The history of franchise reform has long been seen as somewhat old-fashioned. Historians belonging to the Whig tradition of the late nine-teenth and early twentieth century traced the advance of women and working men to the vote through the machinations of parliament, pressure groups, and party politics, but their narratives lacked analysis.Footnote 1 By the 1960s, political historians insisted that pressure from below was irrelevant to the passage of reform.Footnote 2 Not surprisingly, Marxist social historians regarded the struggle for the vote as a distraction from the real issues of capitalism and the need for socialism, while feminists focused on sexual politics rather than high politics. However, recent work has reinvigorated the field of suffrage history with new conceptions of class, gender, and empire.

Under the British constitution, the vote was not a universal human right, but a privilege to be earned. As the essays by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall point out, the vote was also a key marker of citizenship in Britain before the era of immigrant restrictions began to define citizenship as the right of residence. Property, of course, was long the most important requirement for the citizenship of the vote. When working-class men challenged their exclusion from the franchise, politicians increasingly shifted the requirements for citizenship from property to “virtue.” But what did virtue mean? Was it education? Fatherhood? Taxpaying? Traditional constitutional thought also viewed parliament as representing interests rather than individuals. To defuse more radical demands, the British government tended to concede the vote on the basis of taxpaying, age, or communal interests, or local rather than national representation.

Gender and class thus became important in defining citizenship. In earlier work, Hall and McClelland had pointed out how different notions of masculinity were used to exclude or include working-class men in the electorate in 1867.Footnote 3 Gladstone, for instance, portrayed working men as respectable “fathers of families” who deserved the vote.Footnote 4 Antoinette Burton argued that late-nineteenth-century suffragists justified their claim to the vote by promising to rescue Indian women, as well as by vaunting the superiority of white English women to colonized men.Footnote 5

Suffrage history is also reviving with the new critical perspective that sees the empire as constituting the metropole. For instance, the denial of the vote to English Uitlanders provided one excuse for the South African War. The vote was also a major issue as the imperial state began to promise self-government, first to the white colonies and, by the early twentieth century, to selected elements in India as an effort to delay and co-opt the movement toward independence. Although the books under review do not cover this subject, the “one-man-one-vote” principle continued to be an issue in Northern Ireland and in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe and South Africa through the 1960s. Current political theorists also point out the limitations of the one-man-one-vote principle because it fails to represent minority interests.Footnote 6

The linguistic turn has also helped revive the study of the franchise. Historians have begun to analyze the language of debates to show how politicians defined citizenship in raced and gendered terms. In their edited volume, Hall, McClelland, and Rendall provide a very useful introduction to these shifts in perspective, providing a panoramic theoretical and historical introduction not only to the complex historiography of the 1867 Reform Act but to current intellectual trends, including poststructuralism and gender. Refreshingly, all the books under review also combine their analysis of political rhetoric with an assessment of its concrete impact and its function within organizational pressure politics.

Themes of masculinity and women's rights took center stage in the debates over the 1867 Reform Act, while these issues were much less present in debates over the 1832 Reform Act. In a related article, Hall brilliantly demonstrates the centrality of Irish Catholic emancipation and Jamaican slave rebellion for the history of the 1832 Reform Act, but she finds more difficulty in making an argument that gender was crucial in these debates.Footnote 7 In the 1832 parliamentary debates, the vote was not claimed for middle-class men on the basis of fatherhood or their domestic virtues, but because they accumulated real property and contributed to the state. A handful of radicals raised the question of women's suffrage, but it failed to become a major issue in the debate. For instance, Helen Rogers points out that Eliza Sharples, associated with the ultraradical Richard Carlile, demanded that women be included in the reform bill. However, Rogers also notes that Sharples did not organize women to press for their inclusion, nor could she attract large audiences for her speeches. During the 1830s and 1840s, working-class women participated actively in political movements, but they focused on the more pressing problems of the poor law, work hours, and low wages.

The female suffrage movement derived from the middle-class radical tradition of Unitarians, internationalists, and reformers, which Rendall and Rogers illuminate from different perspectives. Rogers's book is an interesting hybrid of cultural, political, and literary history; it also contains biographical studies of individuals such as Sharples and schoolteacher Mary Smith who challenged the political and class categories of their times. She draws on a keen literary sensibility to examine the use of genres such as parody and melodrama, and she examines their success or failure in persuading and mobilizing audiences. Both Rogers and Rendall point out how feminists challenged the increasingly masculine notions of citizenship prevalent during and after the passage of the 1867 Reform Act. Moving beyond the linguistic turn, they emphasize that organizational practice must be considered as well as rhetoric.

