Victims or Survivors: Army Wives in Ireland during the Crimean War, 1854–56

The study of women and war is something which has developed steadily in recent decades, with several works on military philanthropy and military womenfolk in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries having being produced in Britain. Yet in Ireland there persists an absence of comparable dedicated work, in spite of a moderate amount of recent research on Irish philanthropy in the same period. By taking the Crimean War as a case study, this essay illustrates what happened to the army wives in Ireland during that conflict, how this related to the situation in the broader United Kingdom and what it tells us about such women in Ireland in the nineteenth century. This is done through the use of a selection of contemporary newspapers, parliamentary reports and the records of the British military authority in Ireland, but also through the interrogation of the surviving published reports of the Central Association.