2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Our panel explores the enigmatic world of nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperial warfare. It examines how an almost-wholly male institution made space for army wives, created its own regimental domesticity and garrison culture while engaged in the global enforcement of an empire expanded in Victoria’s name.

Army wives in colonial India, settler New Zealand and Great War Britain each presented difficult questions for the British Army with which they were associated (but only very partially acknowledged). These were provoked by the simultaneous reliance on women by individual soldiers and the Army, alongside the institutional denial - or heavy restriction - on women’s existence in the space occupied by the military, both in peace and at war. The contradictions imposed heavy burdens on those caught in its net, most especially women. They also speak to the wider relations between women, gender and warfare: the segregation of military men from civilian women; marriage as a disruptive force; the powerful gendering of imperial and national ‘duty’/service.

These three distinct but connected studies enable closer exploration and explanation of the spatial variety and temporal shifts that link the nineteenth-century warfare of imperial conflict with twentieth-century ‘total war’ and its powerful nexus of welfare, state and citizenship.