A Tale of Two Sidneys

Sidney was a common boys’ name for those born in the early 20th century and was among the first surnames to become widely used as given names, along with Stuart, Stanley, and Leslie. Its historical popularity for men has been attributed to the admiration of Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) who was an English aristocrat executed by the British Crown. He had such treasonous ideas as people have the right to choose their own government and people should retain the power to abolish it if it becomes corrupt. His writings were admired by the American founding fathers.

The Sydney spelling trended for girls in the 1990s. The popularity for women doesn’t have a clear inspiration, but it started gradually in 1983, accelerated in 1990 and 1994, and peaked for those born in 2000. It may have come to public attention due to Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, who became famous in the 1980s for running an exclusive New York brothel. She appeared on Saturday Night Live and had a tv movie made about her life. Notable film Sidneys were also played by Vanity (Action Jackson), Meg Ryan (D.O.A), Annette Bening (The American President) and Neve Campbell (Scream).

Sidney is one of those names people complain about becoming too feminine for boys to use anymore. Despite its more recent feminine shift, it does still have a reputation for being unisex. Hockey star Sidney Crosby is a famous association and there’s still the enduring fame of actor Sidney Poitier. Poitier himself named his daughter Sydney in 1973 before the popular trend for women.

In truth, Sidney has never been exclusively masculine. The evidence shows not one name that became feminine, but two overlapping traditions: a masculine surname style name that rose through political and literary admiration, and a female line of Sidney/Sydney with older roots beginning in Wales.

A 19th century unisex name

When Sidney was trending for men in the UK and North America in the first half of the 20^th century, there was already a noticeable portion of women named Sidney. Sidney shows up in the Top 1000 US names for girls in the 1900s, with a small uptick in 1934 when the Australian Sydney Harbour bridge made world news. Further back, the 1850 US census has about 10,000 people named Sidney or Sydney, about 2,500 being female. This wasn’t just an American phenomenon. The 1851 England and Wales census lists about 5,000 people named Sidney or Sydney, including about 600 women and girls. Although women made up a smaller part, Sidney was not exclusively masculine.

This mixed usage was noted by contemporary name enthusiast Charlotte Yonge. She wrote in her 1863 History of Christian Names that Sidney was one of the first surnames used as a Christian name to come into use after the Reformation, and notes its use for women and men. She says for English boys it was inspired by the poet Sir Philip Sidney, but in Ireland Sidney was a girl’s name given in admiration of Philip’s father Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland.

Yonge wouldn’t have had to comb parish records to know of Irish women named Sydney. She would have known of Lady Sydney Morgan, the Irish novelist behind The Wild Irish Girl (1806), who was named after her grandmother in 1778. There was also Frances Sheridan’s 1761 novel The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph that made a female Sidney central to its plot. Sidney Kennon, the midwife who delivered George III in 1738, offers another early English example. She was also notable for being a collector of curiosities, and once owned Oliver Cromwell’s nightcap. For a supposedly masculine name, the historical record contains a surprising number of female bearers.

The 1850s US census supports an Irish connection for some female Sidneys, especially among foreign-born women. The pattern is not clean enough to make Sidney exclusively female in Ireland by 1850, but it does show that women were not marginal anomalies in the name’s history.

The American regional split is even more revealing. Older female Sidneys of the 1850 census cluster in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, while male Sidneys appear more often in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Among those born before 1800, Sidney was more common for women than men despite the higher male representation in those aged over 50 during the census.

This is the tale of two Sidneys, one developing through surname use in New England, and another preserved among women in the more southern colonies. That split broadly fits the different migration patterns as New England was shaped more by southern English settlement and Virginia, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania received more Irish, Scottish, and northern English settlers.

Gender distribution of individuals named Sidney or Sydney, born between 1760 and 1809 and recorded in the 1850 United States census. The map uses historical state boundaries as of 1810 and combines the spellings Sidney and Sydney. 

