The nineteenth century could almost be considered pacific in comparison with eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Four major wars in twelve years were the only martial events in what was an ‘unusually peaceable century’: France, Savoy and the Italians against Austria in 1858-9; Prussia and Austria against Denmark in 1864; Prussia and Italy against Austria in 1866; Prussia and the German states against France in 1870-1.58
By the end of the Napoleonic wars, armies had become professional and centralised with the result that rear services were now undertaken not by regimental wives but by military personnel, and camp followers, both male and female, were becoming vestiges of another era. 59 ‘Home’ and ‘front’ became rigidly demarcated and women were no longer allowed to move freely in and out of the military environment.60 Enlisted men were still being discouraged from marrying and the paltry provisions for wives and families served to some extent as a deterrent. In the 1850s they were still obliged to live in the same barracks as unmarried soldiers in accommodation that was overcrowded and afforded little privacy. If a soldier chose to live outside the barracks, he received a small allowance, but he also forfeited the right to claim necessities such as candles, fuel, bedding and furniture.61
Women’s position became even more difficult when men were posted overseas. Years of enforced separation meant that couples often never saw each other again. Regimental officers, in an effort to keep their married soldiers and to ensure good conduct, sometimes turned a blind eye to women smuggled onto ships or when men employed wives as their servants. The ballot system, which had previously regulated how many wives could accompany their husbands on campaign was last used during the Crimean war (1853-6), when four per company were allowed to sail with the army.62 Florence Nightingale described the plight of regimental wives at Scutari:
In the Barracks now are located some two hundred poor women in the most abject misery. They are the wives of soldiers who were allowed to accompany their husbands, a great number have been sent down from Varna; they are in rags and covered with vermin. My heart bleeds for them, and they are at our doors daily, clamouring for everything; but it is impossible for me to attend to them, my work is with the soldiers, not with their wives.63
Regimental funds were established to help women left behind, and the foundation of savings banks as well as charities such as the Wellington and United Services Benevolent Institution went some way to assuaging the hardship of widows.64
The gradual removal of women from the theatres of war coincided with the waning public fascination with the female warrior, who was regarded as ‘anachronistic and unnecessary’, no longer en vogue or ‘the “stuff” of hit songs.’65 James Miranda Barry stands out as one of the few examples of the eighteenth-century phenomenon. James Barry entered Edinburgh University in 1809 and graduated with a medical degree in 1812. At just 5 feet tall, with effeminate features and a little dog as a constant companion, Barry was regarded as an eccentric. Yet he was also overbearing, prone to arrogance and would flirt outrageously with women but comment scathingly on their failings. He spent forty-six years in the army, rising to the rank of major-general in the medical service and became a senior inspector of Her Majesty’s General of Hospitals. Barry treated 500 wounded from the Crimea at Corfu and later met and - it is reputed - snubbed Florence Nightingale. Not until Barry’s body was being prepared for burial on his death was it discovered the renowned army surgeon was a woman.
Although the public furore over her revelation was great, it was Nightingale, not Barry, who was celebrated in the Victorian popular ballad and broadside poem.66 ‘The Lady with the Lamp’, who went to the Crimea to combat the diseases of cholera and typhus that were killing men more effectively than enemy weapons, seemingly single-handedly carved a feminine niche in the ‘masculine sphere of war’.67 After Britain and France were drawn into the war in March 1854, The Times ran an article describing the appalling conditions in the hospitals and Nightingale, who had volunteered, was sent by Sidney Herbert, the secretary of State for War, as the head of a contingent of thirty-eight nurses to Scutari.68 Arriving on 5 November, truculent doctors resentful of her presence confronted Nightingale, but she accepted no opposition to her authority, which she asserted immediately. Hygiene was swiftly improved under her authoritarian hand. By Christmas she was said to have dismissed thirteen of her original female nurses. She was particularly dismayed by the arrival of voluntary women, nuns and devout ladies, sent as back up by Herbert. She threatened resignation at not being consulted. Her acerbic and formidable character was glossed over by the journalists who celebrated her achievement. Henry Longfellow’s poem, ‘Santa Filomena’ (1857), which gave her her epithet, confirmed her status as the ultimate ministering angel: ‘Lo! in that house of misery/A lady with a lamp I see’. Punch’s depiction is equally melodramatic:
And there is Mercy’s Amazon, within whose little breast Burns the great spirit that has dared the fever and the pest.
And she has grappled with grim Death, that maid so bold and meek:
There is the mark of battle fresh upon her pallid cheek.
