A number of different waves of women’s and gender history have ebbed and flowed over the past decades and some have had more effect on particular national historiographies than others, thrusting forward new topics and questions without entirely discarding the priorities of earlier generations of historians.5 For those interested in exploring women’s relationship to politics, a number of conceptual frameworks have spurred and sometimes constrained research.
As with many other areas in European women’s history, women’s relationship to politics has been shaped by the metaphor of ‘separate spheres’: the masculine ‘public’ and the feminine ‘private’. As Leonore Davidoff has commented ‘Like many of these binary concepts, “public” and “private” are extremely complicated and shift according to context. They also change with each new generation of users’.6 A central issue has been the extent to which the ideology of separate spheres affected different women’s ability to penetrate the public world of politics, and how this has varied between classes, between national cultures and over time. Although there are debates about how pervasive and how rigid this ideology was, particularly in the nineteenth century,7 the separate spheres framework has enabled feminist historians of politics to open up some different questions. For example, how did political ideologies and their practitioners in political parties understand separate spheres, position the boundary between them and thus define what was and was not ‘political’?8 The extent to which women were able to mobilise the rhetoric of separate spheres on their own behalf was first explored by historians of the feminist movement but has also now been used by those interested in other types of women’s associations and activities. A focus on the changing nature of the boundary between the public and private spheres has also been productive as it allows an exploration of the permeability of the public world to matters presumed to be private, such as domestic violence. Although the existence of a separate women’s culture in the nineteenth century may be contested, this historiography has prompted an exploration of women’s kin and friendship networks as part of a distinctive women’s politics.
Crudely applied, the notion of separate spheres can have a determinist tinge to it. Yet a focus on women’s agency has also been an important way in which feminist historians have approached women’s relationship to politics. Indeed, it was an important motivation in the early acts of reclamation of heroines. For example, biographical studies of Alexandra Kollantai appealed to many socialist feminists of the 1970s not only because she was the most successful of the female Bolsheviks but also because she selfconsciously explored the tensions between the personal and the political.9 Biography continues to be a way to explore political activism. Thus, more recently there have been a number of prosopographical studies on the less visible revolutionary women cast into the shadows by the continuing spotlight on Kollantai.10 This approach opens up the possibility of not only creating a women’s ‘history from below’ but also a social history of political women.
Sandra Holton has explored the relationship between suffragists and the ‘average woman’,11 in this case in relationship to the Edwardian British suffrage movement although the same issues apply to other national suffrage histories and indeed to international suffragism. She questions the presumption that the woman activist by definition is no longer an ‘ordinary’ woman, with the needs of an ordinary daily life to attend to, and that her activism distances her from the ‘average’ woman. Others have explored the related issue of how a particular form of politics - in this case suffragism - is experienced across a lifetime and interrelates with other political and personal activities.12 Instead of moving the spotlight from the famous individual in order to illuminate those around her, this approach trains the spotlight away from the most dramatic of the suffragists, the militants, to illuminate instead not only all the nooks and crannies of the many suffrage organisations, but also their interrelationship and the relationship between this and other politics, such as socialism or liberalism.
Agency has always been a key issue in relation to the operation of systems of power such as class but it is as important when considering gender power and the ways in which different structures of power (class, gender, race, sexuality) are tangled up with one another. Amongst Swedish feminist historians there has been debate on how to characterise this relationship. Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, in her research on the lives and political activity of Social Democratic women, has tried to unite a ‘structure-centred and actor-centred perspective’. Her purpose has been to provide an ‘explanatory historical analysis of women’s strategies’. She describes hers as a
Perspective where we see women and men as acting subjects in complex historical contexts. A perspective that has as its aim to make variations within the women’s collective visible, such as the way in which women’s subordination is linked to other power hierarchies.13
This is one attempt to negotiate the complexity of multiple identities and how they shape and are shaped by the experience of politics.
The power of separate spheres thinking has also been apparent in the characterisation by historians of feminism in terms of two distinct goals: full equality with men or equal recognition for women’s difference as a sex, essentially her reproductive capacity. The shorthand of ‘equality’ versus ‘difference’ feminism has been applied, debated and refined in relationship to individual theorists, women’s groups and campaigns as well as to women’s auxiliaries to mixed-sex organisations. Despite Joan W. Scott’s powerfully argued rejection of the equality-versus-difference dichotomy, this remains a way in which many histories of the women’s movement are perceived.14
Scott made the case for using gender as a tool of analysis in 1986, highlighting how it might productively be used to reconfigure political history, for ‘political history has, in a sense, been enacted on the field of gender’.15 This approach has continued to stimulate a more complex reading of the history of feminism and also an exploration of the ways in which gendered ideological and political discourses have shaped the political and social participation of men and women more generally. This means considering not just how politics has been gendered by political theorists but also how the experience of politics, broadly defined, has been and continues to be gendered over time. This means analysing how gender is veined through the language of politics and its practice within specific historical circumstances.
