Kelly Plante

View Abstract

In the “warrior women” broadside ballads originally charted by Dianne Dugaw in her 1989 seminal book Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850, women are so dedicated to their soldier or sailor lovers that they disguise themselves in military uniform and set sail with them—whether their lover wants them to or not. Dugaw’s catalog of 113 such ballads has not been made public until now, in a digital humanities project undertaken by Wayne State University in partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara Early English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) to gather and make these ballads searchable in one digital catalogue known as the Warrior Women Project. By examining ballads that feature women who dress as men—almost exclusively for the sake of their lover and country—this 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. 

Scholars frequently use early English broadside ballads as windows into the lives and mentalities of commoners, into the mainstream popular culture. Joy Wiltenburg has argued that “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 offered by other historical artifacts such as court records and pamphlets in that ballads “offer a fantasy of the woman … who speaks,” insofar as they “offer a fairly simple model of an interiority and its expression under fire” (157). These and other benefits have supported numerous exciting analyses of early modern culture via this popular “cheap print” oral, written, visual communication. This essay participates in this tradition of ballad-inspired cultural studies by investigating the the connection that the “Warrior Woman” genre of ballads reveals between two expanding markets during and leading up to the long eighteenth century: the expanding British Empire and its market for soldiers, and the expanding institution of the companionate marriage and its demand for women who would now serve multiple roles in addition to domestic manager and dowry-bringer—wife, lover, companion, caregiver.

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” in that “ballads on marriage and gender relations” constituted “an especially popular kind of subject.” For the military and the companionate marriage to expand into structural institutions, both made use of the physical and monetary benefits made possible by objectifying and idealizing women. A synthesis of military and marriage markets and their marketing strategies—how they interweave and build on each other to accomplish similar, empire-serving goals—has not been published. 

Early English broadside ballads depicting warrior women offer unique insight into marketing campaigns inflicted on women of the long eighteenth century, during that pivotal time when the individual self began to evolve into the modern version we know it as today. While these ballads might be seen as empowering women by offering a fantasy to embrace the masculine guise, venture abroad, participate in male occupations, and still be considered marriageable—war being an opportunity to expand freedom from constricting gender roles. Joy Wiltenburg puts it, “To begin with the obvious: literature is not life, and though everyone knows this, it is easy to be lulled by the repetitive reading of literary patterns into assuming that they reflect reality” (28). Further, these ballads’ primary emphasis is the warrior woman’s loyalty to her male soldier-or-sailor lover, who she follows to marriage or death. 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 serve domestic roles; they do so on the battle front, as they are deployed to encourage military recruitment to expand and strengthen the bourgeonning British xenophobic, capitalist,  patriarchal, colonial structure that these ballads promote.

Ballads depicting a woman covering up her feminine characteristics serve not to empower the woman for her full, integrated self but to proclaim to women and society that women are most valuable–marriageable–when they make themselves useful by embracing the colonial and military goals of the patriarchal structure at large, supporting king and country while pursuing the ultimate goal for a woman: marriage. ¹ Warrior women ballads modify the love-song genre by infusing it with military themes of glory, gallantry, and unquestioned loyalty. “By far the most common vehicle for the military recruitment ballad was the love song, a remarkable and perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of the genre,” McShane writes (132): “The final inducement for any man thinking of backing out came when his young love would offer to disguise herself and enlist with him” (133). Another valuable recruitment tool (for entering the military as well as for entering into a romantic relationship with a soldier or sailor) was the military uniform—which not coincidentally was the primary aspect enabling the warrior woman to make her journey at all. The uniform takes on a magical quality: the ballads purport that even the daintiest virginal maiden can perform heroic deeds while in it. It is so effective that even other women are attracted to Warrior Women in uniform; the uniform performs the work of seduction. At the same time, the warrior woman is represented as so naturally attractive and feminine that some men cannot help but feel attracted to her despite (or because of!) her uniform. If even a woman, whom the ballads often depict as extreme in her feminine qualities of beauty in the form of paleness, dainty fingers, hands, and waist, is willing and able to enter the military, what excuse would a “real man” have not to? Why shouldn’t ci-men reap the rewards of the uniform? Further adding to the recruiting appeal of the uniform, the male soldier-or-sailor lover in these ballads must do little to be pursued by the warrior woman. In many ballads it’s love at first sight, and presented as if the uniform’s mystique attracts her, so powerfully, in fact, that she risks her life to be with him. 

