Gendered nations: nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century
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n Weatherall doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400121
Gendered nations: nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, editors; Berg, Oxford, 2000, 347 pp, HbK ISBN 1-85973-2593 d42.00, PbK ISBN 1-859-732-264X d14.99 This edited volume brings together a collection of essays that are a product of the necessary and intense engagement by feminists on the complex connection between the rise of variegated nationalisms and the enmeshing of gender relationships within this. The period is a watershed for the futures that were mapped out for the globe, both in terms of the rise of democratic political movements in Europe, Britain and America (within which women were embedded in a fraught way), relationships between the nations–states of Europe and Britain, and above all for the profound impact it had on colonized peoples all over the world, where imperialism left a lasting legacy. The collection of papers were those that had initially been brought together in a Berlin symposium to evolve an ‘international perspective’ on ‘Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century’ (preface, xv). The book is divided into four distinct parts: Part 1 titled ‘Nations, Nationalisms and Gender’ contains more conceptual essays by Ida Blom, Geoff Eley, Ruth Roach Pierson and Silke Wenk. While designed to lead overviews of the entire volume, they situate these in methodological debates of our times (Blom has herself contributed to the forging of a women’s ‘world history’ or ‘global history’ paradigm) and to the critical importance that culture, mythology and the question of representations has acquired in our disciplines (Eley, Roach Pierson and Wenk.) Part 2 is titled ‘Nations States, Ethnicity and Gender Order’, and contains an analysis by Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff of two paintings by Anne-Loius Girodet (Endymion and Jean Baptiste Belley), which ends with a rather unsatisfactory interlinking with de Sade’s defence of ‘the discourse of republican sodomy’ and the claim that both took ‘subversive positions within this discourse’ (page 100).
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feminist review 75 2003
book reviews
Catherine Hall’s contribution sees the connections between empire, ethnicity (Catholic Emancipation) and ‘race’ (the slave rebellion in Jamaica 1831) and the 1832 Reform Act in the British Parliament by utilizing Partha Chatterjees’s concept of the ‘rule of colonial difference’ and usefully argues that connections require to be made between gender, class, ethnic, racial hierarchies, which cut across both empire and nation. Both Halls’ and Beth Baron’s contributions – the latter titled ‘The Making of the Egyptian Nation’ – are historically nuanced texts, Baron’s providing a particularly insightful analysis of the crucial importance of the ending of harem slavery (that had been prevalent within elite Ottoman households) to the emergence and consolidation of an Egyptian national elite by cutting off the trade in female and male slaves, both groups that were traded in to bolster the power of the Ottoman
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