Feminism by Margaret Walters

necessary pecuniary qualifications’ should be gists
    allowed to vote. The petitioner, Hunt pointed out, paid taxes like any man; moreover, since women could be punished at law, they should be given a voice in the making of laws, as well as the right to serve on juries.
    But the struggle for the vote was only beginning, and it was never straightforward. There were divisions between those arguing for adult suffrage, and those who wanted to campaign simply on behalf of women. And amongst the latter, there was disagreement about which women should be enfranchised. Many early demands for women’s suffrage concentrated on spinsters; Frances Power Cobbe, for example, argued the case for women property owners and taxpayers. These limited demands were partly a matter of tactics (if some women won the vote, it would at least set a precedent, which might later be more easily extended), but it was often assumed, 69
    dismissively, that a wife’s interests were identical with her husband’s, and that giving her a vote would simply mean handing a second one to the man of the household. Some women believed that the passing of a married women’s property act would prove more immediately useful to them than the vote. On the other hand, Mrs Humphrey Ward expressed her anxiety that, if spinsters were allowed to vote, it would mean that ‘large numbers of women leading immoral lives will be enfranchised, while married women, who, as a rule have passed through more of the practical experiences of life than the unmarried would be excluded’. One member of parliament remarked sarcastically that if spinsters were enfranchised, it would be rewarding ‘that portion of the other sex which for some cause had failed to be womanly’. Other opponents of female suffrage argued that only a man might be called upon to fight for his country, and that ‘gives him a claim of some sort to have a voice in the conduct of its affairs’.
    The debate offers some odd and revealing glimpses into attitudes minism
    towards women. Thus in 1871, the political philosopher Thomas Fe
    Carlyle remarked that
    the true destiny of a woman . . . is to wed a man she can love and esteem and to lead noiselessly, under his protection, with all the wisdom, grace and heroism that is in her, the life presented in consequence.
    And a great many women, as well, accepted the notion that by nature and God’s decree, women were different to men. God meant them to be wives and mothers; if they deserted their proper sphere, it would lead to ‘a puny, enfeebled and sickly race’.
    Progress, perhaps inevitably, proved very slow. Indeed, very many prominent women dismissed the vote as relatively unimportant, insisting, sometimes a shade disingenuously, that they, personally, had never suffered any disabilities from its lack. Florence Nightingale announced in 1867 that ‘in the years that I have passed 70
    in Government offices, I have never felt the want of a vote’, and though she later conceded its importance, she always felt there were other more urgent problems facing women. The successful writer and journalist Harriet Martineau insisted that ‘the best friends of the cause are the happy wives and the busy, cheerful satisfied single women . . . whatever a woman proves herself able to do, society will be thankful to see her do’.
    Beatrix Potter attributed her own ‘anti-feminism’ to ‘the fact that I had never myself suffered the disabilities assumed to arise from my sex’. The Liberal Violet Markham came up with an evasive paradox: many women are clearly ‘superior to men, and therefore I don’t like to see them trying to become man’s equals’. By 1889, the popular novelist and journalist Mrs Humphrey Ward was claiming that ‘the Fightin emancipating process has now reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women’. Queen Victoria was sometimes g for th
    hailed by suffragists as an example of what a woman was capable of; Barbara Leigh Smith, for