Lest we start to glorify the military as a viable occupation for warrior women dressed as men and seeking freedom from the patriarchal structure of the class system in Great Britain, here  are some reminders on the intense, strictly observed military ranking system and its rigidly defined roles. The military is a patriarchal system–it is perhaps the patriarchal system. Even the military branches themselves are hierarchized. ² “Strictly speaking, when the three UK armed forces are talked about in the same breath they should be listed in order of the seniority of the service: Royal Navy, British Army, Royal Air Force” (BBC Academy). It makes sense that, in a seafaring island nation whose navy built the empire, the navy is considered “above” the army and includes the word “Royal” while the army simply is denoted as “British.” Not only does there exist a hierarchy amongst the service branches and between officers and non-officers; even officers are separated in terms of status (commissioned or non-commissioned, gentlemen and work-a-day). ³ The warrior woman in uniform therefore trades one set of rigid (domestic) social rules for another (professional) set. 

Warrior women ballads embrace and embody the military structure and unquestioned loyalty thereto by exhibiting warrior women as soldiers serving alongside officers from each of the following ranks (presented in “top-down” order). For the Royal Navy: Admiral, Commodore, Captain, Commander, Lieutenant, Officer, Marine(r). For the British Army: Marshal, General, Colonel, Major, Captain, Lieutenant, Sergeant, Corporal. ⁴ An admiral appears in only one ballad in Dugaw’s collection, “The Female Warrior,” and only insofar as that the warrior woman views a French or British (depending on what variant of the ballad) “admiral” “plowing, “playing,” or “ploughting” (again, depending on the variant) “the main” (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 772-776). This lack of interaction shows that the admiral so far outranks the warrior women that they barely come into contact; she occupies far lower status. The rank of commodore appears in one ballad, “The Female Smuggler,” as the warrior woman’s adversary. The highest ranking naval official to appear in warrior women ballads, the captain (whose army counterpart is the colonel), is also the rank that most frequently graces her presence. He often takes on a surrogate father role in giving away the warrior woman and supplying an income at her wedding. Next down, Commander is the highest naval rank that a warrior woman achieves, as in “The Valiant Commander.” In “The Happy Couple,” it is a commander rather than the captain who makes the warrior woman’s marital goal come true. In one ballad, we see a commander appointing the female warrior to the rank of lieutenant; in another, a first lieutenant “gave the bride away” (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 727). As for those ballads that depict the lower-class British Army and its hierarchical ecosystem, the rank of colonel (captain equivalent) is, like the captain, the officer appearing most often (in four ballads: “The Banks of the Nile,” “Jack Monroe,” “Drum Major,” and “The Female Volunteer”). A warrior woman falls in love with “a handsome sergeant” in one, “Nancy’s Love” (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 455). This appears to be the highest ranked army official with whom the warrior woman successfully consorts. The next rank down, of corporal, only appears in one ballad, “The Lady Turned Soldier”; he “finds her a bed” and “lays” with her (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 809-810). Privates, the lowest rank in the army, do not appear other than when “two privates and a colonel down by her side did die” in “Jack Monroe” (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 619). The full meaning of the military rankings mentioned throughout the Warrior Woman genre of ballads warrants closer reading. When Warrior Women in uniform are depicted within the formalBritish military structure, their roles are solidified and legitimized, taking ballad consumers on a virtual tour of the soldier/sailor ecosystem. Inserting a woman into the structure orients ballad consumers into the complicated nuances of rank, and entertains those already fluent in it.

