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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Patrizia Albanese, Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006)

DESPITE THE FACT that in the early 21st century few would discount the view that the 'personal is political,' the notion that the political is also highly personal may only just be creeping into scholarly discourse. Patrizia Albanese, who teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto, presents a very convincing portrait of how political policy reflects and affects personal life, specifically that of women and families, in her 2006 book, Mothers of the Nation. In this concise, 192 page study, Albanese has undertaken a very systematic survey of four regions of Europe that, during the 20th century, employed ideologies and enacted policies that utilized women's bodies as purveyors of nationalist goals.

In three clearly-organized sections, Albanese outlines nationalist goals in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Yugoslavia (later focusing on Croatia) first in the inter-war period, secondly in the post- 1989 period, and finally in comparison with each other. In the nationalist regimes — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, post-Soviet Russia, and post-Yugoslavia Croatia — what emerges as common to all regions was the attempt by policy-makers to regulate women's sexuality and reproductive lives as a way of furthering the nation. Most specifically, this meant utilizing women, both symbolically and practically, as reproducers of the 'ethnic collectivity' in terms of childbearing and socializing of children.

In all cases, the rise of nationalist regimes led to the implementation of pronatalist and pronuptialist policies that worked to repatriarchalize gender and family relations. Central to these policies was the goal of raising fertility rates. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, policies were put in place that restricted the use of contraceptives, and limited or eliminated access to safe abortions. At the same time, financial incentives and tax breaks were offered to increase family size and, in Germany, eugenic selection to reduce the population of 'undesirables' also became part of the program. Among many unusual measures taken in Germany was the "psychological or symbolic" incentive whereby mothers with nine children (or seven sons) could choose any official of the state to be the next child's godfather; by 1936 Hitler had 12,000 such godchildren. (27) In inter-war Italy, when Fascists equated declining birth rates with "an overall crisis of national vitality," (52) initiatives were taken to reward traditional family forms such as a bachelor tax on unmarried men, marriage loans for newlyweds (repayable only if a couple didn't meet a schedule for pregnancies), and "fertility prizes." (55) Similar policies were enacted in post-Communist Russia and in Croatia in the 1990s.

Comparable approaches were applied to women's labour force participation. Under Hitler, women were encouraged to leave the paid workforce and return to their proper places within the realm of 'Kinder, Kirche, and Küche' but when war broke out, they were encouraged to become workers for the cause once again. In Italy during the 1930s, Mussolini set as a goal a quota of only 10 percent of women employees in public and private sectors and gave preferred employment options to fathers with large families; the onset of war and other economic factors meant that such measures never really had their intended effect.

What nationalist family policies shared was the desire to "promote the ideas of order, authority, obedience, faith, and control at the level of the nation," (188) in essence to place "men at the head of the household and women in front of a crib." (189) The "oppression, submission, and authority" of the father/husband in the home thus became a microcosm of the relations between the state and its citizens. The author soundly demonstrates that, "A key role of nationalist state policies … is to achieve the social control of women for the specific purposes of reestablishing a real or mythical past order and glory, and ensuring a fecund, homogeneous, ethno-national future." (178)

Albanese concludes that, despite the short term successes of these policies as measured in increased marriage and fertility rates, the efforts of nationalist policy-makers were not able to curb the overall decline of either over the course of the twentieth century. Nor were they able to turn around the factors that kept women in the workforce. These outcomes are compared and contrasted in detailed statistical and policy analysis in Chapters 10 and 11 respectively, a section that is somewhat less interesting to read but nevertheless important to undergird Albanese's overall findings. Furthermore, Albanese's study also demonstrates that the so-called 'modernization' often thought to accompany the development of nationalism within a state did not hold for family relations. Indeed, she suggests that gender roles and relations can recede from a modern egalitarianism under the influence of extreme nationalist goals.

A particular strength of this book is Albanese's comparative approach. She measures her hypothesis regarding nationalist states against non-nationalist policies within the same country (or at least geographic region) during a different era. Thus, she is able to draw conclusions regarding significant shifts in state family polices, and their effects, from the Weimar Republic, to Nazi Germany, to post-reunification Germany, for instance. Similarly, Albanese analyzes the potential for gender equality that existed within Bolshevik ideology and practice in interwar revolutionary Russia and later also in socialist Yugoslavia, but notes that measures that might have advanced women's emancipation as wives, mothers, and workers were reversed under Stalin. In post-communist Russia of the 1990s, "increased nostalgia for traditional female roles centred on the home and family" (104) meant that women's reproductive rights were curtailed and they were discouraged from entering the workforce. While nationalist laws implemented by the Nazis and Fascists in Germany and Italy respectively were specifically antifeminist and designed to limit women's roles to that of wives and mothers, in multi-national Yugoslavia during the same period, women remained within a state of traditional agrarian and private patriarchy, as the country focused on economic development while negotiating diverse and regional cultural identities. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia emerged as one of the new "nationally homogeneous entities" in which women were encouraged to find their symbolic place within the "trinity of 'home, nation, and God.'" (123)

Albanese's book offers an excellent historical comparative approach to thinking about the intersection of gender and nationalism. What is particularly fascinating and well-illustrated is the way in which women's bodies and behaviour became tools of nationalist and indeed non-nationalist states, to which women responded with both acquiescence and rebellion. While the author's feminist and leftist biases are evident throughout, she also points out the gains that women did make, if only temporarily, within nationalist contexts — better maternity and childcare provisions for instance — and notes the inconsistences within socialist approaches that affirmed equality but that saw women performing the proverbial 'double load' of domestic and paid labour. The book is well written though a social historian might wish for a few personal life stories of women living within these particular nationalist regimes as a means of illustrating the effect of the policies being examined.

Albanese's conclusions are provocative. An important 'lesson' of the book is her suggestion that the progression towards gender equality in the world is not a linear one, whereby we are moving ever closer to progressive egalitarianism. Rather, "two steps forward can be followed by three steps back …" (191) While nationalism within North America has rarely been analyzed in gendered terms, this study behooves us to consider how nationalist ideology affects gender roles and family relations within less extremist contexts, and thus to consider how deeply the political impacts the personal.


MARLENE EPP Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo

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