How common was it to "do a Mulan"?

[Druplesnubb]

Does anyone know how common it was throughout history for women to serve in the military disguised as men? My interest in this question was piqued when wikipedia listed four separate women disguising themselves as men to serve in the Swedish army during the Great Northern War, and that's only the ones who were caught. Apparently this phenomena reached a peak during that time. It had even entered public knowledge in the army, as shown in 1715 when a soldier accused of homsexuality defended himself by claiming he thought his lover was a woman in disguise, since he had heard that there were two disguised women among the soldiers.

 

[Lord Finnish]

See the Real Life section of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SweetPollyOliver

 

[trybald]

We have no idea how it was common because like you said the cases we do know about ate those women who have bee caught.

 

[Arilou]

"Not exactly common but not unheard of either" and of course, we never know of the people who did so successfully (IE: Were never caught)

 

[Graf Zeppelin]

I heard in the US civil war this happened alot and was well documented by the doctors back then.Numbers been in the thousands, especially in the south.
Another interesting question would be how many men disguised themselves as women to avoid the draft


On a related note I suggest reading Monstrous Regiment from Terry Pratchet. It deals with that topic :laugh:

 

[DarthJF]

Apparently common enough that exactly similar case to Mulan story happened in Korea. Or so they told me in North Korea.

 

[Fishman786]

Mai Bhago, possibly. Although she dressed in male attire she made no attempt to make people believe she was a man.

 

[profxyz]

Can't imagine it'd been too common in China, considering that a poem was written specifically retelling Mulan's story (and even then the story itself hails from the Northern and Southern dynasties, so it could well have been derived from Altaic/Mongol customs rather than a Chinese one). Certainly after the Ming Dynasty the whole foot-binding issue would have made serving in imperial armies quite difficult... though their occurrences increased dramatically in times of chaos, like during the Jin-Song wars (Liang Hongyu) and during the collapse of the Ming (Qin Liangyu), when official recruiting policies broke down. In those cases, they could go quite far - I think the two I mentioned were generals in their own right. None of them disguised themselves as men.

Then you have the various rebels and people who fought against the rebels, all of whom had limited manpower to draw upon and therefore needed women in their armies. The armies of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, of course, were famous for having women-only army units, led by women officers and all that.

 

[PMLF]

There was the Maria Quitéria case in Brazil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Quitéria


Also Anita Garibaldi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Garibaldi

 

[trybald]

Another interesting question would be how many men disguised themselves as women to avoid the draft

Few to none, at least successfully. If the state is capable or organising a draft (as opposed to relying on press gangs and seizing random people who passed by), it has all the necessary data which includes citizen lists, military registration and so on. It's no coincidence that states started to perform drafts only after the French Revolution.

As such a woman's dress would be of no help to a draftee.

 

[Clophiroth]

Another interesting question would be how many men disguised themselves as women to avoid the draft

Didn´t a Greek hero (I think he was Achilles?) try it?

 

[unmerged(652342)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda_Durova and Alexandra Tikhomirova at the same time disguised as her brother.

 

[Jazumir]

Didn´t a Greek hero (I think he was Achilles?) try it?

No, you probably confuse Achilles with Klinger from M.A.S.H. - who proved, btw, that it is no good (jk, dont know about Achilles).

 

[Kuipy]

Yes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deidamia_(mythology)

Another related subject is adolescents lying about their age to volunteer.

 

[gagenater]

Foot binding was only practiced in the upper classes, who if they decided they wanted to go war would go with horses as officers or cavalry and their foot shape would be a non issue. As noted the US civil war saw hundreds of well documented cases and thousands of poorly documented ones. As one of the first times that mass combat met mass literacy and mass production of paper and writing materials it's probably a good bet that most previous wars saw similar ratios. Afterwards women 'in disguise' entering combat dropped tremendously as a result of better state records, physical exams and the like. Of course at the same time (and I think not coincidentally) women began to enter armies without being incognito.

 

[Henry IX]

Read Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun Transvestite in the New World. About the stranger than fiction life of Catalina de Erauso. The story in short involved Catalina escaping from a nunnary, fleeing to the New World, joining various households and military units, getting into fights in bars and killing people (including a man who turned out be her own brother) and eventually being captured at which point she is forgiven and given a papal dispensation to wear men's clothes. I wouldn't belive it except that there is a reasonable body of evidence supporting the story.

 

[Lord Tim]

I suspect it's a lot more common than history sometimes makes it. Excluding various steppe nomad types, where women seem to have quite frequently been warriors, there's examples from a large number of places. Among the more interesting aspects of the Crusades is the surprise expressed by both Muslim and Byzantine writers that the Christians included women fighting in their ranks. Or there's the medieval Spanish (Castillian, I think) military order open only to the women who'd fought in defence of their city. Or the total lack of surprise Usamah expresses when he returns home to find his wife and sister practising their archery in the garden, since they expected the city to be under siege soon and would be ready to help defend it.

 

[DarthJF]

Women participating in the defence of cities and castles probably wasn't that uncommon anywhere. It's when they put on the armor and actually join an army on campaign that would be out of ordinary.

 

[Lord Finnish]

Women participating in the defence of cities and castles probably wasn't that uncommon anywhere. It's when they put on the armor and actually join an army on campaign that would be out of ordinary.

Speaking of defence, I understand that Vlad the Impaler also resorted to "womanpower" in lack of sufficient male numbers when the Ottomans came.

 

[Druplesnubb]

Who is Usamah?