Woman-Nation-State

Published at the end of the 1980s, Woman-Nation-State helped establish gender as constitutive of nationalism rather than an optional addition to its study. Across nine societies, the contributors examine how states and ethnic or national communities position women as biological reproducers, transmitters of culture, markers of communal boundaries, symbols of national difference, and participants in political struggle. Policies concerning marriage, fertility, citizenship, welfare, education, and sexuality therefore become central instruments of nation-building. The collection shows that the nation imagined as a family depends on highly regulated ideas of womanhood.

This framework clarifies a persistent feminist dilemma. National and anti-colonial projects may mobilize women as activists while restricting the terms of their belonging; states can proclaim equality while using reproductive policy, family law, or citizenship rules to discipline minorities. Women are neither merely victims of nationalism nor automatically liberated by participation in it. Their location is shaped by class, ethnicity, migration, religion, and the distinction between formal membership and substantive rights. By comparing different historical settings, the book makes it possible to see how “tradition” and “modernization” can both become languages for governing gender.

Some categories in the volume reflect its period. The emphasis on women as biological reproducers can sound heteronormative if detached from queer and trans scholarship, and later work has developed fuller accounts of settler colonialism, racialization, disability, diaspora, and nonbinary citizenship. Readers should also avoid turning a comparative framework into a universal template. Even so, Woman-Nation-State remains foundational because it changes the object of analysis: family policy, population control, cultural respectability, and border law are not peripheral social issues but political technologies of the nation. For FemRes, it supplies a durable vocabulary for asking who is asked to reproduce a people, embody its honor, and pay for its imagined continuity.