Reading this book, I developed an odd new respect for Victorian MPs: How did they manage to rule the waves, to govern an industrial and imperial nation and still have time and energy for hairsplitting discussions about child custody, women's rights, and enfranchisement? Ben Griffin's answer to this not-just-flippant question is that these issues were crucial to the identities of Victorian MPs, a group of diverse and complicated elite males deserving the respectful and close examination Griffin provides. Griffin addresses MPs own gendered identities as well as gender as a constant political concern. He presents his work as a counter narrative to many studies of nineteenth century feminism that he finds give too much attention to extra parliamentary women's movements. Combined with an overly general and often exaggerated view of male resistance, Griffin claims those studies provided a flawed understanding of Victorian responses to women's demands for personal rights and a greater public role.

The first chapters of the book examine the various iterations and debates over bills to grant married women property rights and to reform child custody laws. The latter part of the book covers efforts to give Victorian women the vote (“Victorian” should be taken literally: this book addresses suffrage debates up to 1906, illuminating the considerable attention paid to the issue before the more familiar Edwardian struggles). In between these two sections is an interesting chapter on masculine identity and anxiety that uses admittedly unrepresentative case studies to show that some key actors' fragile masculinity can explain why they feared and fought changes in women's legal status.

One of Griffin's main points (returned to, perhaps excessively, throughout the book) is that there was no unified, consistent anti-feminist position. Yes, some might oppose granting women any greater freedoms, but close examination of voting records over time reveal that one could support granting married women property rights but oppose enfranchising them and vice versa. Griffin studies the fate of particular issues and bills and provides important insights into Victorian MPs' concerns. MPs were determined to preserve male legal control of households and tried to ignore repeated evidence that abusive men existed among all classes and social groups; both efforts were ultimately unsustainable. He examines the ways religious concerns shaped the understanding of male power in the family. Especially important, he shows that women's suffrage needs to be considered in relation to debates over male suffrage; with each successive reform wave women's case became stronger. Passage of the secret ballot was particularly important because it removed concerns about women having to negotiate the rough and tumble public practices of elections and voting.

Griffin charts the oscillations in Victorian liberalism between seeing women's rights as important because women formed a significant national group deserving a voice in the nation versus seeing women as capable adult individuals deserving the full menu of liberal, post-Enlightenment rights. His overarching conclusion is that over the course of the century various barriers were removed because the arguments holding up particular rationales (for example, married women do not need property rights because they are protected by their husbands) proved unsustainable. And as both Liberals and Conservatives moved towards greater democracy (especially after 1884), rationales against women's suffrage collapsed.

Griffin's case rests on extensive research of voting records, the changing phrasing of particular parliamentary proposals, and MPs' statements in parliamentary debates, but also as reported in the press and private exchanges. This close focus is impressive, but it also sets the stage for a significant shortcoming: the relative erasure of the world outside of Parliament. MPs often seem to be operating in a vacuum—the importance of the Contagious Diseases Acts is there, but in other respects there is not much mention of extra-parliamentary activity. It is even harder to imagine that the issues MPs were pondering were not just British concerns but trans-national ones. There is some mention of the suffrage movement in the United States, but little sense that women were agitating for similar things in other countries and, especially by the late nineteenth century, activists for women's suffrage were connected across national borders. Another lost dimension is Britain's transformation into a global power. Not everything has to explain the workings of the British Empire, but a work that spans the nineteenth century, examines elite masculinity, and has an extended discussion of notions of “fitness” invites at least a nod to the ways these issues were increasingly shaped by perceptions of British power both within Europe and by the Empire.

Griffin selectively draws on recent trends in the writing of political history, and, especially in his examination of masculinity, he also turns to theoretical concepts. Examples of the former are his discussion of different concepts of liberalism. In the latter case he regularly examines whether or not views of gender were essentialist; he also brings in Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus to explain the importance of conformity to particular forms of masculine dress and control of the body. All this is to be applauded but it also makes this reader want more. Patrick Joyce's The State of Freedom (2013), an account of the work and world views of British bureaucrats that appeared after Griffin's book, shows what a deeper examination of habitus might looks like by considering how elite masculinity was shaped by multiple social institutions as well as mundane recurring actions. Joyce works with Michel Foucault's concepts of power and how it is exercised throughout the modern state, concerns that are even more evident in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011), a collection of essays introduced by Joyce and co-edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon that Griffin might be familiar with. There various authors explore the shifting meanings and applications of British liberalism, many of them finding that liberalism was always concerned with the limits of rights and the need to contain equality.

Just as not every work has to explain the British Empire, not every work has to refer to Michel Foucault. But such Foucauldian explorations might have helped Griffin say more about the workings of government, the nature of liberalism, and the ways gender was constantly shaping the views and actions of MPs—all key goals of this book. Wishing that this book had done more is not to diminish its contributions. Rather, those contributions are significant and deserve broader consideration because those six-hundred-plus privileged men who agonized over minute possible changes in women's legal standing administered the nineteenth century's preeminent world power. We want to know everything we can about them.