Suffrage Movement

Background Related Movements

Before a recognizable suffrage movement took form, middle-class women had been active for decades in church groups and local societies that tried to improve the conditions of the poor, wrought by the devastating effects of industrial capitalism, intensive urbanization, and epidemics. Additionally, women were active in associations that attempted to “morally reform” the victims of exploitative working conditions in urban centers. Women of means formed organizations to intervene, philanthropically, in the most visible results of the intensification of squalor and destitution. Temperance societies formed to combat what was seen as the failure of moral rectitude among the poor and working classes. More recent scholarship has afforded an expanded view of the links between the Victorian philanthropy and social purity movements and its links to the suffrage movement.

The suffrage movements' ideology, converging with what some scholars describe as the “first wave” of feminism, and fueled by the largely bourgeois cultural developments of the “new woman,” was a mixture of maternal feminism, traditional “separate spheres” doctrines, and more radical thinking on gender and sexual emancipation. Often characterized as a middle-class movement of elite white women, the suffrage movement also reflected sharp divergences in its strategies, ideologies, and political maneuvering, resulting in sharp disagreements and factions among its members and diversity in their demands. Although the movement was ostensibly and explicitly oriented toward the goal of women gaining equal or democratic franchise, many saw this strategy in terms of a wider concern to expand the influence of women's vision toward a society freed from gender structures that inscribed itself in economic, social, legal, matrimonial, sexual, educational, and religious realms of experience. A dominant ideology among many suffrage organizations was the idea of women's inherent moral superiority, made politically and strategically practicable by women's ability to rise above the quarrels of male politicians.

The suffrage movement, largely associated with Anglo-European national contexts, occurred during the zenith of British imperialism and the intensification of colonial trade and the aggressive expansion of overseas markets. As an example of one of the most bitter and protracted struggles, this entry will mainly focus on the British experience of the suffrage movement, calling attention to the complex terrain of organizations and the pressure brought to bear on political maneuvering during a time that historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of empire.”

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