Conflagrations such as the Seven Years War (1756-63), the American War of Independence (1775-83), the French Revolution (1789), the French Revolutionary wars (1792-1801), and the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) punctuated the eighteenth century. Despite their virtual absence from the military histories, females were an integral part of these conflicts: ‘Behind each regiment came a company of women’.14
The female camp follower of the eighteenth century had a dubious reputation. Variously characterised as a prostitute, slattern, tart, profiteer and corpse-thief, she could be ‘every bit as bad as the men, if not worse, when it came to plundering’.15 Yet she was often simply a regimental wife who joined her husband on campaign and who performed vital support services, the ‘womanly’ tasks of washing, cooking, needlework and nursing, tasks not far removed from those she carried out in ordinary life.16 Female camp followers and sutlers (those who sold provisions, especially liquor) often donned regimental jackets to assert their allegiance to a company. Tolerated by the military authorities as a necessary evil, the Duke of Wellington, for one, regarded them as pests and was said to have flogged those who were ill disciplined.17 George Bell of the 34th Foot gave his assessment:
They impeded our progress at times, particularly in retreats. They were under no control. They were ordered to the rear or their donkeys would be shot. . . Despite the warning, next morning they would pick up their belongings and set off, lamenting their bitter fate, ahead of the column, marauding, preparing their men’s meals, before their arrival, plundering the battle-field or searching it for their dead; they were wounded, killed or died of exposure or hunger. Collectively or individually, they formed cameos of the Peninsular campaign, a colourful kaleidoscope of the romance and tragedy, devotion and self-sacrifice, the hardships and endurance of women at war.18
The British army allowed six women for each company of 100 infantrymen and six for each cavalry troop, and there was a lottery to determine who would go and who would stay behind. The Prussian army allowed five women, including their children, to follow every company of 100 men. If a soldier was killed, his widow might marry one of his comrades in order to retain her living. When the French Revolutionary wars mobilised an entire population, the National Assembly’s general conscription allowed for vivanditres, caniinitres and blanchisseuses.19
For the aristocracy, camp following was a fashionable pastime. In 1778, the Duke of Devonshire organised a voluntary militia in response to the growing fears in Britain of an imminent French invasion after France sided with the American colonies during their revolutionary war. Male members of the aristocracy made up the majority of volunteers (other able-bodied men already being in the army). They trained with ‘almost childish enthusiasm’ at camps at Coxheath in Kent and Warley in Essex, and they attracted sightseers on coach trips as well as the wives of the volunteers.20 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, accompanied her husband and was enthralled by the sight of mobilised soldiers. She also imagined ‘herself bravely leading a battalion of men in a bloody engagement against the invaders.’21 Along with her aristocratic friends, Georgiana soon became bored with merely observing the drills and parades and she set about organising a women’s auxiliary corps, complete with a fashionable uniform that attracted plaudits from the newspapers. But this was not the hard life of the average camp follower: Georgiana lived in comfort in two large tents decorated with furniture from Chatsworth, and her women’s auxiliary performed no discernible necessary functions for the troops besides providing amusement. Amanda Foreman argues, however, such an auxiliary marked the first time that aristocratic women considered the ways in which they might help their men in wartime.22
Ordinary male and female camp followers could not help but be caught up in the fighting: support behind the lines often turned into support in the lines. Yet some women deliberately chose to participate as soldiers in their own right, albeit by disguising themselves as men. In an age when military physicals were unheard of, this was easier than we might assume. Dress, demeanour and cleverly engineered sanitary devices allowed women to move among and fight alongside their male counterparts, whether as commissioned officers or privates. Only when she was wounded was a female soldier likely to be ‘revealed’ and ‘dead or alive, the unveiling of a woman in disguise always created a small sensation.’23 The eighteenth-century fascination with cross-dressing meant that the woman who donned a male uniform to follow a military career was a familiar figure in popular culture. They were celebrated in ballads that fed the appetites of all classes, such as the chapbooks and other forms of leisure highlighted by Tammy Proctor in this volume (pp. 306-8). Popular on the streets, they were also the fodder of refined songs that were performed in the theatres and pleasure gardens of the Georgian era to the delight of polite society. However large its casualties or brutal its outcomes, war was - and still is - especially for those not directly involved, a form of entertainment, and at least a hundred female warrior ballads were published between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century.24 The transgressive act of female cross-dressing was sometimes used to shame men into action, as in ‘The Female Volunteer or an Attempt to make our Men Stand’ (1746), which proclaimed:
Well, if ’tis so, and that our Men can’t stand,
’Tis time we Women take the Thing in Hand.