Rendall's chapter in Defining the Victorian Nation, “The Citizenship of Women and the 1867 Reform Act,” provides a useful narrative of the feminist effort to include women in the expansion of the franchise in the 1860s and 1870s. With the exception of some articles, these events have not been analyzed in detail since 1902, when Helen Blackburn attempted to place women's suffrage in the “Anglo-Saxon” constitutional tradition. The movement faced tensions between its radical roots and its more conservative members, such as Emily Davies. Women such as Lydia Becker and Davies tactically argued for the vote for single and widowed women householders, rather than married women. For a moment, this strategy seemed plausible, especially in 1870 when a bill to grant women suffrage on the same basis as men actually passed its second reading in the Commons (it was, of course, defeated in committee). Single women could vote in municipal elections from 1869, by 1870 they could vote for school board elections, and in 1875 the first woman became a poor law guardian. The local franchise for women can thus be seen as an important victory that allowed women to redefine citizenship, but it could also be interpreted as a classic example of the British state conceding token political representation to excluded classes in order to forestall more radical challenges to the dominant system.

As parliament widened the franchise to include more working men, politicians increasingly emphasized the masculinity of the vote. McClelland demonstrates the importance of manhood in defining working-class citizenship in 1867, but he also reasserts the validity of the concept of the “working class.” McClelland buttresses his argument with an insightful discussion of the changing sociological and organizational composition of the working class. “The People” cannot supplant class as an analytic category, because all sides used the language of class in the debates over the 1867 Reform Acts. As McClelland writes, “Men referred continually to the working class, or working classes, as both being deprived of the vote and thus having a claim to it.” This was not a language of class antagonism, but an assertion that different classes had different interests (p. 95). Yet McClelland points out the paradox that working men recognized that they were excluded as a class but claimed rights as individual citizens. However, the Liberals saw them as one interest among many. While the Reform League wanted the vote on the basis of universal male suffrage, which would give the working class the majority, Gladstone deliberately calibrated his bill so that the working class would not dominate the polity.Footnote 8

Defining the Victorian Nation aims to show that the 1867 Reform Act incorporated “respectable” working-class men into the nation but excluded women and Jamaican ex-slaves. Hall's contribution demonstrates the complexities of these imperial exclusions. They were not simply a matter of the imposition of racist notions of citizenship but the outcome of struggles by disenfranchised people. Jamaica had its own assembly with admission to some men of mixed race on the basis of property, but after Governor Edward Eyre brutally suppressed a feared rebellion (actually just a riot gotten out of hand) the whites relinquished self-government rather than allow blacks to enjoy the privileges of the polity. This stimulated a controversy back in England, which fed into debates on the 1867 Reform Act. Conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle opposed giving the vote to working men, equating them with rebellious black ex-slaves. Although J. S. Mill and others demanded punishment for Eyre, in some ways the Reform Act heightened the whiteness of male citizenship, for as Gladstone emphasized, working men were “our own flesh and blood,” of the same race as the ruling class. The British state also reacted to other rebellions with concessions. For instance, as Hall points out, the Maoris posed a formidable resistance to New Zealand settlers. To pacify them, the New Zealand government granted four Maori seats in the General Assembly in 1867.Footnote 9 As Raewyn Dalziel points out in Women's Suffrage in the British Empire, however, Maori men had already been enfranchised on an equal basis with white men, but different relationships to property meant that most could not actually register to vote. Similarly, despite the alarms incited by Fenian violence, Hall points out that Irish men were still seen as part of the nation, and their franchise expanded, albeit somewhat later, because Gladstone believed that concessions must accompany coercion.

In the years after the 1867 Reform Act, the Secret Ballot Act of 1872 and the Third Reform Act of 1884–85 steadily incorporated more and more working-class men into the nation, potentially uniting all classes as the People. Yet James Vernon argues that the 1867 Reform Act and the Ballot Act of 1872 actually closed down the possibilities for women to participate in the public sphere of the hustings.Footnote 10 But Rogers's discussion of the campaign against Liberal architects of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the early 1870s forces a reconsideration of this interpretation. Feminist repealers formed alliances with working men, who defined themselves as respectable citizens protecting their wives and daughters against sexual exploitation, as McClelland points out. But despite this alliance, Rogers argues, by the 1880s feminists turned away from appealing to the People to help them gain the vote to emphasizing the separate claims of “Womanhood.” As Rogers demonstrates, feminists such as Josephine Butler did not simply rely on a notion of women's influence: they also redefined the constitutional basis of citizenship and rights both on the level of theory and practice. By emphasizing the constitutional approach, Rogers places the Contagious Diseases Act in a different trajectory from the one that sees it as derailed by social purity concerns about sexuality. She argues that Butler extended the notion of rights to cover a women's right to sexual and bodily privacy, for instance, to be free from forced medical examinations, thus changing the radical narrative of the constitution. By the 1880s and 1890s, the notion of the People begins to look less and less like a replacement for class, and more like a failed rhetorical attempt to overcome increasingly bitter divisions of gender and class.

As Rendall and many others have argued, feminists also began developing a rationale for women's vote: that they were altruistic caretakers. Of course, this could also be an expression of their class position, as some women attempted to impose middle-class values on the poor through their work as poor law guardians or school board members. But there was considerable diversity among feminists. Mariana Valverde shows that while late nineteenth-century English feminists attacked male sexual vice, Canadian feminists concentrated their ire on the drinking habits of white men. While temperance was an important justification for the suffrage, Valverde also asserts that alcohol was also a key issue for women on its own. As Rogers points out, some feminists, such as Smith, were not middle-class agents of coercive reform but integral to working-class movements. Furthermore, Laura E. Nym Mayhall reveals that by 1900, radical feminists repudiated women's special mission as a justification for the vote and instead demanded the franchise on the basis of consent: if women could not express their consent to the government by voting, they could not be considered citizens.

