DISAPPOINTED PATRIOTS
It has often been observed that whilst women participated in movements of national liberation on a roughly equal basis, being incorporated as members of the oppressed race or culture, once the struggle was over and the nationstate established their sex once more became the crucial marker of their identity.
The dichotomies of race, ethnicity or culture were replaced by the dichotomy of gender which was institutionalised in the civic sphere, notably in national constitutions and law codes but also in the day-to-day practice of politics. In the nineteenth century the new political sphere was created as a masculine arena. Equality on the streets or at the barricades was replaced by inequality in the parliaments, in the workplace and in the home. In France, Germany and elsewhere, citizenship rights rested upon the individual's duty to the state. For men this was interpreted as the ability to bear arms and defend the nation-state (and implicitly defenceless, weak women). Women's duty was reproduction, ostensibly carried out in the private realm. The consequence of gendered conceptions of citizenship was the subordination of women in the new structures of the state. Thus, the subordination of women was written into the Napoleonic Code after the French Revolution which placed women in legal servitude to men. The same was true in Italy and Germany where new legal codes were introduced in 1865 (Codice Pisanelli) and 1900 (Bugerliches Gesetzbuch), respectively, ostensibly to consolidate the new nation-states which had hitherto been governed by a complex patchwork of law codes, some of which had been distinctly female-friendly. In both newly unified states and in new nation-states such as Bulgaria and Ireland, women had expectations that their civic position would be improved, not so much as a reward for their support of the nationalist struggle but in recognition of the principles of self-determination and democracy. In Italy, Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837—1920) was one of the first women to claim rights for women in the new Italian state, both as natural justice and in the name of civilisation and national survival. She was to be disappointed.In the new nation-states, those women who saw national unity as an opportunity to stake a claim for women's political and civic rights did not use the equal rights language of the French Revolution. Rather they perceived their position within and against the state as different from and yet as legitimate as men's. There were numerous opportunities and forums for women — feminists, patriots, conservatives and socialists — to demonstrate ways in which they saw themselves as full members of the nation. In Germany, those who belonged to women's organisations and patriotic activists found ways of participating in nation-building outside formal political structures. Following the tradition of one of the earliest women's organisations in Germany, the Frauenverein zum Wohle des Vaterlandes (Women's Association for the Good of the Fatherland) founded during the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, and in a similar vein the Vaterlandische Frauenverein (Patriotic Women's Association) established by Queen Augusta of Prussia in 1866 at the end of the Austro-Prussian war, German women enthusiastically joined what might be described as patriotic charitable and cultural nationalist associations. Patriotic Women's Societies had mushroomed during the early years of the new nation-state so that by 1891 there were almost 800 branches.69 These groups initially envisaged their role as complementary to that of men. They embodied acceptable female domestic virtues and did not envisage their role as extending beyond the bounds of patriotic charity. But, from around 1900, patriotic women began to look further than charitable works influenced by an aggressive nationalist political discourse in German political life. Encapsulating this shift was the stated aim of one branch association in Posen in 1911: its mission was ‘to encourage women here to become involved in civic problems, so that we might cast their gaze more broadly — beyond the narrow confines of personal calling and family responsibilities — out on to the whole picture, on to the responsibilities which we women too, as citizens, owe to our nation and country.'70
By 1900, the range of women's organisations, most of which were affiliated to the umbrella Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), was huge, permitting thousands of women to participate in cultural nationalism.
