ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss Mary Booth’s activities in the post-war nationalist environment and how she developed a form of nationalist thinking that fit within the broader framework of feminist citizenship goals. It aims to suggest that Jill Roe’s answer to her own question: ‘What has Nationalism Offered Australian Women?’ – essentially, not a lot – needs revising. While Booth’s particular brand of imperial nationalism, refined in the decades after the Great War, did not give rise to an identifiably ‘feminist nationalism’, its blending of the Anzac tradition with British cultural symbols added a distinctive voice to interwar feminists’ calls for equal citizenship. The Great War, occurring a short time after white Australian women gained the vote, both intervened in and enhanced post-suffrage citizenship. Booth, like many others who shared her political values, saw the Great War as a testing time for the new Australian nation within the British ethnie.
