“Though Females are Forbidden to Interfere in Politics”: War, Medievalism, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer

Abstract

In this letter of December 1808 the fifteen-year-old Felicia Browne identifies the central irony crucial to women’s discussion of war at the turn of the nineteenth century, namely that although women were directly affected by the presence of their brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers in war, “females are forbidden to interfere in politics.” The fact that “Women have always and everywhere been inextricably involved in war’” (De Pauw, xiii) is unquestionable, traditionally in one of three places: victim, inciter, or camp follower. Women were victims of war, raped, tortured, or killed as spoils of war, or because they are the ones left behind to suffer anguish and loss of male loved ones. As inciter, women encouraged men to partake in the male-waged wars, the white feathers given by women in the First World War reflecting from the distaffs given centuries earlier by Eleanor of Aquataine and her women to men reluctant to join the Second Crusade. Camp followers were traditionally laundresses, cooks, nurses, gravediggers, and, most obviously, prostitutes.