Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden’s Thirty Years’ War by Mary Elizabeth Ailes (review)

Mary Elizabeth Ailes’s new book, Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden’s Thirty Years’ War, is a welcome contribution to the field of early modern women’s history. The book is an important overview of current research on women’s history and seems to be directed to a wider audience, not just scholars. The first chapter discusses the experience of women who went to war with the Swedish armies and gives examples of women from all parts of society. The second chapter looks at the impact—challenges as well as opportunities—conscription had on women in Swedish rural communities. While the focus of this chapter is on women from the broad strata of the peasantry, Chapter Three investigates the impact war had on officers’ wives who stayed at home. It examines how they managed estates and worked to promote the interest of their families. The last of the four chapters looks at the highest level of society, discussing female military leadership during the reign of Queen Christina (1644–54).

Although the book primarily focuses on the experience of women who were connected to the Swedish warfare—not only Swedish women, but also women outside Sweden who encountered Swedish armies—during the Thirty Years’ War, Ailes relates these experiences of war to similar experiences in other parts of Europe during the same period. This praiseworthy breadth helps the reader to see the general pattern of female experience of war and to situate these conclusions about gender and Swedish warfare in a larger European context. Among the book’s strengths are Ailes’s discussion of women from all layers of society, from the queen at the top to the often precarious position of unmarried women who followed the armies on campaign. While Queen Christina in her capacity of military leader was questioned because of her sex, ordinary women who lived where the Swedish armies passed by were left to the mercy of soldiers and often were the victims of sexual assault and other forms of violence. On the home front peasant women whose men were called to fight were left managing landholdings, knowing that their husbands most likely would not return. While many fended for themselves and their children surprisingly well, some were not as successful. Some could not provide for their families, while others lost their land because they were not able to pay their taxes.

As a contrast to the burdens laid on women in wartime and the sacrifices made by them, Ailes refers to the many examples of women who used networks to help support themselves and, in some cases, even to take advantage of the opportunities the war gave them. The Thirty Years’ War opened possibilities for women to migrate, to be part of managing estates, and to broaden their intellectual horizons. It is a well-known fact that women in the early modern era were frequent supplicants, writing both to formal state authorities and to informal political agents. These connections were sometimes dependent on the use of other women as go-betweens, thus giving them a semipolitical position. The agency of women on all social levels in Swedish society shows that many were well acquainted with the decision-making hierarchy and that it often was well worth seeking help. It also shows that both Swedish society and the state realized the need to help women during the wars. Ailes does well in describing, and balancing, her analysis of how women could be both victims and agents and how the war offered both challenges and opportunities.

A more critical objection concerns how Ailes sometimes use phrases that may mislead the reader. When the wealthy widow, Countess Anna Margareta Bielke is called a “single mother” (3), it is of course true in the sense that she was a widow with children. In fact, Bielke was—which Ailes also shows—a member of the wealthy...