Highly formulaic, the vast majority of the warrior women ballads end in marriage that rewards the warrior woman for her declared, then proven, loyalty. The military system is so glorified throughout the genre that in many cases it replaces the domestic patriarch in this important civil custom. One ballad concludes as follows: “Their wishes she denied not. / but wedded them to hearts delight. / Her gentle master she desired, / to be her father and at church to give her then / It was fulfill’d as she requi’d / Unto the joyes of all good men” (emphasis mine). After all her adventures, she is reduced from being the titular hero of her ballad to being an object of exchange through marriage, bringing joy to “all good men.” Thus ends “Maudlin, The Merchant’s Daughter of Bristol,” printed as early as 1586 and as late as 1868—over a period of 282 years—and sung to the tune of “the Maidens joy” (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 555). The ballad opens with her loyalty to “a gallant youth” of whom her friends and family did not approve—“Behold the Touchstone of true Love, Maudlin the Merchants daughter of Bristow Town, Whose firm affection nothing could move …”—and ends rewarding her proven loyalty with marriage. She has a new “master” to give her away, the “ship’s master” who let her disguise herself as his “ship’s boy” to follow her lover abroad, where her loyalty is tested. ⁵ She rebuts the advances of the ship’s master, who falls in love with her, and saves her lover from being killed. Her father is now dead, but that is perhaps even for the best—the old type of (domestic) patriarchy dies off to make room for the new, colonial, aggressive one. 

Though warrior women ballads are often targeted to maidens, damsels and couples–in at least 26 of the 113 ballads first catalogued by Dugaw, a narrator/hawker targets a specific audience (damsels/maidens, 11; couples, 4; other, 11) (“WWP”)–warrior women ballads, like broadside ballads in general, were primarily written by men and for men to serve male interests. Their pervasiveness was not intended to literally to recruit women into disguising as men and joining the military; instead, this popular genre aimed to celebrate and elevate masculine qualities and to promote female virtue as servicing the British Empire. Celebrating war and colonialization, the ballads are aggressive: “Ballads were naturally redolent of the xenophobic attitudes for which the English were renowned” (McShane 122). The warrior women participate in this aggression through their unquestioned loyalty to patriarchal causes and to the evolving structural need to supply soldiers and sailors with socially acceptable wives to serve as tools for male military recruitment and therefore advancement of colonial goals. The ballads announce to potential recruits that they can attract rich, higher class women, often the rank of lady, who will be loyal and who will enable their upward mobility. As Clark writes of marriage ballads in general: 

“Certainly, there are some ballads which are directly didactic, and written in a way that precludes all but a non-ironic rendition. One can see how this kind of material–counselling the young on marriage choices, …–could have operated in ways similar to the conduct books designed for literate audiences of the ‘middling sort.’ With this possibility in mind, it is interesting to observe the emphasis of the ballad: where marriage is concerned, it … values economic efficiency.”

(Clark 121)

Even when directed at women by the narrator, then, ballads serve male interests. 

In the case of the Warrior Women ballads, one way of serving male interests is by depicting feminine qualities as not valued: traditionally masculine qualities are valued, and the feminine is to be shed and loyalty to be embraced in order to serve king and country. The masculine eclipses the feminine so that the warrior woman can be virtuous, not weak, and brave “like a man.” At least 33 warrior women ballads mention the warrior woman’s perceived feminine characteristics, always in a derogatory context. In 21 ballads, she receives commendation, accolades, and/or a promotion for her military (killing) prowess. Attractive women were essential to entice men to join and stay in the military. The warrior woman takes on traditionally masculine, aggressive traits, if and when she discards her feminine dress and her family and home—but brings her breasts and maidenhead. Her thin waist and dainty hands can make the journey, too, although this is not acceptable for many of the male lovers in the ballads who use them as reasons to deny her accompanying him on ship. Warrior women ballads promote the military and its values. ⁶

Characteristics traditionally perceived as feminine are not honored, they are ridiculed, in the warrior woman ballads. Women have to become like men, disguise themselves as men, in order to “earn” love and marriage. This is somewhat pathetic: The woman chases the man across the world, and still he maintains the power of choice in whether they marry. The women are ready to have sex, and do not typically make a show of saying no to proclaim their virtue. The soldiers/sailors do not have to worry about taking no for an answer. In these ballads, we do not see a “wide” array of women–these women are narrow waisted and are never physically unattractive. They are idealized as white: They are not tan but pale; their cheeks are rosy and their hair is often “yellow.” They are soldiers/sailors when–until–they need to be, then they get married (or die). 