A similar break down of the 1850 England and Wales census shows another gendered split, this time between Welsh Sidneys and English Sidneys. For English born Sidneys before 1810 there was a mix of men and women, but the Welsh Sidneys were almost entirely women. Marriage records from the 18^th century confirm Welsh Sidneys were all brides. One notable Welsh woman was Sidney Griffith, a prominent figure in the Welsh Methodist revival of the mid-1700s.

The Ghost of names of the past

Scholars have explained the feminine usage of Sidney as a form of Sidonia or Sidonie, meaning “from Sidon”. The theory is plausible as Sidonie and Sidonia are found earlier in German and French contexts. There are sixteeth-century German aristocrats who bore the name, and the French prose romance Ponthus et la belle Sidonie was translated into English in 1501. However, English and Welsh records contain few women named Sidonie or Sidonia, whereas Sidney appears earlier and more frequently. A small cluster of women named Sindeny in Sussex is noteworthy, but the Puritan reading “Sin-Deny” better explains that form and does not account for Welsh Sidneys. 

The Welsh evidence points more strongly to a family honour name tradition. The Welsh Methodist Sidney Griffiths was born Sidney Wynne in Denbighshire around 1717, and was named after her grandmother Sidney Thelwall. That line reaches back to Sidney Gerard, born around 1555, whose father was Sir William Gerard, an Englishman who held political offices in Wales and Ireland.  In the Tudor period, aristocratic families sometimes honoured godparents or powerful patrons by giving daughters, as well as sons, their surnames as first names. Sir William Gerard was recommended to the office of Chancellor of Ireland by Sir Henry Sidney (1529-1586) so this female Sidney tradition may have begun as an aristocratic honour name from the surname. This connection is complicated by the fact that Sidney Gerard was named 20 years before her father’s appointment, when he was still Attorney General of Wales. An earlier connection is still possible and she is still the source of the Welsh Sidneys.

The Irish source is less certain but likely related. John Vaughan was a Welsh settler in Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster and was Governor of Londonderry from 1611 to 1643. He had an only daughter named Sidney Vaughan. In 1620, she married Scottish born Frederick Hamilton as a rich heiress. Whether through Vaughan’s Welsh background or his admiration of Sir Henry Sidney’s legacy, the Irish female Sidney line appears to draw from the same Welsh origin.

The Napoleonic twist

Connections to the prestigious Sidney family were the source for Sidney for English men. Sir Sidney Montagu became Master of Requests for King Charles I in 1616 and Sidney Godolphin, born in 1610, was related to the Sidney family through his mother. The year of 1800 was a pivotal year for the popularity of the name, with a sharp increase in boys named Sidney in both England and the US. With Algernon Sidney being dead for over 100 years, I went looking for a more contemporary association.

One plausible inspiration is British naval officer (William) Sidney Smith. In 1799, he helped stop Napoleon’s advance toward the Ottoman Empire at the Siege of Acre, becoming a celebrated British war hero and later a rear-admiral of the British navy. His fame offers a more immediate explanation for the sharp rise in boys named Sidney than Algernon Sidney alone. 

Literary associations further influenced the name. In 1859, Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in which Sydney Carton sacrifices himself for a worthy cause. The name started increasing in popularity in England after the novel. Dickens named his own son Sydney in 1847 after a different Sydney Smith (1771-1845), a writer known for his wit. Where his name came from, I can’t tell, but he had a brother named Courtenay and son named Douglas which points to a pattern of surnames of admiration rather than a direct family connection. Sydney Dickens went on to have a career in the navy, a path closer to the other famed Sidney Smith.

All in all, the evidence suggests that Sidney was more common for women in Wales, Ireland, and parts of the American colonies before Sidney Smith’s Napoleonic fame helped push the name onto a more masculine popularity track. It did not become predominantly female again until the late 20th century rise of Sydney.

The history of Sidney/Sydney can't be written as a simple gender swapping story. It had separate but overlapping traditions. There’s an older Irish and Welsh female tradition, a 19th century masculine surge shaped by military and literary associations, and a modern feminine revival through the New York Madam. The larger lesson is that name dictionaries often stop at the most visible male usage of unisex names while missing women’s earlier or concurrent use of the same names.