From the Archives: Madeleine Caulier Goes To War
At the moment, I’m deep in a chapter about women who disguised themselves as men and enlisted as soldiers–the subject of the blog post below.
I know a lot more about the subject than I did when I wrote this post back in 2013. And while I still think all their stories sound much the same, I’ve come to believe that’s an important part of the story.
(In case it’s not clear, this is NOT a picture of Madeleine Caulier. It is a generic picture of a dragoon.)
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by real-life stories of women who disguised themselves as men and went to war at times when women didn’t go to war.* About ten years ago, I began to collect examples, thinking I could write a book, or at least an article, about the subject. I quickly gave up the idea. There were too many examples, from the medieval period through World War I.
What’s more, their stories all sounded the same. For one reason or another** our heroine disguises herself as a man*** and enlists. She makes it to the front, where she serves valiantly. She is only discovered to be a woman when she is wounded or dies in battle.**** Presumably more served who were not discovered.
I recently stumbled across an example with a different twist: Madeleine Caulier.
Caulier worked at an inn outside the city of Lille during the War of the Spanish Succession. As in most all-out European wars, the Low Countries were hotly contested territory. In August, 1708, Lille became the site of a long, hungry siege. The French were desperate to get supplies and information in and out of the city.*****
Caulier’s brother served in the French garrison. For reasons that are not clear to me, she was allowed to cross the lines to visit him. (For those of you who are always alert to the passive voice, let me assure you I deliberately chose it in this case because I don’t know who was fool enough to allow her to go in and out of the city. Did she get permission from an officer? Talk her way through a checkpoint? Did someone assume she was harmless? Was bribery involved? This is one of those times when the documents leave the juice out of the story.) When they learned she had access to the city, French officers asked Caulier to smuggle messages to the commander of the garrison. (In some versions of the story, she overheard them talking and volunteered.) She agreed, on the condition that she be allowed to enlist in a dragoon regiment as a man. I would say she had balls–but the whole point of the story is that she didn’t.
The count d’Évreux granted her request–making her the only example I’ve seen of a woman who was officially allowed to disguise herself as a man and enlist. She remained in the army until her death at the battle of Denain in 1712.
Today a street in Lille bears her name. Anyone know of another woman soldier in disguise who’s been honored in some way?
* I’m not the only one fascinated by this historical trope. Terry Pratchett wrote a hysterical novel based on it: Monstrous Regiment. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the fun. Besides, trying to explain the plot of a Terry Pratchett novel is a fool’s game.
** Popular reasons include following/searching for her husband, lover or brother, heartbreak, patriotism, revenge for losses incurred, and just because.
*** How on earth did they pull it off? I realize that a not-particularly curvy woman could bind her breasts and stuff a rolled-up sock in her breeches and pass as a teenage boy for an evening, assuming no one noticed the lack of an Adam’s apple. A recent book on the subject argues that once the Mongols introduced the concept of trousers to the world the total separation of male and female dress helped: the eye saw pants and thought male. But surely the lack of privacy in an army camp would lead to rapid exposure?
****One of my favorite examples from the American Civil War simply suited up again, changed her name, and re-enlisted after she was discovered and sent home.
*****At one point, 2000 cavalrymen disguised themselves as Dutch soldiers and tried to carry 50-pound bags of gunpowder through the lines to the besieged city. That’s a story for another day, but the short version is: BOOM!
1947: A Year in Review
Looking back, 1947 was a year marked by fresh starts and tidying up loose ends from World War II.
India received its independence from Britain after almost two hundred years of imperial domination–the beginning of the end of European imperialism. Unfortunately, Partition, the division of British India into the two sovereign states of India and Pakistan was badly planned. No one anticipated the massive and disorderly movements of refugees driven by fear across the new borders or the violence that followed them: estimates run as high as fifteen million. The transfer was marked by sectarian murders, opportunistic murders, rape, and death from disease in makeshift refugee camps across the subcontinent. A long way from the tactic of non-violent, non-cooperation that shaped India’s independence movement
Harry S. Truman gave a speech to Congress that is often considered the official start of the Cold War. The heart of the speech, later known as the “Truman Doctrine,” committed the United States to support free peoples in the struggle against communist totalitarianism, thereby putting us on the road to the Korea and Vietnam Wars.
Fearful that communists would infiltrate American trade unions,Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, formally the Labor-Management Relations Act, over President Truman’s veto. Taft-Hartley unwound labor rights established in earlier bills.
George C. Marshall unveiled the basic framework of the Marshall Plan, which would dedicate billions of dollars into rebuilding Western Europe. Congress would pass the plan in 1948, in part because of the fear of–you guessed it–communist expansion into Europe.
Not everything that happened in 1947 related to the decline of empire and the rise of the Cold War. On a smaller scale:
Airman Chuck Yeager made the first supersonic flight.
Both Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and The Diary of Anne Frank made Americans cry and reminded us about the importance of relying on the kindness of strangers now and then.
Bell Lab scientists invented the transistor and Edwin Land pioneered the Polaroid camera–two inventions that would shape the lives of the Baby-Boomers.
Teen-aged shepherds discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest extant Hebrew documents, in the Qumran Caves on the northwest shore of, well, the Dead Sea (duh), transforming our understanding of history and religion in the region.
Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, which proved it was possible for ancient people to have made the voyage. Which is not the same as proving they did. 
Lucy Parsons: Goddess of Anarchy
Several years ago ,* I wrote my first book for adults: The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism. It is a history of socialism, from its roots in Utopian idealism through Tea Party accusations that Barack Obama is a socialist.** I spent considerable time reading and writing about socialism and anarchism in America prior to World War I. And I’m pretty sure I never read a word about Lucy Parsons, a famous (or infamous, depending on your politics) socialist/anarchist leader and speaker whose career lasted from Reconstruction to the New Deal . As her recent biographer, Jacqueline Jones, makes clear, its not entirely my fault. Parsons’s story has been obscured by that of her husband, by her own choice to re-write her past, and by the general tendency to file notable women in the “let’s forget about this” drawer of history.
Jones untangles Parsons’s story in Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. She gives us a picture of a life filled with contradictions: a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, an African-American activist who focused on the cause of white labor in American cities, the “professional widow” of one of the martyrs of the Haymarket Square riots who took lovers after her husband’s death, a social reformer with a passion for fashion, a fiery public persona with a well disguised private life. With an eye for the telling detail and a vibrant writing style,*** Jones sets Parsons against a richly rendered background of American society in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, seen through the lens of the changing politics of race and class.
Parsons emerges as difficult, complicated, and not entirely admirable. But while Jones’ depiction of Parsons is not always a comfortable read, it is always a fascinating one.
*2011. A simpler time in what feels like the distant past.
** My basic take on this was and remains that if professed socialists say Obama is not a socialist, we should take their word for it.
***There’s a reason Jones won the Bancroft Prize and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.