Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser argue that the early nineteenth century ‘marked the nadir of European women’s options and possibilities’.50 For them, changes in government, law, economy and religion promoted centralisation, rationalisation and uniformity and it was these that deprived some women of power and opportunities. In contrast, Linda Colley, whilst not dissenting from the power of the ideology of separate spheres, has observed that the scope of female activity in nineteenth-century Britain and France was generally wider than it had been.51
Yet the nineteenth century opened with a widespread sense that their husbands or fathers should represent women politically. Direct participation in politics was not thought to be the business of women. So the English writer Harriet Martineau wrote, ‘I want to be doing something with the pen, since no other means of action in politics are in a woman’s power’.52 For conservatives and feminists alike, women’s relationship to politics lay only in their indirect moral influence over men. Yet of course many women were interested in politics in the broadest sense. The possibilities for expressing this were shaped by national histories and cultures as well as class position, access to ideas, which enabled women to imagine themselves as political beings, and, most of all, opportunity.
However, as nations sought their independence in liberal revolutions during the nineteenth century, there were few possibilities for women to participate in or to shape the emerging political systems. This is particularly clear if one compares women’s role in the two Belgian revolutions of 1789 and 1830. In 1789, Belgian women were expected to share in the public world of revolution, yet in 1830 no women took part. There were no equivalents to the pamphleteer and political networker, the Comtesse d’Yves who, like other noble women before her, was able to participate in a gendered but accepted way within the political world of the ancien regime. Nor were there any comparable occasions to the women who heaved stones from their housetops onto the retreating Austrian armies below. However, despite their presence in the 1789 revolution, Belgian women did not form any separate women’s organisations or demand their rights as women. By 1830 they were not to be found in the streets or in the Hotel de Ville but in their homes. For women, the political world was now an alien one, confirmed in the new constitution, which, as an archetypal expression of nineteenth-century liberal doctrines, placed the individual property-holding male citizen at its heart. Janet Polasky sees the hegemonic role of the ideology of separate spheres as responsible for the nature of the Belgian revolution in 1830. Power shifted from privileged groups in which women had previously held some authority to the bourgeoisie, with its marked division between the public world of men and the private lives of women.53
One of the ways that women were mobilised into acceptable forms of public participation was in support of their country in wartime. Patriotism allowed women to take action that can be understood as political. For example, patriotic associations were formed in over 400 Prussian towns during 1813-15 as part of the country’s ‘War of Liberation’ against Napoleon’s armies. Karen Hagemann shows that ‘As long as women proved their patriotism. . . within the limits of the sphere assigned to them as spouses, housewives and mothers, it was not merely universally accepted, but also promoted and valued in times of peace and war’.54 However, men were unanimous that female involvement in the political arena could only be tolerated under the exceptional circumstances of wartime. In the years after the final victory over Napoleon, a process of suppressing active female patriotism began. Most Prussian patriotic women’s associations had ended their work by 1816, although some survived as general charitable institutions. Linda Colley has identified similar women’s patriotic activism in Britain during the Napoleonic wars. She argues that ‘Under cover of a patriotism that was often genuine and profound, they carved out for themselves a real if precarious place in the public sphere’.55 In neither case did women link their patriotic commitment to demands for equal political rights within the state. Instead, Prussian women did not overtly challenge the dominant gender order as they translated their domestic skills and virtues into the public sphere. This was the way middle-class women in particular slowly eroded the boundary between the rhetorically separate spheres.
Hagemann also found that the period of the Wars of Liberation was, for Prussia, ‘a central phase in the formation of a national political culture organised by gender’. These wars ‘accelerated and intensified the nationalisation of the gender order and the “gendering” of the nation’.56 This process, crucial to nineteenth-century European history in particular, necessarily affected women’s relationship to politics and the possibilities for the achievement of full citizenship rights. The effect of new nationalisms was one of the defining features of the political landscape across much of continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nationalism not only sought to redefine national boundaries and to create modern nation-states but in so doing challenged fundamental understandings of citizenship and national identity. This necessarily had implications for the gendering of politics.
There was certainly a connection between democratic and nationalist movements and women seeking to express themselves politically. Thus, the first women’s movement in Germany emerged in the revolutionary year of 1848. Some women made explicit political demands such as Louise Otto who argued for ‘the participation by women in the life of the state’.57 Some Protestant lay groups formed separate women’s organisations to gain ‘a clear sense of themselves, the ability to think independently and act in a strong minded way’.58 But the membership of more explicitly political associations, democratic and liberal clubs that burgeoned during the revolution, was restricted to men. Democratic women’s associations were more concerned with patriotic philanthropy than civil rights.
