The Woman Question: Sex, Work and Politics 1780-1945

The Woman Question: Sex, Work and Politics 1780-1945 examines what was regarded as one of the most pressing social concerns of the nineteenth century, what Victorians defined as the ‘Woman Question’. It was never a single question but a series of issues and problems related to the changing demands and expectations confronting women in a society that had been rapidly modernising from the late-eighteenth century, a process that lasted beyond the Second World War, the end point of this volume and remain relevant today. In the nineteenth century, the critical questions were how should women be educated? What is women’s role in the public sphere? Should women have the vote? What work can women do? What is her rightful place in society and what is her true nature. These were questions that were persistently presented in articles and books and there was a level of uncertainty about how society, groups and individuals should respond to these challenges. We may have found solutions to these problems today and in the twenty-first century the barriers for women have been significantly reduced but they still remain. The glass ceiling of patriarchy may have been cracked but we are still far from having a real equality of opportunity and certainly an equality of outcome in our society. The campaigns that women fought since the 1780s to achieve gender equality are struggles still to be won.

The first chapter reflects on the relationship between the different methodologies that have evolved to explain the role of women in history. This is followed by a chapter that looks at the ways in which women were represented in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of the female body, sexuality and the notion of ‘separate spheres‘. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between women and work and how that relationship developed. Although women’s suffrage has had a symbolic importance for generations of feminists, the campaign for the vote has obscured the broader agitations for women’s rights during the nineteenth century and was, in terms of its impact before 1914, far less significant. Before the 1880s, the focus was not simply on winning the vote and demands for parliamentary suffrage was one of a range of campaigns. Married women’s property rights, divorce, custody of children, domestic violence as well as prostitution were all significant areas in which Victorian feminists campaigned for changes in the male-oriented status of the law and the differing moral standards to which wives and husbands were expected to conform. This was particular evident in the successful campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and in the growing significance of girls’ schooling and the campaign for higher education, issues examined in Chapter 4.

The following two chapters look at the ways in which women actively sought access to the public sphere through political activity and demands for suffrage reform. After 1900, the suffrage movement achieved widespread national recognition largely through the activities of the militant Suffragettes led by the Pankhursts and the non-militant campaigning of the Suffragists. These wings of the suffrage movement agreed about ends but disagreed about some of the means used to achieve those ends. The nature of the suffrage campaign is considered in Chapter 7 while reactions to this from anti-suffragists and political parties form the core of Chapter 8. The impact of the First World War on women generally and the suffrage campaign in particular is discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 considers the role played by women after they gained the vote in 1918 to 1945. Chapter 11 examines the nature of their role in the development of these colonies. The book ends with an examination of the notion of ‘borderlands’ as a conceptual framework for discussing women.