THE NATIONAL FAMILY
In the search for appropriate and permissible patriotic roles for women, one of the first was that of woman as the heart of the national family. Wearing her national dress, singing traditional folk songs, speaking her ‘mother tongue' and cooking traditional recipes, woman embodied the idea of the unity and authenticity of the nation.
National costume, usually based upon some notion of traditional peasant dress, came to symbolise national identity in concrete form, but more importantly the dress worn by women, as in Iceland and Norway, identified women as members of the national project, but in their role as mothers and keepers of custom. In both of these Nordic countries, women's national costume, which was invented in the early nineteenth century in the context of the struggle for national self-determination, consisted of a heavily embroidered dress overlaid with a sparkling white apron. In Iceland, the full skirt, the corset and the apron, all served to symbolise the nation as mother.53 Women who wore national costume, on feast days, weddings, Sundays and later as workers in the fledgling tourist industry, were walking examples of womanly virtues, exhibiting their skill at handicrafts and their pride as mothers, housewives and patriots. Similarly in the Netherlands, Brittany, Wales and the Austrian Tyrol, national dress for women emerged as a complement to movements of national or regional awakening. In contrast, nations such as England and France which were more comfortable with their national identity and which possessed large empires, felt less need to conspicuously display their women as national mascots.The wearing of dress which harked back to an imagined rural culture, served to locate women within a gender order which identified them with the domestic or the private but which also linked the home with the nation.
In Germany after unification the bourgeoisie increasingly anchored its national identity in virtues such as cleanliness, thrift and hygiene and it was housewives who expressed these virtues every day in running a home. Pride in maintaining the high standards of German domesticity — in contrast with French housewives’ alleged obsession with fashion and Englishwomen’s ignorance of the basic rules of cleanliness on account of their habit of employing servants — was one way in which women of the middle classes could identify with a nation that placed so much value on the home as the heartland of Germanness.54 Elsewhere, women linked the home with the nation through the collection and performance of ‘traditional’ folk songs and dances. In mid-nineteenth-century Latvia, for example, an agrarian Baltic state belonging to the Russian Empire and dominated by Germans, women who collected Latvian folk songs and who then performed them at special festivals became important bearers of a national history. According to Irina Novikova, ‘The politically instrumentalised ritual of the festival was central to Latvian peasant women’s individual and collective participation in the emancipatory vision of the national family, their consciousness of womanhood and motherhood confirming unity with nationhood.’55 Interestingly, the Norwegian national anthem, first performed in 1864, incorporated the relationship between the home and the nation and the gender relations therein. With the words, ‘all that the fathers have fought for, the mothers have wept for’, Norwegians affirmed their belief in the gendering of public and private spheres.56But it was in their role as mother-educators, as preservers of the mother tongue as well as the national culture, that women were most valued by national movements. At a time when a common language and culture was used as the key legitimator of movements of national self-determination, influenced to some extent by the successful monolinguistic nation-states of Britain and France, the perpetuation of linguistic tradition and memory within the domestic and the national family was central to the national project.
