Glenda Sluga: 'Only That I Were an Official Person!' - Women in diplomacy during the Napoleonic wars

By Dilip -

Women born in Europe between 1763 and 1771 and who lived through the Napoleonic wars - even those who lacked a formal education - were liable to remark on the limits to their life choices. As the cultural, legal, and political profile of women’s difference sharpened, some persisted in wanting the same experiences as men (including joining the military) or to be even better than men at what they did. When sixteen-year-old Theodor von Humboldt volunteered with the Prussian army to fight against Bonaparte, his mother, the Prussian ambassadress Baroness Caroline von Humboldt, wished she were a man and could join him.

Female monarchs, whom we might imagine as having more scope to realize their ambitions, could be as frustrated. In the crucial first years of the Coalition campaign, 1812 and 1813, Austrian empress Maria Ludovica, third wife of Emperor Francis, announced her despair at the distance her neutral husband was keeping from the battlefields. She wrote to her son Archduke Johann lamenting, “Ah, would I were a man, to serve the State.”

Letters between the Russian grand duchess Ekaterina and her brother Tsar Alexander during this period overflow with her ambitions for political agency. Ekaterina discussed politics, military dispositions, and the Russian economy. She saw to the creation of a reserve army of a thousand men to be sent off to join the Coalition forces.....

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/only-i-were-official-person


Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791


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