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Following The Drum: British Women In The Peninsular War, Sheila Simonson

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the lives of British women, soldiers' and officers' wives, for the most part, who followed the British army on campaign in Portugal, Spain, and southern France during the Peninsular War (1808-1814). Because most of the women were of the working class, their major roles, as wives, mothers, widows, workers, and criminals, have been contrasted with those roles as defined in British working-class culture.

No direct female sources exist for this war. Information was therefore gathered from male diarists, letter writers and memoirists of the period, using modern research into working-class behavior in the early industrial period as …