This was especially important for national liberation movements struggling against foreign domination. The language spoken at home — Czech, Croat, Polish — was in the trust of women who, in the role of mothereducators, were in the front line of the attempt to counter the imposition of a foreign culture and language in schools and public life. In Italy, Guiseppe Mazzini’s version of republican nationalism placed the family at the centre of the struggle for national unity and freedom from French and Austrian oppression, and hence women's maternal role was privileged just as it had been in America where, during the Revolution and the War of Independence, women who possessed no independent political rights were nevertheless valued as patriots whose role as educators was crucial to the success of the republic.57 Amongst Czechs, women's role in educating their children to become patriots in the Czech language was regarded as essential to combat Germanisation of the Czech lands within the Habsburg Empire.58 In the Kingdom of Croatia (until 1919 part of the Habsburg Empire), women of the nobility and upper middle classes were active in the Illyrianist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, a cultural reaction to the fear of Germanisation and Magyarisation. In the following decades, prominent women Croat writers such as the author of fairytales, Ivana Brlic Mazuranic (1874—1938) worked hard to promote Croat language and history.59 Similarly, in Poland following partition in the eighteenth century, nationalists understood that the forging of a Polish identity was dependent on the cultivation of the Polish language. In schools, boys and girls of the noble classes were taught in French following a French curriculum and using French or Latin texts. In the Russian part of Poland, following the intensive Russification of the elementary education system in the 1880s and 1890s, a group of women educationalists established the Secret Teaching Society with the aim of teaching the Polish language, history, religion and geography to working-class girls and boys in Warsaw and the smaller towns, meeting a demand from Polish working-class families — especially mothers — that their children should receive instruction in their mother tongue.60 Following the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the consequent flowering of Polish national consciousness, the Polish School Promotion Society established numerous classes taught in Polish, many of which were popular with working women. Patriotic themes were also prominent in the works of Polish women writers of popular novels and books for children.61 One woman who recognised the importance of women's role in reviving Polish culture was the writer Klementyna Tanska Hoffmanowa whose Memoir of a Good Mother, Her Last Advice to her Daughter was published in 1819. ‘We have so few who are writing [in Polish]; I suspect that among women in particular those writing in Polish exceed those who read it,' she commented in her diary. ‘Our sex seems to think it was born on the Seine instead of the Vistula. But since almost everyone follows the example of the beautiful sex, it is safe to assume that until women declare themselves in favour of the Polish language, it will not spread.'62 Hoffmanowa combined in her writings a commitment to separate spheres with a zeal to promote Polish identity. Memoir of a Good Mother thus nicely articulated the acceptable role of the female nationalist or Matka Polka (patriot mother). The editor of the conservative Polish women's periodical Blus%cz (Ivy), Maria Ilnicka (1825—97) promoted the role of the Polish woman as homemaker in her belief that the Polish family was a bastion against foreign domination.63Hoffmanowa was not an advocate of female emancipation through education, although she noted that her intention in writing books for schools in Polish was to ‘familiarise [children] with everything Polish and to instil in growing girls the realisation that although God created them female they could still be useful.'64 But there were women who expected more of the mother-educator role within the nation state. In contrast to Bluszpz, the Polish liberal women's journal Swit (Dawn), promoted women's education and work as the route to women's emancipation and the building of a healthy national community.65 The German writer and women's rights activist Louise Otto-Peters made one of the earliest calls for women's education so that they might be of service to the German fatherland.
Criticising the tendency for wealthy girls to be taught French, English and Latin as she had been, she argued that girls' schools should employ ‘true German women who find their highest calling in educating German maidens.' Moreover, she advocated education to enable women to become independent so that ‘they will be capable of doing their duty on behalf of the State in a proper manner.'66 In the wake of the nationalist movement and the 1848 Revolution in the Habsburg lands, Czech women began to campaign for female education to produce the teachers of the new generation of Czech nationalists. In Bulgaria, following independence in 1878 and the establishment of the first national university in Sofia, women who had participated in the struggle for liberation began to demand improvements in girls education at all levels.67 And in Greece at the end of the century, women were regarded as not only ‘the potential producers of soldiers' but also ‘the untarnishable source of the true national language'.68 Their central role in the teaching of Greek was used by feminists to demand equal education and ultimately was used to bolster demands for political rights on the grounds that Greek national renewal was dependent on gender equality.It is easy to be rather critical of those nineteenth-century nationalist or patriotic women who expressed their national identity through the wearing of national costume and taking their duty as mother-educators seriously, since they appear to have been merely fulfilling the stereotypical roles expected of them. Some took their engagement with national ideas further than tokenistic display and literary endeavour by adopting a more chauvinistic and xenophobic form of nationalism. However, at a time when the discourse on citizenship was being redefined as the reward for fulfilling one's duty to the state, most women looked for ways in which they could contribute which would correspond to male military service.