Graduation Semester and Year
Summer 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in History
Department
History
First Advisor
Sara Collini
Second Advisor
Stephanie Cole
Third Advisor
Patryk Babiracki
Abstract
For over two hundred years, women who followed American and European armies during the long eighteenth century were popularly stereotyped and denigrated as prostitutes, burdens, and generally individuals of ill repute by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of historians. While recent scholarship has largely debunked this long-standing characterization as simplistic and inaccurate, the question remains: why exactly were these women so mischaracterized in their own time, particularly by commissioned officers and other members of Anglo-American middling and elite classes, when ample evidence existed of their material usefulness and comparative marital fidelity? This thesis seeks to address the ideological and cultural underpinnings of this disparagement by examining how the demands of army life made the performance of white femininity—defined by upper-class patriarchal standards as physical delicacy, modesty, beauty, fairness, dependence, and helplessness—impossible for the overwhelmingly poor demographic of women who followed eighteenth-century armies. Despite contemporary depictions of white women as naturally weak and fragile and therefore entitled to chivalrous male protection, white army women enjoyed no such presumed privileges and were expected by commanding officers to labor just as hard as the male soldiers around them and endure the same privations. This thesis, therefore, demonstrates that white femininity was not a condition inherent or available to all white Anglo-American women. Rather, it was a privilege bestowed only upon those women with the socioeconomic means to fulfill its demands. Hence, the marginalization of eighteenth-century army women reveals the limitations of Anglo-American patriarchal promises of protection and tenderness supposedly owed to all members of the “fair sex.”
Keywords
Camp followers, army women, Anglo-American, fair sex, patriarchy, white femininity, white womanhood
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Cultural History | European History | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | United States History | Women's History | Women's Studies
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Torres, Angelica LaBren, "“NONE IN VELVET GOWNS”: CAMP FOLLOWERS AND WHITE WOMANHOOD IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN WARFARE" (2026). History Theses. 2.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/history_theses2/2
Included in
Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons, Women's Studies Commons