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Conclusion: A Gendered Reading of Patriotism and Power The German ‹gure of the patriot (Vaterlandsfreund) entered the public realm in the eighteenth century. Throughout German lands, authors penned pamphlets, titled newspapers, and wrote travel accounts and memoirs from the new perspective of the patriotic. Reform associations in urban settings adopted the name, and political philosophers rearranged the bonds of legitimacy between ruler and subject around allegedly shared patriotic commitments. Whatever its speci‹c context or shade of meaning, at its core was a new subjectivity, which helped to create personal identities partly through civic activism in the name of a vision of individual and community well-being. Patriotism was a self-conscious identity acquired by service out in public. Indeed, these enlightenment practices reworked the linkages between charity, relief, and political legitimation, which were essential components of the struggles for power and authority in early modern dynastic and city states, even if their role is not fully credited in the historical literature. In contrast, a wide range of scholarship has recognized the connections between patriotic structures and state-building in the “long” nineteenth century. The work is rich and suggestive, although largely unintegrated . Drawing on a tradition of thought in the West, political theorists, for example, point to new civic identities that transformed patriotism into the foundation of republican virtue: an armed civic commitment that was at the basis of de‹nitions of male citizenship, realized ‹rst in North America and France. The ideal of a militarized male citizenry, in time, proved compatible with the royal professional armies of Prussia/Germany and imperial Russia as well as the system of territorial defense organized in early-twentieth-century Britain. A gendered formation from the start, the model citizen-soldier posited an equally formulaic female “other” and derived its full meaning from the juxtaposition of gendered polarities: war 293 and peace, soldier and helpmate, militarism and paci‹sm, aggression and passivity. While inserting “woman” directly into the discourse of war and politics, much of this literature remains at the level of symbolic structures and political ideals.1 A second line of analysis is more common among German historians for whom patriotism and nationalism, understandably, are deeply complicated questions. It connects patriotism and nationalism to social organization , institution building, and political struggle in the emerging nationstates of Europe. With few exceptions, however, German scholars have failed to analyze women’s place in shaping national identity and civil defense. Their focus, rather, remains ‹xed on the bourgeois nationalist movement and, after 1879, the increasingly radical male-dominated nationalist Verbände. This analysis leads to a tautology: “national identities ” are a function of so-called nationalist debates over armaments, imperialism , or missionary work in the formal spheres of politics—in parliament , the press, and the pressure groups themselves. Even the feminist “politics” of reform are disconnected from the themes that are held to constitute nationalist discourse. Through this prism, nationalism, indeed, becomes a debate among German men. My study has sought to overcome the limitations of both scholarly approaches. By offering a gendered analysis of patriotism and power, it works to integrate the distinct insights into a new and promising interpretative grid. This approach highlights social groups and behavioral forms that essentially remain peripheral in the dominant narratives of nationalism : the German dynastic courts, aristocratic women, and wives of medical professionals as well as their work of staging philanthropy for conservative political state ends. Furthermore, an examination of the philanthropic milieu of patriotic women adds a new mix into debates over modernity, a concept that has been legitimized by the writing of history itself. The blend of traditional and modern elements in dynastic-sanctioned charity—for example, the alliance of humanitarianism and science, the face-to-face ties in bureaucratic organizations, or the political rituals of benevolence in contrast to rights—reveals the shortcomings of any model that posits a straight developmental line toward “modern” rational state-forms with a single unitary national identity. Indeed, scholars outside the West have offered trenchant critiques of the linear foundations of such arguments. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty speaks of “deferral” and Mark Elvin of a “complex 294 Staging Philanthropy 1. I am drawing on here Elshtain, Women and War; and Elshtain and Tobias, Women, Militarism, and War. For England, Summers, Angels and Citizens, 237–90; and, for Russia, Joshua Sandborn, “Empire, Nation, and the Man: Conscription and Political Community in Russia, 1905–1925,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998. of power” divorced, however, from any end point...

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