ABSTRACT
If the scholarship on nationalism had demonstrated a certain indifference to gender as a category of analysis, feminist scholarship was equally guilty of neglecting the study of the nation and of nationalism. That was especially true of certain strands within feminist scholarship shaped by an assumption of the apparent naturalness of the nation for women in North America and Northwestern Europe. Contemporary scholarship proceeds from an underlying assumption that both genders and nations are socially constructed around ideological systems of “difference” that implicate them in relations of social power. The relation between the terms nation and state requires a little more clarification. Most scholars are at pains to point out that the two terms are in no way synonymous and should be kept analytically distinct.
