving that he was a woman. Gatlin was bound over to the circuit court under bond.

     Miss Ray, as the story ran, gave the Boonville authorities much annoyance by insisting on going back to trousers. After her appearance in the Gatlin case she was arrested, but there was no law in Mississippi forbidding a woman from masquerading as a man. She was released.

   Perhaps there is much more to this story than was revealed. Give it some speculation. The possibilities are endlessly amusing.