The Long Eighteenth Century
Sailing on the Etoile, or Outed in Tahiti
Over the last year, as I’ve wandered through the dusty attics and flooded basements of history in my search for women warriors I’ve stumbled across plenty of other fascinating women that I–and presumably you–had never heard of. Case in point: French botanist Jeanne Baret (1740-1807), part of the astonishingly large number of women who disguised…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past – Silhouette
I’m poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits. Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I…
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From the Archives: Madeleine Caulier Goes To War
At the moment, I’m deep in a chapter about women who disguised themselves as men and enlisted as soldiers–the subject of the blog post below. I know a lot more about the subject than I did when I wrote this post back in 2013. And while I still think all their stories sound much the…
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