There seem to be no other references to suicides in other, later, sources and as such it would simply be extraordinarily dangerous and even sensationalist to suggest that this was at any time a common–or even uncommon–strategy employed by female army recruits in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Recruitment was in effect a form of tribute-villages were expected to supply a certain number of girls to the king–and in that respect of course it was not difficult to swell the ranks of the women’s regiments. But since we know that some female soldiers were the daughters of other female soldiers (because some “amazons” had been married before being drafted) there was an element of continuity. For a significant minority, it would simply have been the life they knew.

With regard to “lives of forced drudgery,” John M’Leod, writing in his Voyage to Africa in 1803, remarked: “The state of woman is, upon the whole, very abject here. Wives approach their husbands with every mark of the humblest submission. In presenting him with the calabash containing his food, after she has cooked it, she kneels and offers it with an averted look, it being deemed too bold to stare him full in the face.” Discussing Dahomean women, the British naval officer Henry Veel Huntley, in 1831, added more specifically: “She is a drudge.” Répin, who ventured further inland, reported that a Dahomean woman presented her husband’s food to him while on her knees and was not allowed to eat with him. I could go on at some length, but why not cite Bay herself, who points out that “In popular thought, women as women were objects of scorn and contempt”, and who relates from her own experience in Abomey that even late in the 20th century, a man who wished to describe another’s performance as worthless would remark: “He is less than a woman.”

Is it really so difficult to believe that some women–probably many women-who had experienced this actively preferred a situation in which (to cite Répin again) “the amazons are lodged in the palaces of the king, who supports them sumptuously, and they pass their time there drinking, smoking, and dancing”; in which each possessed her own slave, who accompanied her to war to carry her gear; and in which, to cite Joseph Dawson, a longtime resident of Ouidah in the 1850s and 1860s, their influence was such that they could actively assist their families and acquaintances–Dawson notes that a man with a grievance could bring it directly to the king’s attention, bypassing his chief, via his amazon “mother”?

Eardley Wilmot noted that “The Amazons are everything in this kingdom. They are the first in honour and importance.” For me that explains the swaggering esprit de corps so often commented on by impressed visitors. Where, on the other hand, is the evidence of the desertion, low morale and ineffectiveness that ought to have characterised a regiment of women who had been impressed and brutalised? It is simply impossible to conceive that the “amazons” could have attained their reputation for ferocity and efficiency, and become the elite corps they so plainly were, if the great majority had not been not only willing, but also proud, to serve.

But, yes, I certainly should have cited Bay’s generally very well-researched book in the bibliography.

As a woman, and, as a veteran, I can say that I am delighted that the Smithsonian, and in particular, Mr. Dash, has written upon this subject!

Mr. Dash’s work is always intriguing, and it is with great anticipation I look forward to what he will enthrall us with, next!

Bloody good reading!

LT