Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar

Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar (1683 in Svenarum – 16 February 1733 at Björnskog in Hultsjö), was a Swedish corporal and crossdresser who served in the Great Northern War. She was put on trial for having served in the military posing as a man and for marrying a woman. She has been the object of plays, literature, research and exhibitions.

Background

Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar was born to lieutenant-colonel Johan Stålhammar (1653-1711) and Anna Brita Lood (d. 1699). Her exact year of birth is not confirmed, as the church documents are missing for the 1680s. The year 1683 is traditionally given because her age at the time of her death in 1733 is given as 50 years old. In any event, she was born after her elder sister Elisabet Catharina, who was born in 1680, and before the eldest of her younger sisters, Brita Christina, who was born in 1689, and 1683 or 1688 are often given as her year of birth. She had five sisters: Elisabet Catharina (1680-1730), Brita Christina (1689-1749), Maria Sofia (1690-1766), Gustaviana Margareta (1691-?) and Anna Brita (1696-1756). Her father Johan Stålhammar was himself a veteran of the war, but became almost ruined after his retirement in 1702.

She was raised at Stensjö manor. Ulrika later stated she had always enjoyed the tasks usually given to men, that she had hardly learned any of the tasks normally performed by females at all. She said that people who had seen her hunt and ride had told her that it was a shame that she was not a man, so her talents would have "been put to better use in the world". After the death of her heavily indebted father in 1711, she and her five sisters were left without money, and the family estate was mortgaged. They relied on the charity of relatives and entered into arranged marriages with people whom they considered to be below their standards in order to support themselves: within four years of her father's death, all her sisters were married. Ulrika, who had watched her sisters enter unpleasant marriages, did not wish to marry, and in March 1713, she dressed herself in her father's clothes, stole a horse from the stable and ran away from home. Reportedly she "escaped a proposed marriage which was for her unpleasant".

In 1724, her sister Elisabet Catharina learned of what she had done. Shocked over both the crossdressing and the same-sex marriage, she wrote to Ulrika that she had committed a "sin against the will of God". At one point, the couple managed to meet at the estate of the royal equerry Silfversparre at Gullaskruv, were Maria were temporarily given refuge: it is not mentioned under which circumstances they met. Maria Lönman apparently made a good impression on Drake.

Trial and verdict

To pose as a member of the opposite sex was, under the current law, a serious religious crime which could be punishable by death. Rumors were spreading about Stålhammar. In midsummer 1728, on the advice of her family, Ulrika went to Helsingör in Denmark, and wrote a letter of confession to the Swedish government and asked for its pardon.

The Göta Court of Appeal passed the sentence that the marriage had broken the law of God and nature, but acquitted them from the charge of homosexuality, as they decided to believe the testimonies that the couple had lived in a marriage without sex. This caused the judges to view the marriage favorably, as it was "of the purest, most spiritual kind, a union of virtue".

There was a certain awareness about the phenomena among the public: in 1715, during a trial against male homosexuality, the soldier Jürgen Wiess defended himself by claiming that the only reason why he had reacted willingly to the sexual advances of a male corporal was because he believed the corporal to be a woman in disguise, as it was known that there were several disguised women among the soldiers. and in a play which was performed by Calmare Gycklare in 2005.