Patriotism and even nationalism did provide a banner under which women could meet, organise and serve their community without appearing to challenge, or indeed wishing to disturb, normative gender roles. Such women’s associations, although often with a philanthropic focus, constituted public activity but were not always conceived of as political and were rarely self-consciously feminist. They do form a part of the spectrum of women’s politics in the nineteenth century, the century before citizenship was granted to any European women.
Ultimately, women’s hopes of achieving some recognition of their identity and rights during struggles for national independence were usually dashed. Mary Nash has suggested that in Spain the intensity of the struggle between conservative and progressive liberals throughout the nineteenth century left no room for considering the need to redress the political inequality of women. The new values of citizenship and national sovereignty that emerged were clearly gendered: they did not apply to women. Thus particularly after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1875, the fragility of the political system meant that liberals and democrats struggled to gain power and to consolidate an effective modern democratic state. Unlike liberals in other countries, they saw no role for women’s citizenship nor were there many voices in Spain demanding women’s rights either in the context of liberalism or in the radical or labour movement. Yet, despite the arid context, Spanish women’s activism can be discerned in this period.59
However, there were still ways in which women could contribute often with clear continuities with the previous century. Thus petitioning remained an acceptable engagement with political affairs. For many of the women petitioners this was a way of identifying with a particular version of national identity, of being included whilst actively seeking to exclude others.60 So there was a particularly high level of involvement of British women in petitions against Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s. Petitions to the monarchy and parliament were one legal form of political action open to French women. Only after 1830 did these begin to include demands for women’s legal and, in some cases, political rights.
The possibilities for participation in formal and informal politics changed through the century but were particularly marked by class. Canvassing was one way British women of status could exert political influence. Patronage continued to dominate all appointments; its exercise was determined more by property than gender. For example Ann Lister, Yorkshire landowner and businesswoman, was active on behalf of the Tory interest in the early decades of the century. Despite the fact that she did not have a vote, she probably exercised as much political influence as most of her male contemporaries. For aristocratic women even higher in the social system than Lister, political hostessing remained important. Even the reforms in Britain to limit political influence such as the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872, did not, according to Kim D. Reynolds, put an end to politicking by aristocratic women.61 But Reynolds finds that across the century there were fluctuations in this political engagement. Although the generations before and after them took a public role in electoral politics, the generation between 1840 and 1870 were much more reluctant to do so. Reynolds attributes this to the effect, even among the aristocracy, of dominant notions of domestic womanhood.
In most of Europe, influence was all that women were able to exercise. In the hands of the privileged this could mean social politics. Salonnieres were still to be found in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Fanny Arnstein and her daughter Rachel Pereira in Vienna, but increasingly this was a role that ran counter to notions of respectable and gender-appropriate behaviour.62 As Anderson and Zinsser put it: ‘The moral repudiation of the saloniere led to the moral empowerment of her more traditional sister. The supposed power of female influence was rejected in favor of the power of female virtue’.63
However, working-class women could also employ influence in different ways. So some Chartist women identified influence as a source of female power, ‘While others toil, she can persuade’.64 One of their sources of influence was to boycott those shopkeepers who did not support the Charter - what was termed exclusive dealing. Here was an area of everyday life in which women could exercise choice and thus had some power to sway: ‘we respectfully suggest that the shopocracy be left to their fate, and that no persons are so well qualified to bring these very important personages to their senses as the women of England’.65 The growth of exclusive dealing as a tactic employed in support of pressure-group politics could mobilise the housewife and politicise the everyday experience of domestic shopping. Consumption was a pressure point that women could exploit to make an intervention in the public world.
