Link to Essay at The Warrior Women Project
Abstract: Early English broadside ballads are frequently seen as an entryway into the life of the typical commoner, into the mainstream popular culture, with scholars such as Joy Wiltenburg arguing that despite limitations, “the evidence of popular literature provides insights into a decisive link between the mainstream, literate, male culture and the groups dominated by it including the illiterate, the semiliterate, women, the poor” (27). Frances Dolan argues that broadside ballads can fill the gaps between court records and pamphlets in that ballads “offer a fantasy of the woman … who speaks,” and they also “offer a fairly simple model of an interiority and its expression under fire” (157). What has not yet been examined through the unique capacity of broadsides is the connection they reveal between two expanding markets during the early modern period: the expanding British Empire and its market for soldiers, and the expanding institution of the companionate marriage and its market for women who would now serve multiple roles in addition to domestic manager and dowry-bringer–wife, lover, companion, friend, etc. For both institutions to expand, both needed to extend the gaze beyond the physical and monetary benefits of individual women. In “Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads,” Angela McShane addresses military expansion arguing that “the common use of the love song as a vehicle for military messages, reveals how regular soldiering became a new vocation for the ‘lower sorts’ in this transitional period for army development. This new ‘profession’ not only marked a direct break from the older system of ‘estates’ which put fighters at the top and workers at the bottom of society, it was negotiating its place within the social structures of household formation in early modern England.” Sandra Clark examines the “Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad,” writing that “ballads on marriage and gender relations” constituted “an especially popular kind of subject.” However, a synthesis study of both the military and the marriage market perspectives has not yet been published.
Enter warrior women broadside ballads, which depict women going off to war, originally charted by Dianne Dugaw in her 1996 book Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. Dugaw’s catalog of 113 such ballads has not been made public until now, in a digital humanities project undertaken by Wayne State University to gather and make these ballads searchable in one digital edition/database. By examining ballads that feature women who put on the male for the sake of their lover and/or country, my paper fills the gap in scholarship on the relationship between the British companionate marriage and empire expansion as exhibited in the popular balladry of this pivotal period. In this paper, I will argue that the early English broadside ballads depicting warrior women offer unique insight into the expanding sense of self experienced by eighteenth-century women, as exerted and perpetuated by popular culture. While these ballads might be seen as empowering women by offering a fantasy to embrace the masculine guise and still have someone want to marry them—war being an opportunity to expand freedom from constricting gender roles—, it is also true that these ballads emphasize loyalty to the male soldier/lover. Loyalty becomes a valuable trait on the marriage market that aids in attaining the husband one desires. In warrior women ballads, not only do women fulfill multiple domestic duties and roles including childbearing; they do so on the battle front, as they encourage military recruitment to expand and strengthen colonial structures.
