All children learn at school the story of Florence Nightingale - the Lady with the Lamp - who heroically tended the sick during the Crimean War. But she was not the only woman in the Crimea. It is usually assumed that women did not become involved in international conflict until the First World War. But
in No Place For Ladies , respected historian Helen Rappaport proves otherwise: numerous women were actively involved in the Crimean in a variety of ways.
Four wives would be chosen to accompany each regiment of 100 men, enduring the vermin-ridden troop ships and then left to fend for themselves in the barren Crimean terrain, before combing the battlefields in search of their men. Yet the suffering of the soldiers' wives left behind was more terrible. At home, vast numbers of women - including Queen Victoria herself - knitted socks to cheer the soldiers stranded in freezing Sevastopol. Florence Nightingale had a band of unruly, often hard-drinking orderlies to control. Rejected by Nightingale, maverick black nurse Mary Seacole set up her own dispensary in the Crimea. And then there were the lady battlefield tourists, watching engagements from a safe distance in between picnics and yacht trips.
This rich, colourful and fascinating picture of very different women at war, based on hundreds of rare accounts, is now available in B-format paperback.

Helen Rappaport

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Feb 01, 2008

1, FR, 2008

Source title: No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War

* Absorbing account of the women who took part in the Crimean War, from unsung nurses to aristocratic spectators * Popular history in the same mould as Daughters of Britannia * Vogue for oral and social history continues with the Forgotten Voices series and Simon Garfield's Mass Observation anthologies

"The grim battlefields of the Crimea were certainly no place for ladies. However, in this absorbing and frequently moving account, Helen Rappaport shows that numerous women from all social classes were actively engaged in the Crimean War"--Back cover

2024-07-01