Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94815 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

The Times, March 10, 2007
`Fascinating ... the author has made excellent use of [the diaries
and letters]. Rappaport weaves their stories into the text without
sentimentality; the facts speak for themselves.'

Guardian, March 31, 2007
`No Place for Ladies tells the haunting stories of these mostly
forgotten women, drawing the reader into the lives of extreme hardship,
devotion and devastation. Helen Rappaport paints a vivid picture of these
women ... flung into the midst of the brutality of war.'

Synopsis
All children learn at school the story of Florence Nightingale - the Lady with the Lamp - who heroically tended the sick during the Crimean War. But she was not the only woman in the Crimea. It is usually assumed that women did not become involved in international conflict until the First World War. But in "No Place For Ladies", respected historian Helen Rappaport proves otherwise: numerous women were actively involved in the Crimean in a variety of ways.Four wives would be chosen to accompany each regiment of 100 men, enduring the vermin-ridden troop ships and then left to fend for themselves in the barren Crimean terrain, before combing the battlefields in search of their men. Yet the suffering of the soldiers' wives left behind was more terrible. At home, vast numbers of women - including Queen Victoria herself - knitted socks to cheer the soldiers stranded in freezing Sevastopol. Florence Nightingale had a band of unruly, often hard-drinking orderlies to control. Rejected by Nightingale, maverick black nurse Mary Seacole set up her own dispensary in the Crimea. And then there were the lady battlefield tourists.

This book is an absorbing account of the women who took part in the Crimean War, from unsung nurses to aristocratic spectators.

Customer Reviews

A very high standard of research.
I found this book to be an excellent read on a subject rarely tackled. Not since Following The Drum by Brigadier Page in 1986 (covering the Peninsular War)have I seen a work of this standard, with its exceptional detailed research which probes the lives of the simple camp followers as well as the well-heeled good and the great of all nations involved. I like also the accuracy of dates and events of the campaign, an aspect which I have found to be lacking in many recent publications. This book will appeal to a very wide range of readers and not just students of 19th century conflicts.

A New Classic on the Crimean War
It is hard to list the superlatives of this book. Helen Rappaport has exceptional writing and research skills. The result is a book which is a fascinating read, while simultaneously providing a wealth of information for the research historian. Where former books in this genre provided a few well known stories of British heroines, Ms. Rappaport has provided a much more extensive account to include stories of the bravery and heroic actions of the French and Russian women that were present. She tells her tale with praiseworthy objectivity, so that even Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole are not portrayed as plaster saints, but as living, breathing persons. In weaving her tale, the author has not only provided the story of the women of the war, but an excellent, concise history of the war itself. Destined to be a new classic on the war!

No Place for Ladies
This quiet book is dynamite - a groundbreaking account of what the women got up to in one of the most iconic wars ever fought by Britain, and in many ways a precursor to the First World War in its sheer mismanagement and negligence. Women were there to pick up the pieces, and many of them died in the process. Others you'll never see in the same light again: Florence Nightingale, a control freak and ambitious, bad-tempered administrator; Mary Seacole, the Creole Jamaican with shoulders broad enough to conquer every adversity and still have heart enough left to comfort despairing and injured men in a place bleaker than anywhere. There were the hapless lovelorn ones who were abandoned on lonely beaches weeping; the loyal ones who just simply died with their men (you can't help wondering why - did they really have no homes to go to?); the aristocrats who loved their horses and their flirting; the busy, enterprising ones who set up businesses wherever they went. Children didn't stand much of a chance; but the fact that any women came through at all is miracle enough.

Meticulously researched, compassionate and readable, this is a book written with a level head and a steady gaze, which looks at what we all want to see but few of us do. Victorian England is both kinder and more cruel than I'd thought. The women say it all.