Glenda Sluga: 'Only That I Were an Official Person!' - Women in diplomacy during the Napoleonic wars
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.”
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/only-i-were-official-person
Declaration
of the Rights of Woman, 1791