Ladies’ and girls’ magazines featured stories of her early life as well as her work in the Crimea, while numerous biographies such as Florence Nightingale: The Wounded Soldier’s Friend helped perpetuate a myth that overshadowed the real woman.69
Like the celebrated female warriors before her, Nightingale - or perhaps more accurately, her mythic status - has also overshadowed the wartime contributions of other women. Mary Seacole may have been the ‘last of the camp followers’ when, after being rejected for Nightingale’s contingent, she sailed to the Crimea and established a canteen and officers’ club at Balaclava, dubbed the ‘British Hotel’. 70 She also journeyed to the battlefront ‘with two mules in attendance’ to supply food and medicine to the soldiers and was the first woman to enter the captured city of Sevastopol with allied troops.71 Equally familiar in the trenches for retrieving the wounded during the siege was Mrs Rebecca Box, who had followed her husband with the 4th King’s Own Regiment and was known for her courage in the face of shelling even when the soldiers had taken cover. She also managed through charm and outright bravado to inveigle brandy from the French troops for her own. Her compatriot, Mrs Longley, even when widowed, refused to return to England, staying on to nurse the wounded at Balaclava. One story recounts how she trod through an icy stream to bring brandy to her freezing men back in the lines.72 Russian nurses were organised by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and the Sisters of Mercy of the Society of the Exultation of the Cross, which mobilized 163 women volunteers.73 Seventeen of them had died under fire by the end of 1855. Over 600,000 men perished in the Crimean war, half a million of disease: 22 per cent British, 30 per cent French and half the Russian forces.
The language of war was not abandoned in peacetime, for when Nightingale established her School of Nursing at St Thomas’s Hospital, London in 1860, military terminology permeated her reforms and the outlook of those she instructed: ‘They saw themselves as soldiers - officers - in the fight against disease’ and training was ‘modeled on that of the army’.74 Like religious movements such as the Salvation Army and hymns such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, this medical reformation demonstrated how militaristic metaphors had permeated the consciousness of the Victorians. Nightingale nurses defined themselves as a separate corps, subordinate to male doctors, but clearly defined within their own sphere of influence. They were recruited by Nightingale and answerable to her or to superior military officers who may have called upon them.75 An often uneasy relationship existed between male orderlies and other personnel who resented their imperious orders but, as one nursing sister put it:
Nursing is warfare, and the nurses are soldiers. . . Sin and his consequences - diseases, suffering, degeneration, degradation, death - seem to fill the foreground of the view, and we want a strong mind to face them bravely, and to look through and beyond.76
Nursing, however dangerous and unsavoury the reality, was seen as an appropriate role for women in war because of its associations with the mothering function, with women’s supposed innate instincts for comfort, care and succour.
Such a development coincided with a larger societal attitude shift, which the concept of ‘separate spheres’ encapsulated. The home, domestic duties and the family were propounded as women’s prime occupation - and preoccupation. Evangelicals in Britain especially adapted Rousseau’s philosophy that a woman’s ‘contribution to the welfare of the nation was essentially private and always indirect.’77 In addition to the numbers of women who bucked against such constraints, many ironically found ‘a greater sense of purpose, an opportunity for escape into action and commitment’ in their separate realms.78
The increasingly influential British peace movement, for one, adhered to the separate-sphere dictum as it continued to marginalise women, confining them to ladies’ associations, the first of which was formed in 1821. Respectable women were not allowed to sit on committees or speak at mixed-gender public meetings, so that these all-female groups allowed women an activist role that was in keeping with conven-tion.79 In its ‘Appeal to Christian Females, on the subjects of Peace and War’ published in the Herald of Peace in 1823, the Peace Society reiterated conventional ideas about women, with ‘their bewitching smiles and affectionate importunity, removing from the hand of wrathful man the firebrand of war’.80
While Eugenie Niboyet published the first pacifist journal, La Paix des Deux Monde (afterwards L’Avenir), in 1844, her middle-class British sisters were occupying themselves in the more circumspect yet idealistic all-female Olive Leaf Societies, founded by Elihu Burritt.81 Involving fifteen to twenty women each, the groups met in each others’ homes to discuss issues, to correspond with foreign ‘circles’ in countries such as Spain and Denmark, and to write improving literature for children, which they published in The Olive Leaf or, Peace Magazine for the Young. By the 1850s there were 150 local Olive Leaf Circles in Britain, with a total membership of 3,000 women. Although they could lay claim to being the first women’s peace movement, the separate-spheres ideology to some extent caused enthusiasm for the societies to wane as mores about women’s place became entrenched: ‘Anything which took women away from their family and out into a more pubic arena threatened the sanctity of the home.’82 When the suggestion of female speakers at the London Peace Congress of 1851 was mooted, the Peace Society argued that the ‘idea of a woman taking an active part and speaking in such an assembly is repugnant to the English mind.’83 A national women’s association was not established until 1874 and Quaker Priscilla Peckover was, in 1889, the first woman invited to join the London committee, an invitation she turned down. Ceadel argues that we should not judge the Peace Society too harshly, for in its drive to bring its controversial ideas to a sceptical society, it could not afford to breach too many conventions, especially that of women’s place in philanthropic organisations. The women’s peace movement was boosted by the publication of Bertha von Suttner’s pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms) in 1889. She had deliberately set out to ‘be of service to the Peace League. . . [by writing] a book which should propagate its ideas’.84 Because of her careful research and the reality of the horrors experienced by her heroine, the effect of Die Waffen nieder was so real and the implied indictment of militarism so telling that its impact was tremendous, and it encouraged the formation of new women’s anti-militarist and disarmament organisations throughout Europe, including the Union Internationale des Femmes (1895) and the Association des Femmes des Suede pour la Paix (1899).85
