First Advisor

Ann Weikel

Term of Graduation

Winter 1981

Date of Publication

3-3-1981

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in History

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

Peninsular War (1807-1814) -- Women

DOI

10.15760/etd.3129

Physical Description

1 online resource (3, 146 pages)

Abstract

This thesis examines the lives of British women, soldiers' and officers' wives, for the most part, who followed the British army on campaign in Portugal, Spain, and southern France during the Peninsular War (1808-1814). Because most of the women were of the working class, their major roles, as wives, mothers, widows, workers, and criminals, have been contrasted with those roles as defined in British working-class culture.

No direct female sources exist for this war. Information was therefore gathered from male diarists, letter writers and memoirists of the period, using modern research into working-class behavior in the early industrial period as a check on the attitudes of contemporary male observers. More than seventy-five memoirists--all in print--were consulted through the British Library and various university collections in this country and Canada. In addition to modern secondary sources on working class women and their families, recent military historians also provided useful information on social class and army structure and customs.

The working-class family pattern proved durable, but significant changes occurred in women's roles in the context of war. Although motherhood appears to have remained unchanged, the absence of social support services, the lack of gainful work for children, and the extreme physical peril placed stress on parent-child relationships. The army as an institution intruded upon the wife's customary service-orientation, and threatened her identity as help-mate. Mortality among men forced a return to the concept of convenient marriage. Women's work paralleled work in the rural parent culture, but the nurse role was threatened by army services at the same time that certain entrepreneurial opportunities expanded. The greatest transformation occurred in the nature of criminality for which the culture and history of war supplied models of "licensed" deviation, deviation requiring a change of mentality in the criminal. For good or ill, war is a transforming experience. As the lives of these working-class women demonstrate, it changes women as well as men.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18166

Download

Share

COinS