National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe during the 19th Century

Members of what Carol Pateman has memorably analyzed as the "national brotherhood" attempted to nationalize sexuality during the nineteenth century. Throughout East-Central Europe, a region with many competing national concepts, patriotic authors encouraged national women to choose sexual partners from within the nation. A comparative analysis of Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian, and South-Slavic patriots suggests that the rhetoric of national endogamy presupposed and reified "ethnic" nationalism. Patriotic men celebrated national sexuality as virtuous, and explicitly discouraged female chastity. Several patriot men who advocated national endogamy, finally, personally married non-national women: they believed that men nationalized foreign brides, and imagined various mechanisms of national conversion that reflect their respective linguistic, religious, spiritual, or legal definitions of the nation.