Table Of ContentREVISITING
MODERN
EUROPEAN
HISTORY
1 7 8 9 - 1 9 4 5
EDITED BY
V A N D A N A J O S H I
Revisiting
Modern European History:
1789–1945
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Revisiting
Modern European History:
1789–1945
Edited by
Vandana Joshi
Dedicated to my students, past, present and future.
❧❄❧❈❧❄❧❈❧❄❧
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Contents
Introduction vii
Acknowledgements xxiii
List of Contributors xxv
Chapter 1 Citizenship and Difference:
The Age of Revolution 1
— Barbara Caine
Chapter 2 Spaces and Places: Changing Patterns
of Domesticity and Work 26
— Barbara Caine
Chapter 3 Nationalization of the Female
Citizenry: Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany 49
— Vandana Joshi
Chapter 4 Race and Nation:
An Intellectual History 88
— Eric D. Weitz
Chapter 5 The Apogee of Racism: Nazi
Germany 1933–1945 133
— Vandana Joshi
Chapter 6 In Pursuit of Social Justice:
Modern European Socialism,
1850–1940 189
— Sharon A. Kowalsky
vi | Contents
Chapter 7 Industrialization and the Rise of
Modern Class Society 242
— Vijaya Rajni and
Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay
Chapter 8 Nationalism: Triumphs and
Challenges in the Long Nineteenth
Century and Beyond 296
— Daniella Sarnoff
Index 339
Introduction
Revisiting Modern European History: 1789–1945 helps us to understand
the story of modern Europe in a thematic manner. The themes chosen for
this volume, namely gender, race, class and nation have been used as
analytical tools that question the universality and unilinearity of the so-
called progress and development that Europe achieved in the modern era.
The questions posed in the volume point to the problems and perils of
the progress and development based on science. Scientific advancement
in the Nazi era was utilized to create a moral universe within which
death factories operated day in and day out with remarkable industrial
efficiency such as in Auschwitz, to annihilate entire sections of population
without creating psychological disturbance and moral qualms among
the murders. With impunity the executioners could execute mass
killings without soiling their hands in blood and hearing the cries of the
victims.
Race, gender, class and nation in the century of extremes were so
muddled that we cannot find simple solutions, categorizations and
gradations. That is why they form four pillars on which our understanding
of power politics of modern Europe rests. Readers will find an overlap
of these categories throughout the book, which only confirms the
inherent interconnections. Some chapters concentrate on one concept
more than the other. The first three chapters concentrate on gender,
chapter four and five on race, chapters six and seven on class, while
chapter eight deals with nationhood, an idea that permeates all previous
categories.
The first theme of this book is gender relations. Gender as an analytical
tool came to feminists and women historians in the genealogy of
conceptualizing women’s marginalization much after studying women as
women. The chapters on gender history reflect many of the concerns that
were raised in the previous volume in the chapter on European feminism.
In this volume, we are shifting from women to gender as a category of
analysis. This is in keeping with the way of history writing, periodization
and some of the critical concerns developed historically in feminist thought.
Feminists came to realize that talking about women in isolation is not
very meaningful as it produced a partial and fragmented understanding
of the sexual difference in society. Secondly, studying women as women,
viii | Introduction
assumed that women existed as a fixed and immutable social category just
as men. In other words, both men and women in this understanding were
synonymous to their biological sex. Thirdly, feminists started critiquing
binaries such as home/factory, private/public, production/reproduction
alongside man/woman to break free from essentialist, fixed frameworks
and then went on to pose fundamental challenges to philosophy of
history, periodization, chronologies, social and historical transformations
and so on. It made more sense to see women in relation to men. We now
briefly go back in time to trace this development.