Warrior women ballads aimed to recruit men to the military and to recruit loyal women into the expanding marriage market for military men. The military used the warrior woman to recruit and retain men, to “sell” them against the prospect of going out to sea only to have sex with women in port, in brothels. ⁷ During wartime, venereal disease has historically been a key concern for the military establishment. It was such a concern for the British military’s readiness that some regiments even oversaw brothels. Venereal disease was neither good for the individual nor for the military nor, by extension, the empire. The propagandistic work of the warrior women ballads served two purposes: to entice men into the military and to promote military values including fierce loyalty.  

The warrior women are depicted as so fiercely loyal that they would not cuckold their men; rather, they would wait at home for them and enter a convent even if he did not promise to marry her on his return. Meanwhile, cisgender military men are portrayed as objects of extreme female attraction: So effective is their uniform that they passively obtain more women than necessary, and the warrior woman still wants him and only him. Take, for example, “The Isle of Wight” ballad, in which a lady and her chambermaid feud over a lower-class male and in which he is objectified by the women in his uniform, and “The Chester Garland,” wherein the Spanish widow pursues and marries the lower-class male, yet the dainty damsel who fell for him back home still pursues him to Spain. Here it is helpful to think about the widow as a character type with certaintypical functions in broadside ballads, as shown by Clark: 

“In such ballads the wealth of the widow must be offset within the economics of the marriage market by the threatening aspects of her sexuality, figured as repulsive old age. But when widows are specifically compared with young girls as marriage prospects the position is often different. The widow’s legendary appetite for sex is linked with her wealth to make her into an image of abundance; she has more to offer, sexually and financially, than a young girl … Widows are experienced lovers, not ‘coy and fickle’ like maidens, and they enjoy a bold wooer; they do not look for a wealthy match, and they are not subject to the conditions of father or friends” (Clark 129). 

In “The Chester Garland,” the military man can marry and take advantage of the widow’s sexual and marital experience–and her money–first, then when she conveniently dies, he can marry the virgin who boards a ship in pursuit of him even though he is already married to the a foreign, exotic widow, whose main function is to raise his status to that of the warrior woman so that he can secure the approval of her father and thus her dowry. By enlisting and serving abroad, he can achieve his domestic goals—marital and economic. While such ballads focus on the warrior woman as the named subject, the fact that they make the males into the desirable objects of feminine pursuit serves as military marketing for potential recruits. The message is: You don’t have to work for sex; the uniform will work for you. The military will provide you an income and a wife—or wives—who will not be in the way, who will support and follow you no matter what. ⁸

In their function as promotional materials that could have recruited for the military, the Warrior Women ballads not only offer the promise of romantic possibilities for those who serve, but also work to address other concerns about enlistment. A common concern for military men is whether the woman back at home would frivolously spend his money. ⁹ (This is exhibited in non-warrior woman marriage ballads, as well.) These ballads generally offer reassurances about military wives, though. Women who are attracted to the military man and the military life not only do not waste money, they make money. The woman does the work, and the man reaps the reward–the dowry from her father, the dowry from the captain, or both. Money pours in, as does power and esteem, passed “down” to him through her, from the patriarch. 

In sum, when we consider the warrior woman ballad genre as a form of recruitment for men, the ways we understand the woman heroes shifts. Celebrating sex, romance, marriage, and violence toward British foes, warrior women ballads target women mostly when its convenient for the sake of the patriarchal, colonial system. In this view, warrior woman ballads are an adventure across land, sea, and the female body—for men. This triumvirate of British conquest is neatly encapsulated in one verb that is frequently strewn throughout the ballads: plough. “Ploughing the raging main” appears in several of the ballads and denotes adventure, progress, and violence. To plough functions as a unifying force across land, sea, and the female body. 

Three of the ways plough was used during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries pertained to land, sea, and women: 

To make furrows in and turn up (the earth, land) with a ploughing, esp. as a preparation for sowing or planting”; “Of a ship, sailor, swimming animal, etc. To cleave (the surface of the water). Frequently poetic”; “slang. Usually of a man: to have sexual intercourse with (a person, esp. a woman).