This was recognised and developed in the fight of British women against slavery. From the 1820s the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Societies led a boycott of slave-produced West Indian sugar. Middle-class campaigners even took their battle to working-class housewives. Some ladies’ societies went beyond proselytising, purchasing and distributing their own sugar or endorsing specific commercial suppliers.66 Other women’s auxiliaries adopted abstention as their strategy, so the Birmingham based Female Political Union urged the boycott of all taxed or excisable articles such as tea. To make this domestically focused strategy work, leaders of the male union unusually called on the women of Birmingham to break their normal patterns and to ‘meddle with politics’. The justification for women’s inclusion in what was seen as political action was that the ‘whole family of the people’ must unite.67
The symbolic value of such campaigns was clear but we know less about their extent and success as practical politics in either persuading the boycotted or drawing women into the broader campaign. It seems that the boycott of slave-produced sugar did not have any noticeable effect on the import of West Indian sugar nor did it bring about the immediate abolition of slavery.68 Yet, as a way of dramatising the central moral issue and the political responsibility of individuals in relation to it, this was an imaginative woman-centred strategy that clearly influenced the practice of women’s auxiliaries to other pressure groups, for example the Anti-Corn Law League.69 In a similar vein, in Germany in 1849 the Democratic Women’s Association suggested a new tactic to its members as a way to express support for poor women workers: to ‘pledge themselves to wear only clothes made from indigenous materials’.70 They also suggested that women should only buy products made and sold exclusively by women. These examples point to a potential arena for women’s political activity - consumption - that would be more extensively exploited in the twentieth century. This linked to another area of popular politics with which women already had a history of involvement.
In as much as the crowd remained a key element in political change in this century, so women were still to be found there. Food riots had not disappeared. In France there were riots during the severe famine of 1817 and again during the grain shortages of 1846-7 and 1853-7. Women played a prominent part in them, but after 1848 the traditional food riot died away. Instead, protest prompted by problems of subsistence and the cost of living moved from the country to the town. In relation to Britain, it has been argued that as the nineteenth century unwound, food riots became increasingly obsolescent politically and thus tended to be left to women: ‘when and where food riots did become feminine, it was a symptom of women’s political weakness rather than their strength’.71 Yet, in extreme conditions, women had nowhere to take their protests but the streets.
Riot could also be prompted by more explicit political pressure or in defence of communities and neighbourhoods. So in the revolutionary moments in France (1830, 1848 and 1871) women can be found engaged in the physical defence of their neighbourhoods. They rarely took part in actual fighting but they assisted in the building of barricades. Once the barricades were in use, women provided auxiliary help to the male fighters, supplying them with food, nursing the wounded and transporting weapons and ammunition.72
When women took to the streets in Paris in 1848, they also employed a new tactic: the rent strike. In response to widespread unemployment and soaring rents, female-organised rent strikes took place in La Villette and the Faubourg Saint Antoine. This was to be a form of action that was often identified with women and that sprang from women’s daily experience. Sometimes it was seen as being politically motivated or as having political consequences. This was particularly apparent in the Irish land war that began in 1879. Female members of the Land League were forbidden to speak at meetings, but it was recognised that at the local level, women were crucial to community resistance. Early in 1881 Irishwomen were asked to take control of the movement as the British government sought to repress the league’s male leadership. With the birth of the Ladies Land League, Irish women were given the opportunity not only to participate in a political movement for the first time but also to devise new woman-focused forms of political action. Women used their domestic role for political ends, paying for groceries with cash so that their men folk would not use the money to pay the rent to the landlord. Despite their success in maintaining the land war while the league’s male leaders were in prison, the women found themselves under increasing pressure to disband from both the British Government and the Land League men. The Ladies Land League was seen as representing a reversal of gender roles away from the traditional male/female active/passive dichotomy. This profoundly disturbed men, as an editorial in the movement’s newspaper, United Ireland, underlined: ‘We only wish the men had done [their business] as stoutly, as regularly, and as fearlessly. . . . Is it easier to cow a nation of men than a handful of women?’73 However, with the reassertion of male dominance, women were again marginalised from Irish political movements, which in turn affected their relationship with Irish nationalism. As with other contemporary political movements, the lesson of the Ladies Land League was that if women wanted to be politically active, they either had to form their own organisation or accept subordinate status.74
Indeed, the key issue for women’s interaction with the world of popular politics across Europe in this century was the extent to which women were able to be political actors in their own right. The tendency of women to stress their familial obligations as their motivation for entering the political world has called into question women’s ability to perceive themselves as independent political agents. At the same time, the changing nature of popular protest, particularly the move towards more formal organisation, has been seen as limiting women’s political involvement. Moreover, until recently it has been the orthodoxy that the rise of the hegemonic ideology of separate spheres necessarily proscribed all women’s political activity. Thus, for example, Dorothy Thompson argued that in Britain working-class women ‘took little or no part in the public institutions of trade union, friendly societies, cooperative societies and political organisations in the mid-Victorian years’.75 This was because of the power that domestic ideology exerted over all classes, including the working classes, by the middle years of the century. Thus by 1850 neither women nor men would feel it was appropriate or respectable for women to stray beyond the domestic sphere of the home and the family.