Thus in my Country’s Cause I now appear,
A bold, smart, Kevenbuller’d Volunteer;
And really, mark some Heroes in the Nation,
You’ll think this no unnat’ral Transformation:
For if in Valour real Manhood lies,
All Cowards are but Women in Disguise.25
While they cannot be taken as official records, being more indicative of the century’s fascination with cross-dressing than with accurate military history, the ballads nevertheless do tell us much about the very real practices of the armed forces of the day, the manoeuvres, drills, camps and press-gangs that impinged on civilian life in ways that are completely alien to us in the twenty-first century.26
It is impossible to ascertain the exact number of women who actually went into combat or to tell whether the figures of popular lore have real-life counterparts. Nevertheless, we can document cases of ‘women warriors’ who played active roles in the national wars and revolutions of the eighteenth century, through the biographical memoirs that responded to and encouraged public interest in these ‘amazons’. The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies (1740), for one, recounts the exploits of the woman also known as Mother Ross. Born Christian Cavenaugh in Dublin in 1667, at the age of twenty-six she disguised herself as a soldier in order to find her first husband, Richard Welsh, who had been press-ganged into the Dutch army. Cutting off her hair, binding her breasts and donning her husband’s clothes, she joined an infantry regiment as Christopher Welsh. As a foot soldier she was wounded at the battle of Landen in 1693, taken prisoner then released in 1694, and fought as a dragoon until 1697. After the battle of Blenheim in 1704, in which she took part, she eventually found Welsh and together they continued to serve in the Army as brothers, her gender and thus their marital status concealed, until she was seriously wounded when a shell struck her head and fractured her skull at the battle of Ramillies in 1705:
I was carried to Meldre, or Meldret, a small Town in the Quarter of Louvain. . . I was here trepanned, and great Care taken of me, but I did not recover in less than Ten weeks. Though I suffered great Torture by this Wound, yet the Discovery it caused of my Sex, in the fixing of my Dressing, by which the Surgeons saw my Breasts, and, by the Largeness of my Nipples, concluded I had given Suck, was a greater Grief to me. No sooner had they made this Discovery, but they acquainted Brigadier Preston, that his pretty Dragoon (so I was always called) was, in Fact, a Woman. He was very loath to believe it, and did me the Honour to say, He had always looked upon me as the prettiest Fellow, and the best Man he had.27
After a second wedding to Welsh, she took up being a sutler, foraging for the troops. Her sobriquet, Mother Ross, was given to her by a Captain Ross because of her lamentations after the death of Welsh in battle in 1709.28 Like many other women camp followers, she quickly remarried, but her second husband was killed soon afterwards in 1710 during a siege and she returned to England. Presented to Queen Anne, she received a shilling a day for life. Having moved back to Dublin she married another soldier called Davies and once more followed her husband, not to war but to England. In old age she lived as a Chelsea pensioner. The London Magazine reported on her death and subsequent editions of her posthumously published memoir enshrined her in legend.
