Introduction

Summary

Women Came Into Contact With soldiers of the British army in a number of roles in the nineteenth century: as sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and as sexual partners in casual or more long-standing relationships. Women who were courted by and who married soldiers in this period could endure serious hardships, often thanks to the army and its policies. Nevertheless, theirs was not simply a daily grind of regulated impositions and callous disregard, punctuated by periods of appalling misery. The conditions of army marriage encouraged women to be strong and independent, and to rely upon one another. In spite of the army's ambivalence toward them, they played vital roles in their regiments’ well-being, and indeed, often saw themselves as much a part of the regimental family as their serving husbands. Nevertheless, in the decades between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and Britain's entry into the Crimean War in early 1854, pejorative stories about soldiers’ wives appeared regularly in newspapers, focusing especially on their violence, their dishonesty, their drunkenness and their poor parenting and housekeeping skills. It is a central contention of this study that in spite of their often invidious reputation among contemporaries, the women whom soldiers married were, for the most part, respectable. Just as Nick Mansfield has recently shown for the men, so these women also brought to their time in the army, the values and behaviour which had shaped their lives in labouring-class communities. Sisters and mothers played a lesser role in quotidian military life given the physical distance that generally obtained between them and their soldier relative, but were able to offer emotional and material support through letters and gifts in order to reinforce natal family bonds, which were often strong. Daughters frequently chose to marry within the army, the familiar world of their childhood. Limited military support often made it imperative that widows and orphaned daughters – even quite young teenagers – be provided for through marriage, or remarriage, within the regiment, especially when it was serving overseas. While not necessarily adhering to the tenets of upper- and middle-class respectability, these women had their own notions of acceptable and appropriate behaviour which operated within tightly knit regimental communities. Women who became the sexual partners of soldiers, however, often had a more difficult time of it, even if in long-term common law relationships, and they could expect no succour from the army.