A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and
managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate
relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest
needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long
eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war.
As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential
in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s,
perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers
began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major
national need, female characters came to be central figures in
bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply
patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime
is the first study of theatrical representations of women with
intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive
expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and
archival studies, Backscheider traces the rise of the London
theatre's acceptance that one of its responsibilities was to
support its country's wars. Rather than focusing on the historical,
mythical "warrior women" on the battlefield who have been much
studied, Backscheider explores the lives and work of sweethearts,
wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport
prostitutes, and more, whose relationships to active-duty men made
them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts. They represent a
distinct group of thousands of real women, and the actresses who
portrayed them gave performances of change, struggle, celebration,
mourning, survival, love, and patriotism. Backscheider explicates
more than fifty plays-from main pieces, short farces, interludes,
afterpieces, and comic operas to entr'actes, pantomimes, and even
masques-as both entertainment and as ideological and propagandistic
vehicles in times of severe crises. She also reveals how these
works, many written by men with military experience, attest to the
context of difficult, inescapable realities and momentous needs.
Through the debunking of sexual stereotypes and attention to
audience-pleasing roles such as impoverished-wife and breeches
parts, Backscheider adds a dimension to theatrical history that
substantially contributes to women's and military histories. Women
in Wartime demonstrates the startling acuity and prescience of the
repertoire in responding to the war-steeped culture of the period.
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