Victims or Survivors

The study of women and war is something which has developed steadily in recent decades, with several works on military philanthropy and military womenfolk in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries having being produced in Britain. Yet in Ireland there persists an absence of comparable dedicated work, in spite of a moderate amount of recent research on Irish philanthropy in the same period. By taking the Crimean War as a case study, this essay will illustrate what happened to the army wives in Ireland during that conflict, how this related to the situation in the broader United Kingdom and what it tells us about such women in Ireland in the nineteenth century. This will be done through the use of a selection of contemporary newspapers, parliamentary reports and the records of the British military authority in Ireland, but also through the interrogation of the surviving published reports of the Central Association. Ultimately this essay will show that in spite of the scale of hardships that they faced as a collective social group, army wives in Ireland were able to, in the majority of cases, meet those challenges with a tenacious resolve and ultimately survive the war due to the choices that they made

Criminology · Ethnology · Interrogation · Irish · Newspaper · Northern ireland · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Irish and British Studies · Law