Colonialism and the Jews (The Modern Jewish Experience) Highlight

Consider the case of women’s suffrage, which was the subject of almost two centuries of debate in the West and which only came to France and Switzerland after World War II. As Sylvia Walby has noted, many postcolonial states have granted women the franchise at the time of the states’ establishment. Political citizenship is granted to all adults at the time of state creation as an expression of a populist sentiment and a legitimization of the overthrow of nonrepresentative colonial rule. As Chatterjee writes of India, nationalists asserted that the entire people had been nationalized, that is, vested with a distinct and unifying Indianness. The nation, having been feminized by the colonial power, was to be emancipated in one fell swoop.36 This conceptual framework is of benefit for the study of Zionism, for it helps account for the ZO’s early granting of voting rights to women (at the Second Congress of 1898, at time when only New Zealand had national female suffrage) and the passion with which all but ultra-Orthodox members of the Yishuv advocated women’s suffrage after World War I.