Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (review)

This collection of fifteen essays is the product of a symposium with the same title, organized by Karen Hagemann and held in Berlin in 1998. The contents include four introductory essays, by Ida Blom, Geoff Eley, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Silke Wenk, that speak to general theoretical issues and make comparisons. These are followed by eleven case studies from around the world, organized into four sections: National States, Ethnicity and Gender Order; National Wars, Military Systems and Gender Relations; Nations in Social and Culture Practice—Gender-Specific Participation in National Movements; National Symbols, Rituals, and Myths—Gender Images and Cultural Representations of Nations. The authors include scholars from Germany, Britain, the United States, Australia, South Africa, Norway, the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Canada, and the essays are similarly wide-ranging, though only Beth Baron’s analysis of Egyptian nationalism focuses individuals not of European background.

Many of the essays explicitly begin with Benedict Anderson’s idea of nations as “imagined communities,” (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, [London, Verso, 1983, rev. ed. 1991] and explore the ways in which those communities are profoundly gendered from their creation. As with much else in women’s and gender history, after reading the essays in this volume it is difficult to see how this could have been anything but self-evident. Gendered visual and verbal images leap off the page, from the two paintings by Anne-Louis Girodet exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1798, analyzed as examples of “male alterity” by Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, to the kerchief designed for female participants in the Third Latvian Song Festival in 1888, which shows two young rural women in the recently created “national” dress, surrounded by symbols of church and country. This latter image is part of the material examined by Irina Novikova in a fascinating article on the construction of national identity in Latvia, in which she also draws on peasant women’s folk songs (collected and written down in the nineteenth century by male intellectuals as evidence of an “authentic” collective identity), the epic narrative of Latvian origins Lacplesis written by Andrejs Pumpers with a warrior hero, and ideologies of familial relations created by the religious group known as Latvia as the Herrnhuters. (Generally called Moravians when they immigrated to the United States.) Jitka Maleckova uses a similar range of popular and learned sources in her discussion of the Czech national movement. Such wide-ranging discussions of geographic areas that are probably unfamiliar to U.S. and British audiences are very welcome, particularly because they do not import a model of gendered nation-building developed for western Europe, but note the local complexities.

Essays by Marilyn Lake on the ways in which Australian feminists handled the racial exclusions that were at the core of the developing Australian national identity, and by Helen Bradford on the role of women in the development of Afrikaner nationalism during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 highlight the complex interplay of race, gender, and nation in these two colonial areas. Those searching for women’s agency or subjectivity in the creation of nations will find ample examples in terms of both writings and actions in these two cases, though these will probably not be quite what one had hoped. In Australia, for example, through some feminists like Constance Ternente Cooke advocated Aboriginal rights, others accepted the notion that Aborigines were simply doomed to die out in order to make way for the more advanced whites.

The discursive and actual role of war and military issues emerges clearly in Bradford’s article, and also in Margaret Ward’s analysis of the Irish Land War of 1991/82, Karen Hagemann’s of Prussia during the Anti-Napolonic Wars of 1806–15, and Angelika Schaser’s of the League of German Women’s Associations in the decades...