Similarly, The Female Soldier, or the Surprising Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750), written and printed by the London newspaper publisher Robert Walker, is in part responsible for legend of Hannah Snell. In the preface of the work that documents her ‘surprising adventures’, he takes pains to stress Snell’s place in a long line of heroines, ‘for though her immediate Progenitors were but low in the World, when compared with Dukes, Earls, and Generals, yet she had the Seeds of Heroism, Courage and Patriotism transferr’d to her from her Ancestors.’ Thus Walker both assures his upper-and middle-class readers of Snell’s respectable heritage and provides an exemplar for his lower-class audience. Like Davies, Snell (1723-92) set out after her Dutch sailor husband when he abandoned her and enlisted, as James Gray, in Colonel Fraser’s Regiment of Marines, setting sail on the Swallow in October 1747 bound for the East Indies. Snell took part in the fleet’s attack on French-held Devakotti in 1748 and received multiple wounds: one shot in the right leg, five in the left, another in the groin. She treated all of these herself to conceal her gender. She eventually received a pension for having been wounded in action and was admitted as an out-pensioner at Chelsea Hospital. The connection between war and theatre was further reinforced when Snell, dubbed the ‘Amazon of the Indies’, took to the stage in uniform at Goodman’s Fields Theatre, London to regale audiences with nautical songs.29
The tradition of female soldiering in France, while no less fascinating to the nation, seems not to have inspired the same attendant balladry or theatricality. During the Revolution in 1789, Felicite and Theophile de Fernig dressed in uniform and joined their father’s troops of the Garde Nationale. They were soon found out but forgiven and continued to serve as soldiers, while being compared to Joan of Arc.30 The French Revolutionary wars (1792-1801) and the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) were not bereft of women warriors. Elizabeth Dubois was known a citoyenne Favre and fought throughout 1793 until she was captured. She escaped execution when the enemy commander realised she was a woman.31 Angelique Brulon joined her father’s regiment, the 42nd Foot, at the age of twenty-one. She fought in Corsica (1792-9) wearing male clothing and advanced from fusilier through to lieutenant. After being badly wounded at the siege of Calvi in 1799, she retired from the military and died in 1859. Significantly, she was considered a patriot because she followed her husband into battle, not because of the actions she performed as a soldier and officer in her own right: ‘she was remembered for a supportive gesture’.32 Therese Figueur, who served in male disguise as a French soldier between 1793 and 1815, for all her acknowledged courage and prowess, perhaps received the more ignominious treatment after the wars. Wounded repeatedly and taken prisoner, she was nevertheless unable to claim medical care and was denied the Legion d’honneur because she was a woman.33
Englishwoman Mary Ann Talbot (1778-1808) was more fortunate after her early tribulations. The fourteenth illegitimate daughter of the first Earl of Talbot, she was seduced by her guardian Captain Essex Brown of the 82nd Regiment of Foot and made to disguise herself as a foot boy in his service on board the Crown. As John Taylor, she was a drummer at the siege of Valenciennes in 1793 and was wounded, first in the ribs by a musket ball and then in the back when an Austrian cavalryman slashed her with his sword. After the death of Brown, she deserted and in 1793 signed on to a French privateer (armed vessel). When it came up against the British ship Queen Charlotte, she refused to fight against her countrymen and was flogged. Captured by the British, she revealed her true identity to Admiral Lord Howe who discharged her. She then joined the Royal Navy as a powder monkey on the Brunswick and took part in the battle of the Glorious First of June 1794. She was wounded in the thigh and grapeshot shattered her ankle. After recovering she joined the armed vessel Vesuvius but was taken prisoner by the French and spent eighteen months in prison. Released, she sailed for New York on the American ship Ariel and when she returned home she was press-ganged. She was discharged when she revealed her true identity. For the wounds she received in action, Talbot was rewarded with a pension of 20 pounds a year. She died in Shropshire at the age of thirty, having published her autobiography.34
The propaganda value of women soldiers was not lost on governments. The Russians held up Nadezha Durova as an exemplary heroine and ‘treated her as a pet of sorts’.35 Her memoir, The Cavalry Maiden (1836) recounts how she ran away from an unhappy marriage to enlist in the Tsar’s army in 1806. Using the name Alexander Vasilevich Sokolov, she spent seven years in the military and was present at the battles at Friedland (1807) and Borodino (1812), where she suffered contusion from a passing cannon ball.
