Essential Women, Necessary Wives, and Exemplary Soldiers: The Military Reality and Cultural Representation of Women’s Military Participation (1600–1815)

Women's participation with armies in the field changed dramatically in the second half of the seventeenth century. Before then, women in great numbers accompanied troops on campaign. Yet during the eighteenth century a smaller proportion of women marched in the train of a company of troops. A Prussian circular of 23 August 1733, for example, commanded that the number of women with troops in the field could not exceed ten per hundred men. Other armies allowed even fewer; the British often cut the number to six per hundred. To understand this decline in the numbers of women is not only to register change in the roles played by camp women; it is to comprehend the nature of major refoms in European military institutions and the conduct of war-the fundamental substance of military history. [Author]