Conclusion

The continuities in European women’s relationship with political power are striking. This is despite the fact that women’s formal position has changed radically as women achieved citizenship and as most of the legal barriers to participation were removed. Yet a Whig history of women’s political emancipation is only one way to narrate the history of the past three centuries. For it only tells part of the story. Its focus is narrowly on formal rights rather than on the ability to exercise those rights; it ignores the way in which those rights can ebb and flow and how particular groups of women can be excluded, such as immigrants.158

The principal story is not, then, one of the progressive inclusion of women within national and supranational decision-making bodies. Women, collectively and individually, have had and continue to have a much more ambivalent relationship to formal politics. Having fought to be included, there has been disappointment amongst some at the reality of post-enfranchisement politics: not only from those who hoped gender, rather than party or ideology, would shape participation but also from those who found that formal citizenship rights made little difference to everyday life. Gaining access to national assemblies proved to be hard enough, but reconfiguring the political agenda and the practice of politics has been harder still. And, of course, initiatives such as Iceland’s Women’s Alliance have shown there is not always unanimity on what such a new politics should look like. For centuries, organised women have struggled with the policy implications of a ‘difference’ or ‘equality’ agenda: is it a ‘feminised’ or a ‘gender-free’ politics which is the goal? The notion of ‘women’s issues’ have proved the means for women to connect with politics and parties, particularly at a local level, and for organised and unorganised women to find common cause. Yet at the same time, this perpetuation of a sexual division of politics has justified the marginalisation of most women from the exercise of real power over the management of the economy, foreign policy or national defence.

It is at the level of informal politics and within civil society that a much longer history of women’s participation is apparent. Over the centuries, feminine influence has persisted, as has men’s fear of it. Women have used their long formal exclusion from politics to learn other ways of engaging with political power and seeking to shape political outcomes. The long history of social politics at an elite and popular level might seem to emphasise women’s marginality, but through it many women learnt the effectiveness of kin and friendship networks. Politics that sprang from daily experience, whether a cost-of-living protest, a rent strike or campaigning for infant-welfare centres, can be seen as community - rather than women-focused actions, yet it is through such activity that women found ways to conceive of themselves as political actors. Often harder for parties to control, such neighbourhood-based politics seems to have been the way in which many European women have made sense of the meaning of politics and the possibilities it represented to meet their immediate demands. For some, this has translated beyond the moment of crisis into a broader participation in civil society, a sense of empowerment and a desire to meet humanitarian, party or even feminist goals. The model of politicisation that most political parties had, and still have, rarely accommodates such experiences and remains highly gendered.159 It may also be that those who become ‘political women’, of whatever ideological allegiance, have more in common with one another than they do with the unorganised or apolitical.

Across the centuries, the constraints on women’s political action have continued. Class has shaped these possibilities: through differential access to the powerful, through property-based franchises, through access to education, through the burden of domestic responsibilities and through the possibilities for personal autonomy. The power of separate-spheres thinking has also been tenacious across the centuries, reconfiguring but never really dissolving. Yet women have been inventive and have seized opportunities even in the face of backlash and suppression. At the same time, these experiences have been discontinuous, with little historical knowledge either of foremothers or of the forces of reaction. Recovering a sense of a collective past has therefore been important not just to second-wave feminists but also to earlier generations of women activists, such as British suffragists who vied with one another to compose the dominant narrative of the battle for female enfranchisement.160 As we retrieve more of the history of women’s engagement with political power across Europe, we can see that there are many continuities in the situations in which women have found themselves and in the ways in which they have responded to the possibilities that new political spaces have presented.