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The women who married officers in the Royal Navy spent much of their lives alone but married. These conditions meant that they often not only handled work which most married women husbands performed, but also supported their husbands’ professions acting as aides-de-camp. This entailed collecting intelligence on Admiralty policies, foreign events, Parliamentary actions, and social developments. They created emotional intimacy through their letters as their marriages were often more imagined than lived. Nineteenth-century wives of naval officers are a useful category to study as they enhance our understanding of naval history, alter our perceptions of married women’s labour in the British Empire, challenge our beliefs about public and private spheres, and enrich the historiography of gender.

 

Lisa Wojahn, a PhD student at the University of Exeter, is a social historian of nineteenth-century Britain focusing on the maritime world.  Her current research documents the unusual lives of women who married officers of the Royal Navy.  It incorporates elements from social, maritime, and gender history.  She earned two graduate degrees from Rice University, a Master of Liberal Arts with a project titled Crimea through Russian Eyes: Politics, History, and Memory and a Diploma of Liberal Arts with a thesis, Royal Navy Officers’ Wives Georgian to Victorian: “I must fain look to myself.”  In her free time, she loves to spend time with her family, read, and travel.