ABSTRACT
British Victorian women’s bodies were rarely the object of military scandal that they were in the American Civil War and in wars in the Empire. In those conflicts, women soldiers often enlisted in armies engaged in mass enlistment and total war. Limited enlistment, imperial wars, and barracks life meant that British women had few chances to put their bodies into the front lines of battle. Instead, some caused military scandals by drawing attention to military mistreatment of male bodies, such as Jane Franklin and Florence Nightingale. By 1848, Franklin publicly castigated the Admiralty Board and Arctic Council for its failure to effectively find her husband’s lost expedition to the Arctic. She funded private search efforts and privately used her social influence to increase search efforts, which created a flurry of interest in the Franklin expedition and the search for the Northwest Passage. Another woman who used her pen that created a military scandal was Nightingale during the Crimean War, and she became the scourge of the British Army establishment. After arriving in the Crimea to nurse wounded British soldiers, Nightingale sent a report to the London Times documenting the conditions in the military hospital at Scutari. Her public denunciation forced a reckoning about how wounded British soldiers were nursed, fed, and housed.
