THE NATION AS WOMAN
‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.'43 The English feminist and writer Virginia Woolf (1882—1941) uttered her appeal to universal sisterhood in 1938, at a moment in European history when the fragile peace following the First World War was under threat as a consequence of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain.
For Woolf, the issue of the oppression of women was global. She equated the ‘tyranny of the patriarchal state' with that of the fascist nation-state. From the perspective of the nineteenth century, Woolf's appeal to the universal woman stands in contrast to more than a century of entreaties to women to embrace their patriotic duty, and historians have recognised that women are central to the ‘biological, social, cultural and symbolic reproduction of nations'.44 In France and in Germany, the images of Marianne and Germania respectively have been used to symbolise the nation. In Prussia, Queen Luise, and in Norway, Queen Maud, became icons of the nation and of idealised femininity; in Spain, Isabel II (r. 1833—68) was represented as the good Catholic mother figure, the hope of the nation following several decades of political turmoil.45 And, as mothers, women have been charged with the responsibility of reproducing the race; as educators they were responsible for shaping responsible citizens; as sexual and moral beings women's virtue has been placed at the centre of the defence of the nation against ‘degeneracy'; and as bearers of ‘traditional' culture women have been given a central role in defining and maintaining national cultural identity. During the nineteenth century, when liberal, emancipatory impulses across Europe found an outlet in campaigns for national unification and self-determination, this association of woman with the nation could be both empowering and constraining. Whilst, on the one hand, women were regarded as ‘guardians of the traditional order' or, in Anne McLintock's words, ‘as the atavistic and “authentic” body of national tradition (inert, backwardlooking, and natural), at the same time women have been given (and have sometimes embraced) an active role in the reproduction and maintenance of the nation and national identity.'46 Like it or not, women are implicated in the flowering of cultural nationalism, resistance to foreign domination and the emergence of nation-states. This means they are also implicated in struggles for national supremacy.Feminist historians have recently begun to think about the ways in which nationalism is gendered and, for the most part, have concluded that despite incorporating women into the liberationist struggle, nationalist movements are sites of masculine domination. Writing about European nationalism Pierson argues that
the formation of national identities was predicated on an imagined community of shared sameness (sameness of language, culture, blood, soil, economic interest), but the achievement of that unity entailed the violent suppression, exclusion or denial of difference and conflict... in their strategies to preserve dominance over women in general... lay the seeds of ‘scientific' racism and a socio-biology based gender ideology.47
In the context of later nineteenth century nationalism in its encounter with colonialism, Pierson's analysis carries some weight (see in Chapter 9), but this description of the heavy hand of nationalism as a universal oppressor of women does not ring entirely true for earlier in the century. It fails to take account of women's own perception of their contribution to the national project. Women did share in the resurgence of national identity, although they often expressed their national consciousness using different symbols and rituals. Indeed, for most women, national identity began at home.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793—1815) offered many women an opportunity to exhibit their patriotism.
The events of the Revolution and especially the representation of women's involvement, had already produced a debate in Britain and in Prussia about the potential threat to the social and gender order if women there were allowed to emulate their French sisters. Prussian and British women were thus urged to act in ways that demonstrated the qualities and virtues associated with Germanness or Britishness. Modesty, timidity and dignity were feminine virtues to be cherished and counterposed to the Frenchwomen's unnatural desire for power and their immodesty on the streets.48 The invasion, or threat of invasion, by the Napoleonic forces, however, gave women a new role: that of patriot. British women, hearing of the alleged brutality of the French soldiers, cheered the militia men sent to fight and jeered those who refused. They also collected subscriptions towards the raising and equipping of volunteer forces, they gathered clothing, they made banners and flags, and collected money for wounded soldiers. These women were fulfilling an acceptable patriotic role but, as Linda Colley argues, ‘by extending their solicitude to the nation's armed forces... women demonstrated their domestic virtues possessed a public as well as a private relevance. Consciously or not, these female patriots were staking out a civic role for themselves.'49 The experience of war in Britain (the American Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars), in Prussia (the Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of German Unification) and in national uprisings such as the 1861 Polish Insurrection, helped to forge a patriotic identity that encompassed women's participation. In Spain, on the other hand, which was occupied by the French, the patriotic woman took part in the resistance. Women were active in riots and uprisings constituting the urban revolutions of 1808; some, such as those in Zaragoza, engaged in combat, but more commonly they provided back-up in the form of intelligence and supplies. Their role in the defeat of France contributed to the formation of women's national identity as Spaniards and as citizens.50Elsewhere in Europe, the emergence of new nation-states was doubleedged for women. On the one hand, nation-states did institutionalise gender difference via what has been termed civic nationalism, that is national law codes, constitutions and the formal structures of power. On the other hand, in the realm of ‘cultural nationalism', women's contribution was often valued and women themselves began to use their leverage in this sphere to demand improvements and ultimately greater civic rights within the nation-state. The spirit of liberalism and democracy which had swept across much of continental Europe in the middle of the century was both a consequence of and a contributor to a heightened sense of national identity, notably in Italy, Germany and the member nations of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, all of which were keen to emulate the national unity and power of France. Here, the old regime had been replaced by the nation-state founded upon the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity; her male subjects had become citizens and she established a popular army to defend the nation against reactionary enemies. Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and Greeks as well as Germans, Italians and Irish, nurtured their language, culture and customs in the service of the national idea. Women participated in these national movements as patriots, contributing to the cultural creation of national identity in their writing and music-making. At the same time, the ways in which nations were conceived of and imagined contributed to the definition of the feminine and to the ways in which feminists constructed their arguments for equal inclusion in the nation-state.
Nationalism took many forms in this period. In some places it was a liberal or revolutionary ideology with the aim of resisting domination, and in others it was a dominating ideology concerned with upholding the interests of those who were deemed to belong to the nation at the expense of others.
It is clear that women might be implicated in a number of different ways. In Germany, for instance, women played a prominent role as writers in the liberal romantic nationalist movement of the early nineteenth century, but following the unification of Germany around economic and political imperatives in 1871, this spirit gave way to a more aggressive nationalism focused around rightwing associations like the Colonial Society and the Pan-German League wherein women played a rather different role. In German-speaking Austria, where bourgeois Germans were determined to defend their position against the rising power of Slavic groups from the 1880s, women were given the responsibility of maintaining German ethnic purity and of German culture. Schoolteachers in particular were at the forefront of these efforts to strengthen German cultural unity at the expense of other ethnic groups.51Nineteenth-century nationalism was neither a coherent movement nor a coherent ideology, and perhaps it is precisely on account of its inchoate and shifting nature that women could find in the national idea a place to nurture their own aspirations. As writers, women contributed to national literature; as recognised carriers of language and custom they could be incorporated into the discourse of national liberation, especially in those states dominated by foreign rule. But women's role in promoting cultural nationalism was permitted within quite narrowly defined limits. The nation was conceived of as a family incorporating the gender roles already familiar to us, and in turn the family was regarded as the ‘nursery of the nation'.52 Thus, in nationalist discourse women were symbolised as mothers, housewives and educators, as bearers of national tradition, and as guardians of culture. Women were given significance then, as custodians of the past in a project spearheaded by men to create a new future.