Blown like cotton in the wind: women’s experiences of the White Lotus War (1796-1804)

ABSTRACT This article explores women’s experiences during the White Lotus War (1796–1804), examining disparities related to the state’s calculation of women’s value as agents of institutional reproduction, sources of intelligence, and symbols of disorder. The state cared assiduously for widows of officers killed in battle, converting their grief into a commitment to raising sons as officers, while offering only meagre assistance to soldiers’ widows. Interrogators used female captives to verify identities of captured men, taking their emotions as evidence of attachment. Officials resettling female refugees treated them as threats to social order who need to be returned to families or remarried.