Jean Quataert is Professor of History and Women's Studies, Binghamton University. She has previously published a number of books, including Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present with Marilyn J. Boxer (Oxford, 1999).

Jean H. Quataert has written a provocative book that helps us rethink the rise of the modern state and the development of nation and nationalism in gendered terms. She focuses on the growth of philanthropy in nineteenth-century German society and argues that through philanthropic organizations---primarily women's associations and the closely related Red Cross---women participated in important and hitherto ignored ways in the construction of state and nation. . . . Quataert takes the women's associations as raw material to make a series of broader claims. The first is that philanthropy, far from being a simple tool of social discipline, was in fact at the heart of dynastic ritual. . . . These are important and original arguments, and historians will be forced to grapple with them. ---Helmut Walser

Jean Quataert is Professor of History and Women's Studies, Binghamton University. She has previously published a number of books, including Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present with Marilyn J. Boxer (Oxford, 1999).

Jean H. Quataert has written a provocative book that helps us rethink the rise of the modern state and the development of nation and nationalism in gendered terms. She focuses on the growth of philanthropy in nineteenth-century German society and argues that through philanthropic organizations---primarily women's associations and the closely related Red Cross---women participated in important and hitherto ignored ways in the construction of state and nation. . . . Quataert takes the women's associations as raw material to make a series of broader claims. The first is that philanthropy, far from being a simple tool of social discipline, was in fact at the heart of dynastic ritual. . . . These are important and original arguments, and historians will be forced to grapple with them. ---Helmut Walser

Jean Quataert is Professor of History and Women's Studies, Binghamton University. She has previously published a number of books, including Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present with Marilyn J. Boxer (Oxford, 1999).

Jean H. Quataert has written a provocative book that helps us rethink the rise of the modern state and the development of nation and nationalism in gendered terms. She focuses on the growth of philanthropy in nineteenth-century German society and argues that through philanthropic organizations---primarily women's associations and the closely related Red Cross---women participated in important and hitherto ignored ways in the construction of state and nation. . . . Quataert takes the women's associations as raw material to make a series of broader claims. The first is that philanthropy, far from being a simple tool of social discipline, was in fact at the heart of dynastic ritual. . . . These are important and original arguments, and historians will be forced to grapple with them. ---Helmut Walser