Did Lady Pirates Button Their Shirts?

Yes. Art you may have seen to the contrary wasn’t realistic.

Tucker Lieberman

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18th-century illustration: pirate Mary Reed stabs an enemy with a sword
Mary Read killing her antagonist. Illustration in The Pirates Own Book (1842). Public domain.

There’s a pirate killing an enemy. Or an illustration of the event, anyway.

It depicts Mary Read (1685–1721), sometimes also known as Mark Read, an English pirate, running her sword through an unfortunate man.

Mary had a woman pirate compatriot, Anne Bonny (born 1697, fate unknown after 1721). Mary and Anne were both raised as boys by their parents. They were both sexually interested in men. At first, when they met as pirates, they didn’t know they had the same secret.

Here’s a 1725 illustration of Mary:

A long-haired white pirate in men’s jacket and pants. The jacket hangs open, revealing breasts. She’s holding a sword.
The pirate Mary Read, in the 1725 Dutch edition of Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers. Public domain.

And one of Anne in the same book:

A long-haired white pirate in men’s jacket and pants. The jacket hangs open, revealing breasts. She’s aiming a gun.
The pirate Anne Bonney, in the 1725 Dutch edition of Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers. Public domain.

These illustrations communicated that Mary and Anne were pirates who had breasts. It’s made clear even to people who can’t read.

In a 2012 journal article, “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body,” Sally O’Driscoll wrote that these…

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