Nelson's Women: Female Masculinity and Body Politics in the French and Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

British women’s participation in public life expanded significantly in the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when women served as crucial actors in the home front’s battles of ideas and political loyalties. But as war with Revolutionary France escalated, and British women were enjoined by conservatives to refrain from politics, some responded by enacting a ‘female masculinity’ that demonstrated that neither patriotism nor masculine values were ever solely the product of male bodies and their effects. The impact of this ‘female masculinity’ on perceptions of gender is traced in popular political culture and in attitudes towards Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, two controversial figures of the day. Their unconventional gender performances and their representation illuminated a larger shift in the valences of body politics, from the universal and neo-classical forms of the eighteenth-century public sphere to the fragmented and individuated images of nineteenth-century modernity.