ABSTRACT
Charlotte Browne was not afraid of the French or the Indians. Instead, she sailed from England to America in 1754 as matron of the general hospital to be established for General Edward Braddock’s troops in his campaign against Britain’s enemies on the edge of the Ohio River Valley, on the eve of what would become the Seven Years War. Enduring the hardships and miseries of a transatlantic transport vessel with her reputation for good sense and strict chastity intact, she met with as civil a reception in America as the unpolished colonists could provide. The ‘English Ladies’ of Frederickstown, Maryland invited her to a Ball, where, according to Browne, the company was composed of ‘Romans, Jews and Hereticks . . . Ladys danced without Stays or Hoops and it ended with a Jig from each Lady’. The strangeness of ‘Englishness’ in the American frontier did not lessen Brown’s resourcefulness or deter her from her duty of ministering to wounded British and American soldiers, and their bereft partners, despite insect-infested beds, drenched camps, treacherous roads, her brother’s passing, and news of her daughter’s death in England. ‘It is not possible to describe the distraction of the poor Women for their Husbands,’ Browne recalled, following Braddock’s defeat in the autumn of 1755.1
Browne’s story, and those of the tens of thousands of other women who served, followed, and toiled for the British military in its long wars for empire, rarely figure prominently in the imperial saga. Yet, as scholars have come to recognize the varied and vital roles of eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury women in British public, as well as private, life, they have also begun to appreciate their importance in ‘forging the nation’ and building an empire.2 British women were intimately involved in imperial projects and aspirations, key figures in orchestrating the consumption or boycott
of imperial goods, subsidizing or resisting imperial wars, and refashioning the empire through anti-slavery and missionary campaigns. They turned up in western Atlantic colonies and eastern trading outposts (Africa, India, Sumatra, and Australasian settlements) from all over the British Isles and in all conditions: as forced and indentured labourers; soldiers, sailors and officers’ wives; teachers, actresses, nurses, sutlers, merchants, and prostitutes; the partners or daughters of religious pilgrims, naturalists, slavers, planters, and officials; and as slave traders, adventurers, and explorers themselves. This chapter will examine how women helped establish, maintain, and challenge British dominion in the period from 1700 to 1850. It will consider both general contexts for understanding women’s roles in British networks of maritime, military, and commercial power, and the experiences of individual women within these systems of rule. In doing so, the horizons of Britishness will be expanded to include the contributions of the empire’s extended territories and peoples to British culture and to the British understanding of national and gender difference.
