Women’s Involvement in Family Military Entrepreneurship in 17th and 18th Century CH

Women’s Involvement in Family Military Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French-speaking Switzerland

Abstract

This article seeks to highlight the participation of women in military entrepreneurship as part of the Swiss foreign service. From the end of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, family correspondence as well as accounting documents from cantonal archives in French-speaking Switzerland reveal evidence of some women’s intervention in the careers as military officers of their relatives. Several of these women had assumed the role of local recruiter for their husband’s or brother’s military companies, and had kept written records of various expenses such as payments, transport or the accommodation of recruits. Furthermore, there is evidence that some women who became interim captains were able to remotely manage their familial military company. This study underlines the extent of the female involvement in this particular professional environment, considered exclusively masculine by military historiography. We seek to demonstrate that the important interdependence within modern kinship makes the specificities of gender roles more flexible, especially in a highly familial military environment. It is therefore necessary, in our view, to temper the idea that some tasks or actions were specific to one or to the other sex in the families involved in the Swiss service abroad.

Keywords

• women’s history
• gender history
• Ancien Régime
• Modern history
• Swiss foreign service
• military
• military entrepreneurship
• kinship
• French-speaking Switzerland