21 - Women and Nation

Summary

What does it mean to speak of ‘women and nation’? To illustrate a possible spectrum of answers, here are three voices from outside Scotland. First, Virginia Woolf's anonymous daughter of an educated man in Three Guineas, according to whom nations are made by and for men:

‘Our country’ … throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner… in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Second, Frances Bellman in Iris Murdoch's The Red and the Green, who perceives a parallel between women and small nations: ‘I think being a woman is like being Irish … Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.’

Third, Sally Roberts Jones, whose explicitly anti-English poem ‘Tryweryn’ is inspired by Liverpool Corporation's construction of a reservoir in North Wales:

Nothing's gone that matters - a dozen farms,

A hollow of no great beauty, scabby sheep,

A gloomy Bethel and a field where sleep

A few dead peasants. There are finer charms

Observed in rising water, as its arms

Circle and meet above the walls; in cheap

Power and growing profits. Who could reap

Harvests as rich as this in ploughmen's palms?

All's for the best - rehoused, these natives, too,

Should bless us for sanitation and good health.

Later, from English cities, see the view

Misty with hiraeth - and their new-built wealth.

All of our wealth's in men - and their life's blood

Drawn from the land this water drowns in mud.

This poem, written by a woman, asserts the validity of national identification by contrasting English and Welsh attitudes and interests. Questions of gender do not arise here.

Examples such as these indicate that there is no obvious connection between women and nationhood. This is not to be wondered at, given that even the terms woman and nation as such are fuzzy. Woman can be defined by referring either to biological sex or to socially constructed gender.