The debate about the extent and nature of women’s agency is apparent when analysing women’s involvement in Chartism, the campaign for political reform in the 1830s and 1840s whose principal demand was for manhood suffrage. Historians have debated how much female Chartists mobilised on behalf of their menfolk, their families, their communities or as women. Michelle de Larrabeiti feels that too often historians of Chartist women cannot hide their disappointment at ‘the failure of the Chartist women to remain both feminist and politically visible into the mid-nineteenth century’.76 The lack of a challenge to the ideology of domesticity is seen as their greatest omission. Yet de Larrabeiti does not read the rhetoric employed by Chartist women as reflecting a straightforward acceptance of a subordinate role. She argues that they may have chosen to represent themselves as wives and mothers but that they also ‘managed to raise their political voices to question not only the oppressions of class and gender, but to articulate their own particular political sense of self’.77 In contrast, Jutta Schwarzkopf sees Chartist women’s language of political wife and motherhood as one that ‘effectively prevented them from establishing themselves as political agents in their own right with needs and aspirations specific to them as women’.78 For Anna Clark, Chartist women articulated a ‘militant domesticity’ that challenged prevailing, middle-class formulations of family life.79 There clearly was space for women to participate within Chartism, yet Dorothy Thompson argues that by the 1840s women were far less visible in the movement because they had internalised dominant notions of separate spheres.80
Yet there are examples of women who directly challenged bourgeois prescriptions of feminine behaviour, for example the Glaswegian Chartist Agnes Lennox who argued in 1839:
The time has now arrived when it becomes the duty of everyone who wishes well to the country that gave her birth, to come forward, casting aside all those feelings which false delicacy and mock modesty give rise to - to take a prominent part in the great movement for reform.81
Some nineteenth-century campaigns provided a catalyst for women’s sense of themselves as political actors. British anti-slavery was not focused specifically upon women’s rights but incidentally gave women political experience and provided the possibility of developing woman-focused arguments. Thus, although formally excluded from citizenship, women such as Elizabeth Heyrick identified themselves as political subjects with political responsibilities in the public world. In terms of developing a new selfconfidence and sense of agency amongst middle-class women, it was significant that from 1825 onwards women formed their own ladies’ anti-slavery societies, which operated largely independently of the men’s societies. It was in this context, Clare Midgley argues, that ‘women were able to develop their own ways of working, produce their own propaganda, decide on their own campaigning priorities and create their own networks’.82 Yet there was no simple development from the espousal of anti-slavery views to a claim for women’s rights in Britain. Ladies anti-slavery societies did not challenge their own subordination and wished to export their same middle-class ideals about gender relations to emancipated slaves. However, while there was no causal connection between abolitionism and the later women’s movement in Britain, many first-generation feminist campaigners gained early political experience in the ladies’ anti-slavery societies or had strong kin connections with those who had. Although strongly influenced by the philanthropic tradition, their petitioning of parliament shows that women recognised the political dimension to their campaign.83
The 1848 revolutions, which reverberated across the major cities of Europe, allow us to review the state of women’s political agency at mid-century and the constraints upon it. For a brief period some working-class, middle-class and aristocratic women joined the revolts, when for a moment there seemed to be new possibilities. But it was only a moment, for conservative government was restored, with some concessions to liberalism. In most of the German states and in France, the consequence of 1848 was that socialists and women, whether feminist or not, were seen as subversives and barred from political participation for the rest of the century.
The makers of these ‘democratic’ revolutions in their new parliaments did not include women’s political rights on their agenda or expect women to directly participate in the business of revolutionary change. Yet in the tumult created in 1848, there was suddenly space where women’s rights might be added into the broader debate. Karen Offen argues that in some of these revolutions ‘feminist activity poured forth through the fissures opened by men’s claims for representative government, for freedom of the press and association’.84 Yet, by 1850 counter-revolutionary forces had brutally suppressed feminist activism in most societies. Women’s civic activism, even when it was not accompanied by overt feminist claims, was seen everywhere as a threat. Thus, for example, in March 1849 the Hapsburg Empire banned all political activity by women, as did Prussia in 1850. Prohibitions could target areas in which women had been particularly effective at engaging in civil society, thus in France, between 1852 to 1881 women were formally prohibited by law from political commentary and newspaper directorships. Despite fears of women organising as a sex, accounts of women’s participation in the European revolutions of 1848 suggest that dominant ideas about separate spheres were never really endangered. As Ute Frevert has said of the German states, ‘Even the strident women of the 1848 revolution had clear ideas about “women’s station”, and it never entered their heads that they might want to be “emancipated” from it’.85 After 1850, women’s civic activism was confined to patriotic and philanthropic endeavours.
