Most Americans think of Betsy Ross as she was depicted in
Charles Weisberger's popular painting The Birth of Our Nation's
Flag--a motherly figure, sewing at the hearth. In fact, as Jo Ann
Menezes's analysis in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism points
out, Ross was a widowed businesswoman who ran an upholstery shop
out of her house. In Weisberger's painting, all signs of economic
industry are erased and Ross's house is transformed into a home
rather that the site of cottage industry. Ross is constructed as
the perfect heroic mother, worthy of sacred creation; thus, our
flag was born.
Ross's transformation into an icon neatly illustrates the
conjunction of soaring nationalism and the establishment of woman
as a fixed domestic presence and serves as an excellent example of
the master narratives revealed in Nostalgia, Gender, and
Nationalism.
The essays in this provocative anthology explore the connections
between nation and gender and the ways in which nostalgia functions
to bind these two presumably unrelated constructions together.
Collectively they suggest that women pay a special fee on behalf of
the nation, even though it is traditionally represented as an
honorarium given to them and that, in fact, the nation-state takes
as a foundational principle the subordination of women.
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