(OED)

To “plough” signifies penetrating the earth, the sea, the woman. Broadside ballads, famous for their bawdy, drinking song and ale-house quality and function, surely play on all three of these usages. “The Ploughboy” embodies this economically: a “lady” falls in love with a mere ploughboy who increases his value by joining the military; she pursues him, he gets the girl, her dowry, and further upward mobility by ploughing the land, the sea, and her (Dugaw, “Catalogue,” 678). 

While many readers find it empowering that the warrior woman is so celebrated and valorized in the warrior women ballads, my analysis of the ways in which the ballads are pitched toward military recruitment and pro-military propoganda suggests a less-feminist possibility in which the Warrior Womanparticipates in her supposedly heroic deeds only in service of “ploughing” for the Empire–performing a violent act, stirring up the dirt, the sea, and the bodies of women and/or colonized peoples, in service of expansion, through adventuring but also through conquering. As we have seen, warrior women ballads celebrate not traditional feminine qualities but masculine, aggressive, ones valued by the military, and the female’s unquestionable loyalty thereto. Anything associated with women is by definition assigned a lower cultural value than qualities associated with the military in the long eighteenth century, that is to say, with men. 

In this way, the warrior woman ballad foretells present-day pep talks given to girls to be “anything a boy can be,” and to women in the workforce to “lean in” if they want to advance economically and professionally: 

Now the assertiveness movement is taking this same depressingly stacked ranking system and selling it back to us as feminism. We in turn barely question whether the male standard really is the more socially desirable or morally sound set of behaviors or consider whether women might actually have had it right all along.

(Whippman)

We are the inheritors of the warrior woman ballad. No genre of early English broadside ballads exists, to my knowledge, which encourages men to put on the guise of a woman in order to advance in economic or marriageable status. Traits perceived as feminine were and continue to be dismissed as frivolous or low status and are certainly not to be aspired to by men. My analysis thus troubles the idea of warrior women as feminist role models. Instead, as a group, the warrior women reflect sexist realities: they are  drawn to nursing and caring for lovers, while the lovers do not have to do much. They not only care for themselves, but also for them. She enables patriarchal goals. She is thus marketed as the perfect match, and the perfect recruitment tool, for the aspiring military man. At the risk of inhabiting the role of the feminist killjoy, my analysis of the ultimate impact of  the warrior women ballads is that, while they might be fun to read and think about as liberating for women, their main, underlying function is to insert the domestic into the colonial and to use women to further the aggressive goals of the empire.

Works Cited

“A Timeline of Women in the Army.” National Army Museum. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/timeline-women-army 

Clark, Sandra. “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2003. 

Dolan, Frances. “Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres.” Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800, edited by Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee, editors. Ashgate, 2010, pp. 149-171.

Dugaw, Dianne. “A Catalogue and Collection of Anglo-American Female Warrior Ballads: Appendices I and II, and Bibliography.” The Female Warrior Heroine in Anglo-American Balladry PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1982, pp. 340-1059. 

Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850. 2nd ed., U. of Chicago Press, 1996. 

McShane, Angela. “Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads.” Journal of Early Modern History, issue 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 105-137. 

“Military Ranks.” BBC Academy, BBC, 19 May 2015. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art20130702112133708

“Plough | plow, v.” Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Third Edition, September 2006. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. 

Steward, Journey. “Prostitution.” 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 3 April 2017. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prostitution 

“The Warrior Women Project (WWP) Database,” Version 9. Wayne State University, 11 October 2019. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBEr9A5Rvxo3bV6oyXIN1q_z9PS89A6FmEXHTvsQz54/edit?usp=sharing 

Whippman, Ruth. “Enough Leaning In. Let’s Tell Men to Lean Out: The assertiveness movement has taken a male-defined value system and sold it back to us as feminism.” The New York Times, 10 October 2019. Date accessed: 14 October 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/sunday/feminism-lean-in.html 

Wiltenburg, Joy. “The Literature of the Streets.” Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. UP of Virginia, 1992, pp. 7-25.

Notes