The effect of the enforced divorce of women from public political activity can be seen in Germany in the second half of the century. In most German states women were not only prevented from joining political parties by law, it was also illegal for them to attend meetings where politics were discussed. In Prussia the police broke up political meetings at which women were present, and particularly ones where women spoke. This legal position continued after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Many would have agreed with the Reichstag deputy who argued in 1896, ‘if one decided to admit women to political life. . . then one would bring trouble and strife into the last place where one can, thank God, find a haven of peace in times of political excitement’.86 There was little pressure from women to repeal these restrictions. The General German Women’s Association, formed in 1865, refrained from petitioning for repeal, as they feared that such action would define them as a political society with all the repressive consequences that would undoubtedly follow. It was only in the 1890s that a broader civic culture grew up in Germany with a range of voluntary associations and pressure groups, and political parties began to organise on a formal and professional basis. This changed the context for women’s interaction with politics. It saw the growth of Europe’s largest socialist women’s organisation, led by Clara Zetkin. This flourished as an auxiliary to the Sozialdemokratische partei Deutschlands (SPD), for until 1908 women were barred from joining political Parties in most parts of Wilhelmine Germany. Illegality did not in the end deter women’s political activism, but it forced it into different spaces.
In those countries where the political culture was not very developed, such as tsarist Russia, the spaces for women’s political action were highly constrained. The French feminist Jenny d’Hericourt offered the following advice to Russian feminists in 1857:
Surround yourself with women, form committees, establish a large institution as a model, set up a journal, but do not meddle in general politics. Let the exclusively masculine regime vanish by itself. If you start to attack it, it is so powerful in Russia that it will crush you.87
Her advice may have reflected the experience of many nineteenth-century feminists to eschew anything that was seen as ‘political’, yet in what was a police state Russian women had no means of collective political expression. None of the political institutions such as political parties, civil rights, active legislatures and free newspapers on which feminist movements everywhere depended existed in Russia for most of the century. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that political parties in a recognisable sense were established. Yet Russian women were involved in political action. Nihilism, the revolt of the younger generation of the small Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s, was a cultural and psychological rebellion rather than an explicitly political one. For some women professing nihilism increased their personal freedom in a movement that professed sexual equality. These nigilistki of the 1860s became notorious for their short hair, dark glasses and mannish clothes and manners. But others took their rebellion further, into the populist movement of the 1860s and 1870s, which fought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and introduce popular self-government based on an agrarian socialism. This revolutionary underground movement attracted thousands of young educated people, including women who were accepted as equals. It was not a movement in which women’s rights played a significant part, yet no other radical movement of the time contained so many women. They acted as propagandists, but also as terrorists and many paid for their activism with their lives. The hanging of Sofya Perovskaya for organising the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 marked the end of this phase of radical women’s activism in Russia.88 The extremity of women’s response was largely governed by the dearth of space for political expression and for any form of mass politics.
However, in some countries in the later part of the century new spaces for political action could be identified for the unenfranchised woman. Again, these opportunities were usually constrained by class. The function of political parties was to change significantly as they were forced to modernise. In Britain, the Corrupt Practices Act (1883), which forbade the payment of canvassers, was a particular spur. It encouraged party organisers to formalise their relationship with female volunteer canvassers and party workers. Individual women, particularly the female kin of politicians, had traditionally played some role in electoral politics. Few took it as far as Lady Jennie Churchill who took over her husband’s entire election campaign in 1885. Because women could not join either the Tory or the Liberal Party, until 1918, women’s auxiliary organisations became an important way to serve a party interest and, increasingly, seek to influence the party political agenda.89 From its formation in 1887 the Women’s Liberal Federation became increasingly confident in expressing collective views on a range of issues such as public health, temperance, education and domestic violence which, they believed, illustrated the need for a female political voice. In particular they argued about how best to promote the demand for women’s suffrage. The issue was whether Liberal women would in any or all circumstances put party before their suffragism.