One of the ways in which the gendering of ‘the political’ has been explored is through the concept of citizenship, defined by Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose as ‘a political status assigned to individuals by states, as a relation of belonging to specific communities, or as a set of social practices that define the relationships between peoples and states and among peoples within communities’.16 Influenced by Carol Pateman’s explorations of the gendered contradictions of liberal citizenship,17 feminist historians have explored moments in the making and remaking of citizenship and the particular politics of inclusion and exclusion on which they were based. One example is Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall’s dissection of Britain’s 1867 Reform Act as a decisive moment in the making of a ‘classed’, ‘raced’ and ‘gendered’ citizen.18
The theorist Jurgen Habermas has influenced debates about the gendering of citizenship and the conceptualisation of a broader arena in which political engagement might take place. Habermas identified a new kind of public space emerging in Europe over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a third sphere of public citizen discourse mediated between the home and the state, where individual citizens could meet on a terrain of equality in order to discuss rationally matters of public concern. He calls this the bourgeois public sphere and we might understand it as civil society. As Laura Lee Downs says this was ‘a public yet extra-political (or at least extra-state) plane. . . a public arena whose legitimacy stemmed from its claim to represent public opinion and the common interest’.19 This bourgeois public was an essential constituent in the construction of modern democracy. It was also a space, as Habermas’s feminist critics pointed out, closed to women from the outset. Critiques of his work have spurred studies on how democracy and citizenship were gendered in a foundational moment such as the French Revolution, but his work has also led to a foregrounding in eighteenth-century studies of new spaces of sociability, prompted particularly by a burgeoning print culture, which some women exploited. Habermas also spurred feminist historians to map the multiplicity of public spheres not just across time but also concurrently.20 This critical engagement with what has constituted ‘the public’ is reflected in a much more plastic understanding of ‘politics’.
Thus rather than just thinking in terms of two spheres of action, the public and the private, it has become more useful to think in terms of political spaces. The concept of political space suggests that there are many places where politics can occur, beyond parliaments and political parties. This takes us into the realm of the many activities that make up civil society and the notion of informal politics taking place in spaces that are not perceived as political at all. The notion of space allows us to see politics happening not just in elected assemblies, in meeting rooms, in workplaces and in public squares but also in the parlours of domestic homes, in shops, in newspapers, in snatched conversations and even in the imagination. Thus political space was not always public space. If political space is diffuse it also contains many possibilities, some of which are more amenable to women’s participation than others. A woman’s access to political space could also depend as much upon her class, her religion, her ethnicity and her geographical location, as upon her gender. Indeed, the idea of space allows politics to be placed in contexts other than the national, whether it is the neighbourhood, the local, the regional, the transnational or even the global. The links and contrasts between some of these spaces and the possibilities and frustrations they represented can be traced in Leila J. Rupp’s exploration of the international women’s movement.21
In order to reflect on some of the different issues that historians of European women’s politics have raised in recent years, this chapter will keep to the broad and somewhat arbitrary chronological divides of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries but will attempt to explore similar themes in each. The purpose is to establish the extent to which there are continuities in women’s relationship to politics over this lengthy period and within a series of developing national cultures. Is a Whig history of women’s political emancipation discernible across all of Europe, as is often implied in mainstream histories, or is this the least interesting question to be asking? As part of a reconfiguration of this story, I will touch upon how the thinking about politics and women’s relationship to it, such as notions of citizenship, was shaped and will consider the impact this had on the everyday lives of women. What was acceptable or possible in formal and informal politics for women, and how was this constrained by class, ethnicity or other identities? To compare what was possible also involves identifying the spaces for women’s participation and the extent to which women were able to carve out new ones or to reconfigure traditional notions of ‘the political’. This therefore leads to a consideration of the extent to which gender shaped women’s engagement with the political process. Yet none of this has any meaning unless it is placed within specific historical contexts, thus what were the significant events that affected women’s relationship with politics? Are those markers of the making of modernity such as nation-building, revolutions and world wars the most significant contours for the mapping of women’s political experience across three centuries of
European history? The comparative approach of this volume allows us to escape from the myopia of national histories and the limitations of period-bound studies to a wider vision, which attempts to make out patterns of experience and broader discourses across temporal and geographical boundaries.
World History
