"The Real Soul of a Man in her Breast": Popular Opposition and British Nationalism in Memoirs of Female Soldiers, 1740-1750

In the "Preface" to The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, commonly called Mother Ross (1740), the anonymous author reports that Christian Davies, a woman who purportedly passed as a male foot soldier and dragoon during the War of the Spanish Succession, "died on the 7th of July 1739, and was interr'd in the burying ground belonging to Chelsea Hospital, with military honours."¹ This intriguing narrative treats readers to a plebeian woman's humorous, nostalgic chronicle of Britain at war during the victorious years of King William and Queen Anne and provides us with a window into the workings of popular nationalism, just as it reached a zenith in expression at midcentury. In the year the memoir was published, England, despite Walpole's reluctance, had entered the Anglo-Spanish War (1739-48) and the overlapping War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48); and court and opposition leaders vied for control of the patriotic, imagined community of the British public. To many, the Georgian court's hesitation to pursue war served simply as another glaring indication of its lack of British pride and its contamination by the effeminizing culture of Europe (particularly France).² In this climate of dissatisfaction with the nation's elite men, publishers Walker and Montagu turned for patriotic inspiration to a well-known figure from popular balladry: the cross-dressing, plebeian heroine who goes to war.

Two fictionalized memoirs of female soldiers—Davies' Life and Adventures and the anonymous The Female Soldier; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750)³ —frame this decade of imperial conflict, as Britain fought both Spain and France for control of the West Indies, the East Indies, the European low countries, and parts of North America. Upon their publication, both memoirs became immensely popular, going through several reprints, editions, and a range of abridged forms.⁴ Examining these narratives amid the contemporary debates about the war with Spain, we can gain insight into the symbolic richness of the figure of the female soldier in rallying both men and women's support for the ensuing war, and sustaining British national pride in the face of the nation's losses that resulted from the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The narratives of Christian Davies and Hannah Snell uniquely illustrate popular attitudes about the virility of the British nation, the necessity of war to expand colonial holdings and trade, and the myth of liberty for all British subjects.

To date, scholars have attributed the cultural resonance of the memoirs to their provocative implications for eighteenth-century gender roles. Julie Wheelwright sees The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies as a celebratory depiction of a woman resistant to her culture's gender norms, whereas Lynn Friedli views the fictional female soldiers such as Hannah Snell as exceptional women who end up reifying traditional gender roles.⁵ Dianne Dugaw significantly deepens our understanding of the narratives by situating them within the context from which they derive: the ballad tradition. Dugaw argues that the female warrior is a common trope of popular ballads, and within this tradition, the cross-dressed women are not so much progressive or exceptional depictions as they are realistic portrayals of the less-restrictive gender roles for plebeian women and the ubiquitous presence of laboring women in military camps.⁶

This essay builds on Dugaw's insights about the construction of plebeian women's gendered identities, but argues for a fuller assessment of the middle and upper-class appropriation of such identities during Britain's military engagements at midcentury. The printer of The Female Soldier, Robert Walker, issued a cheap text of forty-six pages and, in the same year, an illustrated and longer text of one hundred eighty-seven pages (Dugaw, "Introduction," viii). The double texts met...