Conservative women were also organised into an auxiliary organisation, the mixed-sex Primrose League, but they were more reluctant to involve themselves in policy, choosing not to take a stand on women’s suffrage. From the 1880s, the new socialist parties marked their difference from mainstream parties by opening their organisations to women as well as to men. Despite equal party membership, socialist women’s auxiliaries nevertheless did develop in the early twentieth century to deal with the under-representation of women within the parties as well as reflecting more deep-seated assumptions about the need to educate women into party membership.90 Whether as full party members or in auxiliaries, British women extended the spaces in which political action was possible in the latter part of the century. At the same time, some women used these organisations and specific suffrage pressure groups to voice demands for citizenship.
One way to narrate European women’s relationship to political power over the nineteenth century is to recount the attempts to raise feminist arguments and the seemingly predictable backlash that followed. An organised women’s movement, often focusing initially on employment and education and then moving onto direct demands for inclusion as citizens, emerged at different rates across Europe from the second half of the century. Karen Offen has mapped the detail of this process across Europe, the range of feminisms that are apparent and the resistance to them from the political Right and Left.91 But, of course, feminism was not the only way in which women engaged with political power, and the changing shape of the practice of politics also affected how women perceived the possibilities for, and even desirability of, participation. Again the pace of these developments varied depending on whether the regime was authoritarian or some version of a partial democracy.
In the liberal democracies of Europe, the opportunities for women to engage in civic society and to move from informal to formal politics grew and were used by women motivated by humanitarian or party or feminist concerns, or some combination of these. In Britain, elite and middle-class women’s acceptable participation in charitable societies not only gave them skills and networks that enabled them to move further into the public world, but also provided confirmation that the dominant discourse of domesticity need not be unsettled by such action. In the second half of the century local government gradually absorbed many of the functions of traditional philanthropy, particularly the care of children, the sick and the elderly. Although resistance to enfranchising women in national politics remained strong, women were very gradually admitted into the various local government franchises. By 1900, a few hundred women were members of school boards and nearly a thousand were poor law Guardians.92 Yet, despite women’s successes in local government, with only the city and county councils eluding them, Patricia Hollis shows that ‘within a couple of years, achievements that women thought were safely banked, began to slip away’.93 For example, abolition of the school boards in 1902 deprived many experienced women of their elected role and left them dependent on local authorities (on which they could not sit) to co-opt them onto the new education committees. Although women in continental Europe had fewer opportunities to participate in local politics than British women, they still found that there was no progressive development in the provision of political rights. The unification of Italy in 1860 meant that propertied women living under Austrian law in Italian speaking regions of Lombardy, Tuscany and Venice lost the municipal franchise. In the reshaping of nation-states, pre-existing and limited women’s rights could be lost.
Although there was disagreement in Britain whether women’s successful involvement in local government demonstrated their fitness for full enfranchisement, there were clearly implications for the ideology of separate spheres. As Hollis argues,
Invariably and inevitably, women members spoke the language of separate spheres, the work that only women could do for other women and for children, and with it an insistence that. . . they had neither need to nor intention of trespassing on male territory.94
Women candidates repeatedly made the same points: that every aspect of local government affected the lives of ordinary women and their families; and that every task of local government would benefit from the social housekeeping skills that women would bring to the task. These arguments were then used in pursuit of women’s suffrage and again in the inter-war period when they became a key feature of the drive by women’s organisations to educate ordinary women into being effective citizens.
But just as there was to be later, there were also differences of opinion on whether separate spheres thinking meant that women should confine themselves to ‘women’s issues’, those that translated women’s supposed domestic concerns onto a community level such as education or health. From the beginning women representatives had to make choices between their party loyalties and a desire to bring a ‘woman’s point of view’ to bear.
The context for women’s involvement in local and national politics was also changing towards the end of the century. Motherhood was increasingly seen as a matter of national concern, whether for broad pro-natalist reasons or specifically to counter eugenic fears of racial decline. Women could argue that in this context welfare provision for women and children was essential for the nation as a whole and that women’s particular knowledge and skills fitted them to design and implement such policies. For maternalism to work to women’s political benefit, ‘difference’ rather than ‘equality’ feminism had to be emphasised. There were already tensions between women who appealed to sexual difference and those who assumed an essential equality in the abilities and capacities of the two sexes, although too much can be made of this apparent polarity. How effective this was as a strategy for women in the short and long term and the extent to which particular national cultures were more susceptible to this version of a ‘political woman’ were to be crucial issues for women in the twentieth century.
World History
