Women's suffrage in nineteenth-century Europe and Britain

Europe Women's Suffrage

Most countries in Western and Central Europe, including Great Britain granted women the vote right after World War I, and only in the Scandinavian nations of Norway and Finland did they receive it earlier than that. France stood out as exceptional, however, no matter that it was the homeland of democratic revolution and of the idea of equal rights for women. It also had a highly conservative side and did not allow women's suffrage until 1945. In Southern and Eastern Europe, granting the vote to women was usually delayed at least that long as well, especially due to the influence on the Catholic Church. In any event, the authoritarian or even fascist nature of the regimes in most of these countries made voting irrelevant, but for the most part no movements for women's suffrage and equality even existed in these regions in the 19th Century. Women's suffrage advanced fastest in the Northern Protestant European countries that had the strongest liberal and democratic traditions un the 19th Century, particularly Britain and Scandinavia, although almost everywhere, working class and social democratic parties were the first to formally endorse female voting rights. These parties were almost always the first to introduce the first bills in favor of it in the national legislatures, which were literally men with howls of scorn and ridicule when the subject came up in the 19th Century, as something quite literally comical, absurd or unthinkable. In traditional and conservative societies, as opposed to those that were more urban and industrialized, women were largely confined to their domestic roles and had few opportunities for participation in public political or economic life. In countries with string authoritarian traditions like Germany, Russia, Austria and Italy, where parliaments were either weak or non-existent and not even the majority of men could vote, there was virtually no chance of voting rights being granted to women in the 19th Century.

Great Britain

Great Britain was the first country in Western Europe that began to extend voting rights to all men the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884-85, including to laborers and the working class, although full universal suffrage for all males regardless of income and property ownership did not come until the 20th Century. Women age thirty and over were allowed to vote in national elections in 1918, and this was extended to all women over age twenty-one in 1928. Unlike France, which proclaimed universal suffrage for all men in the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, only to abolish it again in the dictatorships or absolute monarchies that were restored later, in Britain the progress toward democratization was slow and steady throughout the 19th Century. Moreover, once certain rights were granted, usually after exhaustive debate and discussion, they were never rescinded again, which did happen on the continent in Germany, Italy, France and Russia when weak liberal regimes collapsed. John Stuart Mill first advocated women's suffrage in On Liberty (1859) and petitioned Parliament to allow women's voting rights during the debate over the 1867 Reform Act. That same year, the first women's suffrage committees were formed in Manchester and other large cities, and almost everywhere the cause of women's suffrage and equality was strongest in the large cities rather than rural areas and small towns, which always tended to be more conservative and traditional.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Jane Rendall, "Citizenship, Culture and Civilization: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866-1874" in Caroline Daly and Melanie Nolan (eds). Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (NY: University Press, 1994), p. 129.]

These local committees and societies finally coalesced into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1896, led by Millicent Garret Fawcett. In contrast to the far more militant Women's Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, these organizations did not engage in civil disobedience, violent protests, arson and smashing or store windows. If the members of the more moderate groups were not jailed, beaten up by the police or going on hunger strikes in jail like the 'suffragettes' and did not go on hunger strikes, neither did they ever manage to get the same amount of public notice as the Pankhurst's -- who made no pretense about women being meek or following traditional domestic roles. In Britain, the suffragists were also disappointed by the pre-1914 Liberal governments, which failed to introduce a bill in parliament, and as in most countries, the Labour Party was actually the first to endorse women's suffrage in 1912. Starting in 1869-70, they were granted the right to vote in local and school board elections, however, and in city council elections in 1907, but the national franchise came about only as a result of women's contributions in the First World War.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Ute Planert, "Women's Suffrage and Antifeminism as a Litmus Test of Modernizing Societies: A Western European Comparison" in Sven Oliver Muller and Cornelius Torp (eds). Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (Berghahn Books, 2002), p. 110.]

France

France was unusual in Western Europe in that it was the first country to inspire feminist writings during the French Revolution, such as those by Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft, but did not finally grant the vote to women until 1945. In France the Chamber of Deputies voted overwhelmingly to grant women the right to vote and run for office in 1919, which the new democratic governments in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia did as well after World War I, but the law was blocked in the upper house and never approved by the president. Nor did the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and the Paris Commune fundamentally advance the rights of women, and indeed generated conservative backlashes against radical or reformist movements of any kind. Women demanded the franchise during the 1848 revolution, for example, and in the Paris Commune of 1870-71 were allowed to vote for the first time, but this right was taken away immediately when the revolutions were suppressed. On the whole, the age of revolutions in Western Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th Centuries did not bring "considerable advances in granting political and legal rights to women" or even to all men.[footnoteRef:3] Early feminists in France like Desiree Gay, and Pauline Roland were most often allied with the radical and socialist movements of Saint Simon and Fourier movements of the 1830s and 1840s. They generally assumed that most women would continue to follow domestic roles, but should also be free to participate in the public sphere, particularly as a moral and religious influence. In France, the U.S. And Britain, of course, labor and socialist movements were often suspicious of middle and upper class women's movements because they were often allied with religious and moralistic movements, and conservative churches that promoted prohibition and similar causes. [3: Planert, p. 109.]