In the long period of relative peace in Europe between the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, peace societies used the dearth of martial conflict as evidence that ‘war had become an anachronism’.86 Yet despite such optimism and the lack of actual war, there were ominous signs of coming international crises, and Europe was growing steadily more militaristic in its outlook. Predictions of future wars, the rise in status of the soldier and the fascination with all things martial, from dress to literature were emblematic of the age. And women were just as susceptible to the romance and seduction of this as men. In the same way as the language of war entered the reformation of nursing, it permeated wider public consciousness. The Victorian era was conditioned by and for war. Royal women took to donning military uniform when inspecting the troops, a trend started by Queen Victoria. When the Victoria Cross was inaugurated on 26 June 1857, it made for ‘one of the most stirring military spectacles ever seen in London’, not the least because the Queen, ‘mounted on a magnificent charger’ wore a pseudo-military uniform:
A round hat with a gold band around it, and on the right side a red and white feather. Her dress consisted of a scarlet tunic, open from the throat, and a dark blue skirt, and across her shoulders was a gold embroidered sash.87
Treitschke’s ideas on women and his view that the matters of state belong to men informed German opinion on separate spheres.88 Women’s organisations, while encouraging an auxiliary role for women in war, emphasised the centrality of their voices. The Patriotic Women’s Association, for instance, was founded in Prussia in 1866. The end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 marked a turning point for the European outlook from passive to active, from anticipation of peace to expectation of conflict. The period of calm was nearing its end. The German Empire, united when the King of Prussia was proclaimed emperor, signalled the imminent return of large-scale warfare carried out by huge armies.89 In 1877 there were 400 women’s patriotic organisations in Germany; by 1891 there were 800. Voluntary imperialist organisations in Britain such as the Girls’ Friendly Society (founded 1874) and the Primrose League (founded 1883) acknowledged women’s contribution to empire-building while promoting health and hygiene for the good of the nation. L’unione feminile, an Italian monthly review first published in 1899, promoted the ‘image of virtuous and patriotic mother.’90 Italy, in effect, politicised the ‘angel in the house’ as ‘Mazzini’s revolutionary republicanism. . . placed women at the centre of a most radical vision for a new society.’91 These were mothers of the nation - bearers of soldiers, consolers of the bereaved and the wounded, the unprotected for whom the men were fighting. Yet they could be as bellicose and bloodthirsty as any man, just as the peace organisations demonstrated that men could be as pacific as women.
It is no coincidence that The Battle of Dorking was published at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. Written by Sir George Chesney, the novel described a German invasion of Great Britain and started a vogue for prophetic stories of a European Armageddon:
The First World War, it would seem, had been desired and described long before it took place [for] between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year without some tale of future warfare appearing in some European country.92
The fear over a kind of degeneration also began to preoccupy the European public imagination of the late nineteenth century. Max Nordau’s quasi-medical expose Degeneration (1895) voiced and fed on widely held fears about the physical and moral threats to Western civilisation. The emergent militant women’s movement, avant-garde art and homosexuality were all seen as signs of racial decline. War was seen as a purifier. Armed conflict, some believed, brought the masculine virtues to the fore and solidified traditional gender roles where man was aggressive/defensive and woman passive/defended.93
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) seemingly provided an excellent opportunity to purify the British nation, but in fact it bore out the fears that the population was physically and morally deteriorating when it was announced that a third of all recruits to the army was found to be unfit. The 14,000 women who served as army nurses were ‘nursing British imperialism’ as well as soldiers.94 Although fought on African soil and involving indigenous Africans, the Second Anglo-Boer War was, in essence, a European conflict, fought between whites. The British and the Boer descendants of the Dutch settlers were relentless in their own claims to the land and the sovereignty of what we now call South Africa. The conflict preoccupied the British population in ways that prefigured that of the First World War. Women, as much as men, were fascinated by the reports of battles, sieges and reliefs of such towns as Mafeking and Kimberley. Periodicals aimed at women and girls were filled with stories, first-hand accounts and advertisements that explained and commercially exploited the war. In addition to learning about the experiences of a nursing sister, one could make, with the help of recipes, such themed dishes as Africander Pudding and Brain Cutlets a la Buller. Women were advised on how to dress in times of mourning and instructed on ways they could support the troops by knitting socks for soldiers or by contributing to funds for soldiers’ families. Emily Hobhouse articulated the other side of the war when she publicly criticised the conditions of the concentration camps set up by Lord Kitchener to contain Boer women and children. Her book The Brunt of War and Where it Fell (1902) caused a sensation and while it earned her accolades from peace campaigners, it caused her to be pilloried by those who adhered to the cult of imperi-alism.95 Despite the differences in its political aims and its distance from the home front, the Boer War was a rehearsal for the First World War. ‘The last of the colonial and the first of the modern wars’, it bridged the divide - literally and symbolically - between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.96
World History
