Rethinking Women's Suffrage: Women's Rights and Nineteenth-Century Languages of Parliamentary Representation

This paper sketches out a new intellectual history of the parliamentary debates over women’s suffrage in nineteenth-century Britain. Since the publication of Brian Harrison’s classic book Separate spheres in 1978, historians have broadly accepted that anti-suffragism was characterised by a belief that politics was a public activity and that women’s place was in the home. Lying beneath such views, Harrison argued, lay arguments about physiological and intellectual differences between the sexes. This framework is due for reconsideration on both theoretical and empirical grounds. An analysis of the voting behaviour of over a thousand members of parliament reveals that Harrison’s model cannot account for the complexity of men’s responses to demands for women’s suffrage. This is because the ‘separate spheres’ model ignores two crucial variables. First, it ignores the ways in which the behaviour and attitudes of male politicians were shaped by their diverse masculinities, not just their beliefs about women. Secondly, politicians were influenced not only by their beliefs about women’s bodies, but also by their beliefs about the nature of political representation. The articulation and reception of suffragist demands were shaped by the various constitutional idioms that were available in the nineteenth century. This paper traces the ways in which Liberal and Conservative political thought redefined the concept of political representation in the second half of the nineteenth century, and argues that this holds the key to explaining the changing patterns of support for women’s suffrage. Recent work has explored the debts that the suffrage movement owed to radical liberalism, but the contribution of mainstream Liberal and Conservative thought has been strangely neglected. By offering a more nuanced approach to the relationship between feminism, liberalism and conservatism this paper substantially challenges existing intellectual histories of women’s rights.