As in Britain, early supporters of women's suffrage often claimed to be moderate and pacifist, and argued that women's biological nature was domestic and family-oriented. Hubertine Auclert was the leading proponent of this type of 'difference' feminism in France in the 1880s and 1890s, although is in Britain women's rights supporters also eagerly engaged in war work during World War I in hopes of winning the franchise afterward. Few of the early feminists publicly engaged in cultural issues related to divorce, birth control and the traditional family, and instead argued that the family would be strengthened by giving women equal rights in the public sphere.[footnoteRef:4] In France and other continental European nations, a common assumption was that women would also vote the way their husbands directed, or perhaps the way the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church directed. This would always prove to be a stumbling block when it came to advancing women's suffrage for liberal, labor and socialist parties on countries like France, Spain, Italy and Austria. [4: Offen, Karen, "Citizenship and Suffrage with a French Twist, 1789-1993" in Daly and Nolan, p.152.]

Scandinavia

Like Britain and the U.S. all the Scandinavian countries had strong middle and upper class feminist movements in the 19th and early-20th Centuries, including the Danish Women's Society (1871) and the Norwegian Women's Suffrage Union (1898). All the labor and social democratic parties also had women's branches and associations, and as usual these parties of the left were the first to endorse women's suffrage.[footnoteRef:8] These Northern Protestant countries with strong liberal and democratic traditions were more open to campaigns for women's rights and equality than those in Eastern, Central and Southern Europe, and in Sweden women first received the right to vote in local elections as early as 1862. After the revolution of 1905 in Russia, in which Finland received autonomy, women also received the right to vote in all national elections.[footnoteRef:9] In Swede, Norway and Denmark, "prolonged struggles against intransigent aristocracies strengthened the liberal politics that gave women's suffrage sway."[footnoteRef:10] Iceland and Denmark granted full women's suffrage in 1915, followed by Sweden in 1921. In Scandinavia, World War I had much less of an impact on moving the issue of women's suffrage to the forefront than in Britain, the U.S., Germany and Austria since all of these countries were neutral in 1914-18. [8: Byron J. Nordstrom, Scandinavia since 1500 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 252.] [9: Nordstrom, p. 253.] [10: Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (NY: Random House, 2011), p. 140.]

Southern and Eastern Europe

Southern and Eastern Europe, which were more traditionalist and authoritarian than Britain and Scandinavia, had almost no activity or mass organization related to women's suffrage and equal rights in the 19th Century. These societies were also mostly rural and agrarian, with peasants as the majority of the population, and not particularly fertile ground for liberal reform movements or working class parties and organizations that existed mostly in the large, industrial cities. Young Russian women were heavily involved in the revolutionary movements of the 1880s and 1890s, including attempts to assassinate the tsar and other officials, but since the country had no real liberal-parliamentary tradition and no system of voting or representation, women's suffrage was meaningless. Even after the 1905 revolution, when Nicholas II allowed a parliament (Duma) with limited powers, women were still excluded from the franchise. Of course, with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the abolition of the Duma the next year, all voting became irrelevant in Russia or in countries it controlled -- as it always had been under the tsars. As in France, opposition to women's suffrage also remained strong everywhere in Eastern and Southern Europe, where women were assumed to be conservative voters heavily influenced by the churches. Liberals and leftists in Italy, Spain, and Portugal argued that women's participation in elections would only reinforce conservative domination of political and economic life. This is one reason why they were the last nations in Europe to permit women's suffrage. No major campaigns for women's suffrage existed in Italy during the 19th Century and men only achieved universal franchise rights in 1912, while voting itself was meaningless under the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini in 1922-43. Not until the end of World War II in 1945 did women finally receive the right to vote.[footnoteRef:11] In Spain, women were given the vote by a new republican government only in 1931, but then all voting ceased to exist under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1939-75. [11: Gisbert H. Flanz, Comparative Women's Rights and Political Participation in Europe (Hotei Publishing, 1983), p. 96.]

Conclusion

No country in Europe granted women full and equal suffrage to men in the 19th Century, and in the more conservative, rural and agrarian regions of the continent there were hardly any organizations at all that advocated women's rights or an equal franchise for both genders. Moreover, in many areas of Europe, such as Austria, Germany, Russia and Spain, liberal-democratic traditions were either very weak or nonexistent, and even men did not have voting rights. Britain was the first country in Europe to extend voting rights even to working class males, starting in 1867, and even as late as the First World War about a third of men fell below the income and property requirements that permitted them the franchise in national elections. Only in industrialized countries where men had already achieved at least some measure of universal suffrage could women's organizations even hope to make any headway on their demand for voting rights. In almost every country, the leftist, labor and social democratic parties were the first to raise the issue women's suffrage in parliaments, at least in those countries where legislatures existed at all. Middle class and liberal feminist organizations also came into being in Britain, the U.S., Germany and Scandinavia in the 19th Century, although they were unable to achieve full voting rights in national elections anywhere except in a few U.S. states -- usually in the West. New Zealand was the first country to grant women equal voting rights in 1893, but in Britain, most of the U.S., Germany and Scandinavia in the 19th Century, women were generally only permitted to participate in local and school board elections, and even then were also subject to property requirements. France, which ironically had pioneered the concept of universal make suffrage in the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, and had also inspired some of the earliest feminist writings in history, was an outlier in Western Europe and did not grant women the vote until 1945. Compared to Britain, the U.S. And Scandinavia in the 19th Century, its feminist and women's suffrage movements were also rather weak, limited and ineffectual. They were not able to obtain the vote for women even after the national legislature approved it in 1919. France had a very conservative and authoritarian side in the 19th and 20th Century that continually derailed its liberal-democratic revolutions and restored dictatorial or monarchical rule, although this finally came to end in 1945, which is when women also received the vote. As in Italy, Spain and Russia, liberal and leftist parties also feared that women would vote for the conservative parties, under instructions from the priests and bishops, and this fear that women voters were actually more conservative than men held up women's suffrage in many countries.