Spanish warrior women were equally heroic in their campaigns against the French. Agostina became famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Her town, Saragossa, was besieged by Napoleon’s army, and with only 220 soldiers to defend itself against an army of 12,000, its fortifications were quickly overcome. The women formed companies to assist the men and when all from the artillery were killed, Agostina rushed to fire the cannon left by a dying soldier. Her actions inspired others to do the same, and the siege lasted for another eleven days and continued with street fighting, in which Agostina had a prominent part, until in the end the French gave up. In addition to medals, Agostina won the right to continue as an artillery officer with full uniform, pension and rights and took the name of the town as her surname.36
Such acts of heroism by ‘warlike Amazons’ have obscured the lives of thousands of women whose tales were not told by entrepreneurial publishers or touted by governments seeking exemplars for propaganda. This is especially the case for women caught up in the Jacobite Rebellion and the French Revolution. Brandishing swords at rallies seems to have been the closest Scottish women came to martial action. Their energies were devoted instead towards raising troops, providing money for supplies, offering hospitality, and sheltering fugitives. The narratives of the ’45, Maggie Craig has argued, have traditionally focused on and romanticised the actions of Flora MacDonald to the exclusion of other women ‘doubly marginalized’ by virtue of their gender and their politics. Yet,
The women were there, doing their bit alongside the men; some committed to their beliefs; some reacting as best they could to what was going on around them; some risking their lives and safety to help the wounded and the fugitives; others just trying to survive as their world fell to pieces.37
Margaret Ogilvy, for instance, accompanied her husband David, eldest son of the Earl of Airlie, as he marched to Edinburgh at the head of the Forfarshire regiment. She was with him, a drawn sword at her side, when he proclaimed Prince Charles prince regent at the mercat cross at Coupar Angus.38 The only woman officially allowed on the march south, she endured the hardships of the campaign, including the demoralising retreat from England. Some women were particularly virulent in their shaming of men into action when caution was mooted. Isabel Haldane reputedly told her reluctant husband Charles Stewart of Ardsheal: ‘if you are not willing to be a commander of the Appin men, stay at home and take care of the house, and I will go and command them myself.’39
Jacobite women were not immune to the wrath of the Government. After the Battle of Culloden, eighty were held prisoner, some for long periods, while others found their characters assassinated by officials keen on quelling any further uprising.40 Jennie Cameron experienced the barbs of slander and sexual innuendo after she recruited 300 men, whom she led to the raising of Prince Charlie’s standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745. Anne Mackintosh, wife of the Chief of Clan Mackintosh, was untruthfully rumoured to be Prince Charlie’s lover in the wake of her successful rallying of Mackintoshes and men of other clans. In opposition to her husband who eventually joined the government side, she was not averse to using threats to encourage volunteers. Carrying with her a pair of pistols, she wore the ‘traditional blue bonnet of the Scottish fighting man’ and was nicknamed ‘Colonel Anne’. Bonnie Prince Charlie dubbed her la belle rebelle.41
The historical amnesia evident in narratives of the ’45 was repeated after the French Revolution. Thousands of nameless women were at the forefront of the marches and uprisings of 1789 and some participated in armed combat. The levee en masse mobilised the entire population and les femmes du peuple, the lowest strata of prerevolutionary Paris, participated for the first time as citoyennes. Yet equality was a chimera. The female ‘firebrands’ that urged on uprisings and took to the streets to demand bread and rights receded to the background as the new government adhered to the old patriarchal values.42 The truly patriotic woman was defined as the loving wife and mother content to rule in her domestic sphere, supporting her husband after his day in the public arena.43 Women of the upper classes also found themselves little better off than they were in the ancien regime. The enlightenment ideals of domesticity and sociability were cultivated in the salons, and it was here that their power continued to be consolidated.
That is not to say that women did not persist in their demands. Since the fundamentals of citoyennete, citizenship, were inextricably bound up with national defence, power and equal rights, many demanded the right to enlist.44 The women who took part in the parades to celebrate the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille pledged themselves to ‘live and die for their country’. Pauline Leon led the Societe des Citoyennes Republicaines Revolutionnaires and, on 6 March 1791, read a petition to the National Assembly signed by 300 Parisian women demanding the ‘natural right’ to be organised into a unit of the National Guard:
Patriotic women come before you to claim the right, which any individual has to defend his life and liberty.