In 1990, the editors of the US-based Journal of Women’s History sug-
gested that feminist history was witnessing a paradigm shift. The sepa-
rate spheres theory of a masculine public sphere and a feminine private
sphere had outworn its usefulness and was passing its epistemological
baton onto a new analytical category called gender that sought to lo-
cate women within the broader framework of their social, cultural and
political relationships with men. The term gender had already started
replacing women in a few pioneering studies in the 1980s, such as Denis
Riley’s provocative Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of
Women in history (1988), and Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender as a useful
category of historical analysis (1986), which claimed that a retrievable
“women’s history” was not possible since the very category of women
was defined in essentialist terms, based on biology. They challenged the
fixed characteristics associated with men and women, as these char-
acteristics are not universal and varied across time and space. By the
late 1990s gender came to acquire wider currency, which reflected in
the founding of journals like Gender and History and a host of schol-
arly publications. It was agreed that studying women in history through
the lens of gender made more sense. Gender, however, was redefined to
refer to abstract ‘representations’ of the differences between men and
women, a form of social relations and a set of social identities. These
representations could be found through studying texts and discourses
and were constantly constructed and reconstructed by powerful groups
who defined what it was to be a woman or man, thus controlling the
parameters of what was possible in everyday life. In this understanding
experience about the past could never be captured on its own terms
for it was always constructed by the language. Language in this under-
standing is no longer a medium of communicating thought, but a cre-
ator of ‘lived experience’ itself. Experience becomes a linguistic event.
Language sets the terms of power, in other words, language in action,
language as discourse, created reality. Some went as far as to say there is
no reality outside the text. These post-structuralists upstaged language,
discourse and identity at the cost of material evidence.
Introduction | ix
Women as a social category itself was splintered in the identity poli-
tics of race, region, religion, culture, sexuality, generation and so on.
This theorization and deconstructive ‘death of woman’ has recently
been attacked by practitioners of history for whom an investigation of
hard, material evidence remains the key to any assertion, to deal with
women as a political category and to study its agency in different times
and spaces. Scholars recently are found to be talking about a spatial
turn, a purported paradigm shift, which they deploy to rewrite history.
Nonetheless, cultural or linguists turn has made historians ever more
sensitive to and aware of silences, erasures and marginalization of those
who could not stake their claims to power earlier and gender remains
as ever a valid category of analysis. This way of reworking European
history also allowed women’s historians to put together scattered evi-
dence in a perspective, pose new questions and look for new sources
that enrich our understanding of Europe and fill many gaps in existing
knowledge. Gender is the first point of departure or theoretical tool of
analysis in this volume and we have set this in three most profound, ep-
och making ruptures of modern Europe, namely the French Revolution,
the Industrial Revolution and Fascism/National Socialism.
Chapter 1 ‘Citizenship and Difference: The Age of Revolution’ places
the issue of gender in the larger context of changes brought about by
the French Revolution. However, the core idea that the author examines
for gender history is that of making of the nation and citizens, a process
from which women were deliberately excluded. The chapter thus is an
exploration of this exclusion.
While the élan of equality, liberty and fraternity triggered a series of
uprisings in Europe, slave revolts in the Caribbean and intellectual stir-
rings elsewhere, back in revolutionary France a woman called Olympe
de Gouges penned ‘the Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and the
Female Citizen’ challenging French male revolutionaries and exhorting
them to bestow the same rights upon the likes of her. Women had played
a very active role in the revolution. They could be seen in protests, dem-
onstrations and bread riots, even marching alongside the National Guard
as auxiliaries. They had every reason to be as hopeful as men. Alas, that
was not to be! The most radical of all, the Jacobins, banned women’s
revolutionary clubs and activities, dubbed them as counterrevolution-
aries, guillotined a few and relegated all women to the role of domestics,
of sacrificing, passive, silent homemakers, mothers and housewives. The
boundaries between private and public began to firm up with the bold-
est statement of change in the lives of men. The middle class homebound
woman was thus born in revolutionary France, nurtured in Victorian
England, and turned into the ideal woman for the rest of the ‘bourgeois