In an atmosphere of heightened nationalism during Germany's imperial and naval expansion, these organisations began to conceive of ways in which women might contribute to the nation comparable to male military service. The idea of a ‘female service year' put forward by the BDF in 1912 seemed to fit the bill, envisaged as instruction in home economics for those with a basic education and a year spent in a female social-work school for those of higher social classes. On the outbreak of war in 1914 the female service year became National Women's Service. ‘The invocation of the nation proved an ideal catchphrase for expanding women's sphere of influence without appearing to be too radical.'71 Nationalism was thus used by some feminists as a means to an end. They hoped by demonstrating their allegiance to the nationalist agenda they would be granted greater access to the political sphere, although as Gertrud Baumer (1873—1954), chair of the BDF, warned, it would be dangerous to pin too many hopes on what could be ‘a Trojan horse of the worst kind'.72German unification was not the outcome of a popular nationalist uprising but was accomplished through war and economic domination. Women's participation had been limited, restricted to their traditional role as supporters at home of the men carrying out their patriotic duty. In this context it was not surprising that women gained so little from the new nation-state. When feminists campaigned to influence the codification of the new civil code they were denied equality even in the realm assigned to them — the family.73 In Ireland though, the national liberation struggle against the British had fully involved Irish Catholic women and yet even here women were marginalised from public political life in the new Irish Free State established in 1922. Women's militant activity within the 500 branches of the Ladies Land League, which adopted a policy of active resistance to landlord power in the 1880s, was first and foremost in the service of Irish nationalism, but its leader, Anna Parnell, saw the organisation as a means of developing female autonomy.
Subsequent activity by nationalist-feminists in Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Erin), founded in 1900, focused upon the promotion of Gaelic culture and the education of the young, but its cultural slant belied its uncompromising stance as expressed in its paper Women of Ireland: ‘Freedom for our Nation and the complete removal of all disabilities to our sex.'74 The Daughters of Erin believed that women's strong and active presence within existing nationalist groups such as Sinn Fein would result in female enfranchisement in an independent Ireland. As their critics pointed out, they were impervious to the obvious retort that rural, Catholic Irish society in which women were subordinated in virtually all spheres, was unlikely to jettison its cultural baggage just as soon as Ireland was free. Women members of Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen's Council) engaged directly in the military action of the 1919—22 war of independence, servicing the Irish Republican Army Volunteers, carrying out intelligence work, gun-running and scouting. Indeed, it was precisely nationalist women's fervour, and their rejection of the cultural stereotype of the Irish woman, that allowed male nationalists to reassert their power in the political sphere ‘in order to create an independent state based on masculine authority and feminine domesticity'.75Moreover, in the 1920s, the consolidation of the Irish state and the construction of an Irish national identity based on supposed shared cultural traits, placed the family at the centre of national life so that ‘the nation came to be symbolised more and more by Irish motherhood and the sanctity of the Irish Catholic family.'76 There was little space within this discourse for feminist alternatives.
By the end of the century even those women who had been content in their role as cultural nationalists were beginning to feel frustrated. Governments remained intransigent in their unwillingness to include women in the nation-state as citizens, despite their encouragement of women to fulfil their role as mother-educators and as transmitters of culture.
Women took on board the entreaties to rear and educate future citizens, they tried to be good patriots, they grasped at opportunities to serve the nation in comparable ways to their menfolk but, as Ida Blom makes clear, women's service to the nation was judged according to prevailing constructions of gender roles. ‘To create life [and presumably to sustain and nurture it] resulted in a need for protection, whereas to be prepared to take life resulted in independence and rights in the nation.'77 The continuation of this gendered notion of duty and rights was to continue to plague feminists throughout the First World War. However much campaigners for women's rights sought to demonstrate their loyalty and patriotism to the nation — for example in the German National Women's Service or in the emphasis placed by British suffragists on women's wartime work — they did not see that service to the nation would never guarantee them equal participation in the state. Women had far more freedom of movement within campaigning nationalist organisations when the idea of the nation was still in flux, than within nation-states concerned to wield power and consolidate political and legal structures. Thus in Germany, Italy, Ireland, and amongst the peoples of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, we find the optimism of women engaged in a liberation struggle which offered the possibility of fundamental political and cultural change, including changes in gender relations. Within the new nation-states women found themselves hemmed in by power structures which did not acknowledge any possible reordering of social relations in the name of social stability. Women remained defined by their familial role; the nation was conceived of as a family and hence, in Geoff Eley's words, ‘the pioneers of nation-making found familial metaphors excellently suited for a modernising vocabulary of reform that simultaneously upheld the gender regimes of men.'78