Everyone predicts that a violent shock is coming; our fathers, husbands and brothers may be the victims of the fury of our enemies. Could we be denied the joy of avenging them or of dying at their sides? We are citoyennes, and we cannot be indifferent to the fate of the fatherland.45
Theroigne de Mericourt echoed Leon’s call when she led a mob that stormed the Bastille at the start of the French Revolution. De Mericourt demanded that women be allowed to organise their own battalion, but the French National Convention ruled against this in April 1793. Male revolutionaries were determined to resist women’s political emancipation.46 Even historians, nearly two centuries later, regarded de Mericourt’s actions as misguided, if not ridiculous. In 1938, Jean Robiquet dubbed her ‘outrageous’ and recounted how other ‘foolish’ women had to be ‘courteously sent back to their stoves’ when a group of ‘young beauties wearing the Phrygian bonnet and armed to the teeth presented themselves at the bar of the Conseil de la Commune.’ An attorney admonished them to:
Remain as nature intended you, and instead of envying us males the perils of a stormy existence, content yourselves with letting us forget them in the bosoms of our families, where we may rest our weary eyes on the enchanting spectacle of our offspring made happy by your tender ministrations!47
The levee en masse decree of August 1793 firmly put women in their place when it came to the defence of la patrie en danger. While young men were to fight,
The married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes, and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old linen into lint; the old men shall repair to the public places, to stimulate the courage of the warriors and preach the unity of the Republic and the hatred of kings.48
Such gendered patriotism was becoming a key concept in European politics and society during this period of almost continuous conflict that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars initiated. It was necessary for nations to mobilise the emotions as well as the actions of both men and women, but there were defined spheres and arenas of participation, especially for the ‘respectable’ classes. Karen Hagemann has demonstrated how middle-class Prussian-German women were seen for the first time as being crucial to victory for the patriotic charity they were able to perform. When Prussia declared war on France in March 1813, volunteers were needed to help support the clothing and feeding of the conscript army, as well as their widows and dependents. Since nearly every family had sent a son to war, ‘the civilian population in Prussia responded to the appeals for donations with remarkable alacrity.’49 By July 1813, the first Female Charitable Association was established in Berlin. Hundreds more in 414 Prussian towns followed within the year: 72 per cent of the 573 recorded women’s organisations. Led by women of the aristocracy and upper class and staffed with workers from urban and lower classes, these women’s groups also spawned girls’ and daughters’ organisations, the primary focus of all of them being to collect donations and to care for the sick and wounded. According to Hagemann, the Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland (Berlin) raised phenomenal amounts of money, and women’s activities of this kind - linked inextricably to their domestic roles and gender expectations, were heralded as female heroism. They were, of course, also expected to be influential mothers and wives, motivating their men to enlist, keeping the home whilst they were away and welcoming them on their return. In addition to being willing to ‘pour scorn on “cowards”’, they were meant to grieve with dignity for
The fallen.50 Such patriotic activism was motivated not just by ideology or conformity with one’s neighbours, but by a real conviction that the French must be defeated if the Prussian identity and way of life were to be maintained.51 A precedent for female activism had been established, yet as French women in the wake of the Revolution discovered, ‘public activity in wartime had to be relinquished in peacetime and female contributions to the victory over Napoleon were forgotten.’52
In Britain from 1793 there was an equal enthusiasm for patriotic philanthropy. Women banded together to gather supplies, clothes and funds for the departing troops. It was a scene that was to be endlessly repeated in all future wars, but at the time it was unique and startling. Women presented regimental colours at assemblies and on occasion made speeches to the assembled troops and spectators.53 The bloody end of the eighteenth century and violent beginning of the nineteenth century also inspired a questioning of the fatalism that considered war and revolution not only normal and constant but also essential. As Martin Ceadel has shown, the peace movement proper can be dated from 1793 with the campaign against the French wars, which articulated ‘the first statements of pacifism other than those produced by sectarians such as Quakers’.54 Britain would be at war for the next twenty-two years. The introduction of mass armies meant that by 1809 it had 817,000 men in uniform. Ceadel goes on to argue that although the first documented peace society was formed in the USA in New York in August 1815, the movement itself began in Britain with the ‘first known meeting to plan a peace association’ occurring in London on 7 June 1814. Only an accident of timing gave the accolade to America.55 On 14 June 1816 the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace was founded in London. It almost immediately became known as the Peace Society and was ‘the world’s first durable peace association with a national reach.’56 Women’s role in the campaign was, at this time, extremely limited; making up only 10 per cent of the membership, their presence would not be sanctioned until well into the mid-nineteenth century. Fascination with the soldier hero, especially in Great Britain, was growing and even made its way into the novels of Jane Austen. Such a ‘cult of heroism’ owed much to ‘female enthusiasm’ and it was sustained even in the relatively pacific years that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars.57
World History
