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5 a woman’s age Nation and Women After American women were denied inclusion in the Fifteenth Amendment , which granted African American men the vote, the (Susan B.) Anthony Amendment was proposed in 1878 and would be introduced in every session of Congress for the next 41 years. This women’s suffrage amendment was first brought to a vote in 1886, the year of H.D.’s birth, and stingingly defeated. Unsatisfied with an unequal position in the nation and unable to escape the hegemonic nation-state’s influence, women fought for their rights, slyly manipulating the rhetoric of nation to their advantage. For example, the Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Conference in 1848, is modeled on the language of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States, by the National Woman Suffrage Association, was released on July 4, 1876, the nation’s centennial. Gisela Kaplan connects the movement for women’s rights to the claims of nation, writing that “in the broadest sense, modern feminist claims in western Europe were an expansion of citizenship claims made during the French Revolution” (6). Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage documents , Mary Wollstonecraft’s decisive Vindication of the Rights of Women, published merely three years after the French Revolution that she supported , also connects women’s rights to national freedoms. However, Votes for Women would not be achieved until 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, by which time H.D. had left the U.S. for Europe. Furthermore, in 1886, the year of H.D.’s birth, American women were 178 Chapter 5 denied admittance to many colleges and universities, no woman worked in the U.S. executive offices, no woman had ever been mayor, women were banned from serving on juries, the age of consent under federal law was ten, women’s scientific discoveries were often attributed to the men with whom they worked, and women were attired in corsets, voluminous skirts, and elaborate hair styles (Franck and Brownstone 202, 203, 204, 211).1 Clearly, the American nation was predicated, along with gross inequities for African Americans, on an unequal status for women. The original U.S. Constitution failed to acknowledge women’s existence in the young republic, and so early in U.S. history, English common law provided the model for governing women through coverture, which dictated that married women would be subsumed by their husbands’ actions and opinions in civil affairs. Legally, then, married women were represented by their husbands and had few rights of their own. This basic principle began to fall out of favor in the 1830s and 1840s, but since the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was approved neither during H.D.’s life nor afterward, women’s legal rights relied, and continue to rely, on piecemeal federal and state legislation. These historical inequities created a troubled relationship between the nation and women, who were often in the position of dependent citizens, their legal rights reliant first on their father’s status and then on their husband’s. On the eve of World War II, Virginia Woolf considered the relationship between women and the nation, a nation that now needed everyone’s labor to defend it, and defiantly wrote in Three Guineas, “Our country . . . throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions” (108). Although during wartime most women put aside their legitimate grievances and fought for their country as civilians, spies, nurses, and ambulance and canteen drivers (thus bringing into sharp relief the hierarchy of nation first, women later), women lived within a nation that perversely required their support but continued to persecute them. Succinctly summed up in Between Women and Nation, “women are both of and not of the nation” (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 13). Few of the major theorists of nation, who are mostly men, have bothered to analyze the role of gender in nation, very likely because, as their A Woman’s Age 179 critics point out, the invisible, naturalized citizen is male, so a male bias is assumed and accepted. Feminist critics have called for more sophisticated analyses of nationalism in which gender is analyzed as a primary component rather than an afterthought, but the nation—la patrie, the fatherland, a fraternity of men, or even the motherland—has yet to be recognized as a deeply gendered construct...

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