War & Peace Quote by Calamity Jane

Self-mythmaking never sounds so matter-of-fact. In a couple of plainspoken sentences, Calamity Jane turns what could be scandal or spectacle into a practical adjustment: she "donned the uniform", felt "awkward", then got "perfectly at home". The rhythm matters. Awkwardness is acknowledged just long enough to establish credibility, then dismissed with frontier efficiency. The line reads like a shrug, and that shrug is the point.

The stated intent is simple: to explain how she came to wear men's clothing while riding with Custer. But the subtext is a quiet power move. Jane frames cross-dressing not as rebellion or performance, but as professional necessity and personal comfort. "Uniform" does double duty: it signals military belonging and also a social disguise that lets her move through male space with fewer questions asked. By locating the change in clothing inside the chain of command ("joined Custer"), she borrows the authority of a national myth to legitimize her own choices.

Context does the rest. Post-Civil War America was busy manufacturing heroes and taming the West into story. Women in those stories were usually props: schoolmarms, saloon girls, victims. Jane uses the grammar of memoir to elbow into the role of actor. It's also a sly comment on gender as workplace policy. If the frontier demanded competence over propriety, then "men's clothes" become less a transgression than a tool. The line survives because it refuses to beg for permission; it assumes the reader will catch up.