The 1880s and 1890s were also a time of the expansion of empire, and recent work on women's suffrage has emphasized the complicity of late nineteenth-century feminists in the imperial project. Burton continues her earlier work in a chapter in Women's Suffrage in the British Empire, revealing that Butler justified the South African War and British imperialism as a way to save black Africans from injustice, but she repudiated any possibility that they could vote. Similarly, as Judith Smart points out, Australian women gained the vote in 1902 but failed to protest the simultaneous exclusion of Aborigines from the franchise. In South Africa, some black African men had long had voting rights due to property ownership, but the government finally gave white women the vote in 1932 to guarantee white predominance in the electorate, as Pamela Scully delineates.

Ian Fletcher's chapter also shows how feminists could construct their relationship to empire through pragmatic strategies. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) first cited the Irish Land League as a precedent for their use of force and protested the government's double standard in harshly imprisoning suffragists while allowing mutinous Unionists to go free. However, when the Unionists allowed women to sign the Ulster Covenant, the WSPU made overtures to them. Other sections of the suffrage movement, however, tried to make alliances for home rule with Scottish and Irish movements.

The authors of Women's Suffrage in the British Empire also refuse the simplistic notion that all feminists were racists who imposed white imperialist ideas on non-Western women. In a chapter on the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906–11, Mansour Bonakdarian makes the point that just as some feminists drew on Orientalism to portray Iranian women as helpless and oppressed, some Iranians stereotyped all western, European women as loose and lascivious. When Iranian feminists participated in the revolution and even demanded inclusion in the vote, they were engaging in a radical, democratic, and anti-imperialist struggle. Reporting on their efforts, he argues, “some British suffragists gradually transcended simplistic constructs of two distinct categories of Eastern and Western women, developing more complex and less complacent approaches to the global ‘sisterhood of woman’” (p. 163).

Nationalist movements complicated the question of women's suffrage in other countries dominated by Britain. In an attempt to defuse nationalist movements in India and Palestine, the British imperial state persisted with obsolete traditional notions of the vote as based on interests and qualifications, rather than as a universal right. It granted a very limited suffrage on the basis of property, literacy, local, religious, or communal identifications. However, nationalist movements themselves also foundered on the dilemma of how to ensure representation for religious or communal minorities. As Ruth Abrams shows, women's suffrage became a bone of contention in the debate over whether the Jewish state should be founded on the basis of Orthodox religion or a more secular version of Zionism. For Arab Palestinian women, as Ellen Fleischman writes, the question of the vote was much less important than the effort to defend Palestine. However, Palestinian Arab women also manipulated religious tradition against the British, exploiting their fears of violating religious proscriptions about female seclusion by claiming that British oppression forced them out of their homes.

Indian feminists were divided over whether women should be granted reserved seats or simply gain the vote on the same basis as men.Footnote 11 This was part of a larger controversy: on the one hand, Muslims and dalits (formerly known as untouchables) demanded separate electorates so they would not be swamped by the Hindu majority; on the other hand, Gandhi argued that reserved seats played into the British strategy of divide and rule and set the stage for further communal tensions. British feminists took different sides on this issue. Margaret Candy traces the turn of Irish Theosophist Margaret Cousins from working for social reform to advocating for women's suffrage in India. Eleanor Rathbone, as Mrinilini Sinha shows, advocated reserved seats for women as part of her philosophy of trusteeship imperialism. Selected women could represent female interests, but she did not want feminism to be incorporated into the nationalist movement, which she opposed. Nationalist women, however, repudiated reserved seats for women. As Sinha argues, the Indian women's movement thus appropriated the notion of the universal, unmarked citizen. At the same time, this universalistic, noncommunal notion of citizenship provided “ideological cover to a hegemonic nationalism that remained vulnerable to critiques of its unspoken gender, caste, class and religious hierarchies” (p. 236).

Taken together, these books are part of a transformation of British history that reclaims ideas of class in a political, rather than Marxist point of view; that is deeply attentive to the rhetorical construction of citizenship but also acknowledges the power of social movements; and that demonstrates how race, empire, and gender complicated the construction of the nation. They also point the way toward future research. Perhaps the next step will be to apply some of the insights in Hall, McClelland, and Rendall volume to examine tensions over changing definitions of manhood in the struggles for the one-man-one-vote principle in the twentieth-century empire and its aftermath. In addition, in the introduction to Women's Suffrage in the British Empire, Fletcher, Mayhall, and Philippa Levine also suggest that “struggles for women's enfranchisement were fundamental elements in nation-building and citizenship” (p. xiv). In further work, it would be good to take this insight further by documenting how women's suffrage changed, or failed to transform, the nature of the imperial state.