CONCLUSIONS
At the outbreak of war in 1914 the active citizen in the nation-state was still male in all European countries, apart from Finland and Norway which granted female suffrage in national elections in 1906 and 1913, respectively.
Yet women had been actively engaged in political life as de facto citizens and as patriots throughout the century. Everywhere, politically conscious women bypassed the limitations put upon their engagement in the public sphere, but nowhere were they granted political rights. Why was this? The most persuasive explanation concerns the continued adherence to ideas about difference amongst men and women. Men's claim to citizenship was founded upon their difference from women; their ability to bear arms was predicated upon their defence of the nation, including women and children. Women's duty was different, encompassing reproduction, nurture and the education of future citizens. Legislators could not or would not see past this ingrained conception of gender roles. So women who sought to engage with national politics on the same terms as men seemed to justify the portrayal of them as female incendiaries, militants and political radicals. Attitudes had changed little since Burke's description of female revolutionaries in 1789 as ‘the vilest of women'. As Gay Gullickson has vividly described in the context of the 1871 Paris Commune, ‘thepetroleuse [female incendiary] became the negative embodiment of the publicly active woman and cast a long shadow over debates about women's rights and proper roles.'79 Women, like the petroleuses and the Irish nationalists during the war of independence, were seen as having violated their nature.In an attempt to speak to those who held power, women revolutionary and nationalist activists began to talk the language of difference too. They embraced their role, they found ways of carrying out their duty to the nation that were comparable with, but not the same as, men's activities, and they attempted to build on the work assigned to them to make gains in the fields of education, employment and civic and political rights.
More comforting to men in power was the image of the domestic woman teaching folk songs to the child at her knee (and probably wearing her national costume).It is clearly misguided to interpret women's activism in revolutionary and nationalist movements as always informed by feminism or a desire for women's emancipation. But the very fact of their engagement did eventually force some women to begin to campaign for women's rights per se, since it was recognised that no matter how hard women actively demonstrated their loyalties to the nation they would never be regarded as equal citizens of the state. Meanwhile, in the more mature, economically strong and selfconfident nations of France, Britain and the Netherlands, women who had less need (or maybe less opportunity) to demonstrate their own patriotism began to participate in the imperial project. This not only cemented white women's national identity in states from which they were still politically excluded, but it also provided them with another space in which to articulate the language of duty and rights.