ABSTRACT
Distinct from industrialization and urbanization, which are founded upon modern principles of individualism and rationalism, nationalism as the substance of every nation-state feeds itself from entirely different sources: the community and sentiment. Women's "good-bye" to individuality and rationality in favor of a community based on sentiment was in fact a precondition for a politically public and bourgeois civil society. Postsocialist societies have reclaimed the status of the privileged subject that was once held by certain social groups and classes and given this status to new groups and classes. In postsocialist societies they became the targets of redelegation into "mothers who should ensure the biological survival and moral progress of the nation", "the guardians of the home", and the "guardians of privacy". The political protests of women against the cancellation of their basic rights are an efficient remedy for the pseudo-organic concept of national unity and for the tendencies toward the domestication of women.
