Women As Essential Citizens in the Czech National Movement by Frančíková Dása;

Author:Frančíková, Dása;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The Queer Story of

Kateřina Maršalová

The Female Soldier, Ideal Woman,

and Masculine Femininity

In 1845,[1] the popular journal Květy featured an article entitled “Kateřina Maršalová, amazonka česká.”[2] The curious piece told the tale of Kateřina Maršalová, an ordinary woman who, around the mid-eighteenth century, supposedly enlisted in the Austrian army and joined a regiment of dragoons dressed as a man. She enjoyed a successful career in the military, and after it was accidentally discovered that she was a woman, Maršalová was summoned before the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who publicly praised her and rewarded her bravery.

This is hardly the typical story in which the female soldier—a woman who cross-dressed to enlist in the army—is either an aristocratic woman who fights out of patriotism, or a lower-class woman whose gender transgression raises the possibility of same sex desire and sexual behavior.[3] The article presented Maršalová’s tale in contradictory ways—as a nationalist exemplar, a cautionary tale, and a story of gender transgression—that would both support and undermine notions of the ideal woman. This chapter unpacks the layers of the story in these paradoxical ways in order to reconsider what the phenomenon of a female soldier can contribute to our understanding of issues including gender transgression and the requirements for the ideal woman.

Indeed, the exceptional reception by the empress is not the only aspect that makes this story so intriguing. The crucial point of the story is that the anonymous author presented Maršalová as a role model for Czech women, while maintaining that Maršalová joined the army because she was “adventurous, bored with her duties as a nanny, and disliked caring for children.”[4] After she left the army, Maršalová married another soldier and had three children. Even with the heterosexual sop that followed her discharge from the military, Maršalová does not quite seem to fit the exemplary ideal national woman who would guarantee that the Czech nation would be prosperous, advanced, and generally on a par with other well established modern nations. Czech nationalists—like activists in other similar national struggles—urged women to take an active part in their nation’s construction. In no way, however, were women allowed to forget their duties as housekeepers, mothers, and child educators. The early deaths of Maršalová’s children and husband, as well as the poverty from which she suffered toward the end of her life, seem to punish her breach of womanly duties that led her to join the military. But in spite of this (or perhaps because of this, if we read the story as a tragic romantic tale), the author never condemned Maršalová. Surprisingly, the story glorified her and proclaimed her to be a “Czech [woman] who showed exemplary fervor, unselfish love, and determination [and could] carry out great efforts [on behalf of the Czech nation].”[5]

My goal here is not to investigate whether Maršalová was an actual person and female soldier, or whether the author told an accurate story. Even though there are elements that make the story unlikely, it does not matter whether it was a description of a real female soldier’s life.

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