Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe.

Bonnie J. White is a Ph.D. candidate in History Department at McMaster
University.

Patrizia Albanese provides a systematic examination of the impact of political policy on the private sphere. Primarily concerned with the lives of women and their role as “reproducers of the nation,” she considers how nationalist movements in Europe amended or restricted women’s rights. Beginning with definitions of nationalism and its impact on gender relations and family politics, she explores women’s roles, rights, and responsibilities in the inter-war and post–Second World War periods in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Yugoslavia. The aim of her work is to identify and explain changes in family practices and policies as nationalist governments introduced and reintroduced patriarchal customs and traditions that were often detrimental to women and family life.

The strength of Albanese’s work is its comparative nature. She convincingly demonstrates that although nationalism was a powerful modernizing force that was beneficial to some members of a particular nation state, women were almost universally excluded from active participation in political and military life, thus denying them equal citizenship. Within this framework, women’s roles as mothers, wives, and educators of children were reinforced. In Germany, for example, the rise of a nationalist government came with contradictory results. Under the Weimar Constitution women could vote and had more control over their bodies, but the rise of Nazism was accompanied by a concerted effort to remove women from the workforce despite the fact that the regime created new employment opportunities for women. The desire of Nazi reformers to remove women from the public sphere was part of a larger movement to re-Aryanize women by returning them to the home, thereby reversing the negative effects of modernization. Alternately, in the Soviet Union economic necessity forced women into paid employment, but their experiences were often discriminatory and in no way freed them from their traditional family obligations.

Although Albanese’s work does not cover the entire 20th century and is restricted to four case studies rather than a general European history, her examination of nationalism does extend beyond the more narrowly defined parameters of the case studies themselves. The book is also rich in historiography and provides adequate political and social context for the issues under investigation.