OverviewIntroduction
Benedict Anderson observes that nationalism is
akin to kinship in that it rests on assumptions of
putative “blood” connections between those re-
garded as fellow nationals/fellow citizens (1991, 5).
Nationalist rhetoric is replete with images of blood
and earth evoking birth and autochthony. The sta-
tus of citizen, the sense of belonging to the nation,
arises on the basis of birth, of blood connections,
like membership of a family. (Indeed the word
nation derives from the Latin nasci, to be born.) In
some instances, the nation and the family are
explicitly connected through metaphorical equa-
tions that naturalize the exercise of state power,
rendering it inevitable and even God-given. More
commonly, the equation is more imminent, with
woman’s role within the family serving as a homol-
ogy for her role as a citizen, or her performance
of citizenship linked to domestic/maternal roles.
The “Western construct of the nation-state, which
became the compulsory form for the rest of the
world, is based on citizens as detached from com-
munities, as individuals. In fact – in the Arab world,
the Third World, and much of the West – persons
are deeply embedded in communities, in families,
in ethnic and social groupings” (Joseph 1997, 64).
Just as men and women are not necessarily equal
within families, the connection to the nation is not
equally available to men and women. They are dif-
ferentiated in terms of civil and political rights,
these differences commonly deriving from their
family roles.
In his path-breaking work on nationalism, An-
derson does not pursue the connection of the nation
with kinship, except insofar as his argument posits
the imagining of the nation as a community, a fra-
ternity. Scholars of nationalism have not tended to
see the nation as a social entity that exhibits a deep
gender asymmetry, even though the language of
nationalism is replete with gender imagery. The
national subject is represented as male, in both
nationalist rhetoric and in scholarship. The theo-
retical insights required to analyze the gendered
basis of the nation have been developed within fem-
inist political theory, and these tools are now being
applied by (mainly female) scholars in analyses of
specific nations/nationalist movements. Gender
Families: Metaphors of Nation
relations, both in the private world of the family
and in the public order, are foundational to analy-
sis of the nation.Women’s citizenship and
nationalist struggles
In an oft-cited formulation, based on a wide-
ranging historical review, Yuval-Davis and Anthias
(1989) have outlined the terms on which women
have been offered citizenship – terms that are, on
the whole, different for men: as biological repro-
ducers of the members of the national collective; as
reproducers of the boundaries of national groups
(through restrictions on sexual or marital rela-
tions); as active transmitters and producers of the
national culture; as symbolic signifiers of national
difference; and as active participants in national
struggles. These idealized roles in the political life of
the nation are linked to their duties within the pri-
vate world of the family. Eickelman and Piscatori
(1996, ch. 4) discuss the centrality of the link be-
tween women’s role in the moral order and the
upholding of the civic virtue of the nation in mod-
ern Islamic political thought.
Jayawardena has documented the important
ways in which women, and women’s issues, were
integral to the articulation of the ideal of the nation
in many struggles for national independence.
Claims for women’s civil and political rights – most
commonly in marriage and family law, education,
and suffrage – have often originated independently
of the influence of the first wave of feminism in the
West. Indeed, the “first arena in which women as a
group began to be involved in political action was
that of nationalist struggles” (Jayawardena 1987,
258). There are few published materials on the
imaginings of nation by these women, but it is clear
that they were articulating a modern notion of
women’s rights as part of their vision.
Reviewing nationalist movements in twelve
nations (including five with majority Muslim pop-
ulations), Jayawardena concludes that the reform
of the family and women’s roles were important
symbolic elements of the strategies of bourgeois
nationalist reformers in their quest for a national
consciousness and for modern secular political
structures. For these reformers, family structures
that oppressed women were associated with old
orders and the bourgeois family was central to the