Until very recently, historians have tended to characterize the women’s suffrage campaign in England as an exclusively political movement, as merely an attempt on the part of women to share in the general enfranchisement that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Feminists did, indeed, demand recognition from and participation in the political process, but to stop here is to describe, not to understand, the feminist movement. In fighting for enfranchisement, suffragists sought no less than the total transformation of the lives of women. They set out to redefine and recreate, by political means, the sexual culture of Britain. Though suffragists repeatedly...

Though the term was not introduced until 1890 or so, the movement that came to be called “feminism” became large and outspoken during the second half of the nineteenth century. Feminists sought to reverse what they deemed to be the declining role of the middle-class woman. They reserved their most furious objections for representations that equated the female with the sexual. Feminists cast their arguments in the context of a larger discussion about the value and function of the family and its individual members’ roles in industrial capitalist society.

The dominant theme of middle-class ideology stressed women’s roles as wife...

Victorian ideology finally offered only two possible images for women. They might be either the idealized wife and mother, the angel in the house, or the debased, depraved, corrupt prostitute.¹ The image of the respectable, passionless middle-class lady, in fact, depended upon a contrast with the other image of the “fallen” woman. Whereas society and its main spokesmen insisted that the two types of women operated in diametrically opposed and separate spheres, feminists countered that, in the end, they were not, in men’s minds, distinct at all. Indeed, feminists refused the terms of the contrast, insisting that prostitutes and women...

The prostitute exemplified one aspect of female sexuality; the mother, pure and untainted by sexual motives, exemplified the other. Victorian ideology imbued marriage and motherhood with an element of the divine. The family and the home constituted for Victorians “a central fact of the greatest importance,” as W. L. Burn described it;¹ the integrity of family life and the guardianship of all the comforts and benefits to be accrued therefrom rested with the wife and mother. Marriage and motherhood were the crowning achievements of a woman’s life, her “natural destiny” and “best earthly happiness.”² Reverence and awe surrounded her position...

The medical profession had lent its considerable authority to scientific definitions of the female as “the Sex” in the course of the nineteenth century. This identity had been evolved both to justify women’s exclusion from the public sphere and political power and to make them the proper complement to the “inherent” sexual drives of men. Confidence in science as the basis for virtually all knowledge permeated Victorian mentality; physicians enveloped themselves in the scientific mantle as they sought to establish themselves as the “supreme authority” in sexual matters. Doctors mobilized “the truth of sex,” as Foucault termed it, in a...

Laws made and administered by men constituted the focus of women’s intense anger during the entire period under study. Nina Boyle of the Women’s Freedom League raged in 1913 against “the open immorality of the Courts of Justice,” where the overt “sex bias” of magistrates manifested itself in “tenderness to male ruffians who inflict the ‛reverberations of their physiological emergencies’ upon women and children.” “We have watched the treachery and dishonesty of politics and the abuse and tyranny of the administration of the law until we are sick and sore with the shame and vileness of it,” she wrote furiously....

Feminists conceived of their movement as a response to the sexual degradation of women created by the ideology of separate spheres and the double standard of morality for men and women that it justified. By reducing women to a role composed solely of sexual functions, by imposing upon them male definitions of sexuality, and by validating the belief in the inexorable necessity of men to find release for their sexual drives, Victorian ideology, they charged, stimulated the notion of woman as “a creature of sex value only, created to fulfil the will, the pleasure and the needs of men,” as...

Feminists struggled for over fifty years to obtain votes for women. Their campaign, although a continuous one, was marked by three distinct phases. During the pioneering phase, from 1866 to 1870, suffrage agitation focused on the Reform Act of 1867 and was characterized by great optimism and spirited activity. The second phase, lasting from 1870 to 1905, has been described as a period of “doldrums,” when the movement became muted and diffused.¹ With the advent of militancy in 1905, votes for women took on an intensity of purpose marked by “an almost religious fervour,” as Strachey described it. “It was...

With the outbreak of World War I, the nuwss, wfl, and wspu ceased all suffrage activity as their leaders devoted their energies to the war effort. For all intents and purposes, “votes for women” was dead for the duration of the war. In 1917, however, the government became concerned about the need to call a new election, and on the basis of the old franchise the men of the armed forces and those serving in related industries would no longer be eligible to vote. (After 1884, men were qualified to vote if they occupied a residence for twelve months prior...