Women resisting the vote: a case of anti feminism?

Abstract

The resistance of women to the vote is often regarded as a form of anti-feminism, particularly when it has its roots in an attachment to gender roles. However, the arguments of the women of the Radical Right who opposed the franchise at the beginning of the twentieth century not only contributed to the public debate on woman's role in society but also unmistakably evoked some of the teachings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which, far from challenging the patriarchal ideology of the separate spheres, celebrated domestic virtues and invited the ‘Sex’ to regard the private world as its natural preserve. By appropriating a Wollstonecraftian kind of citizenship, based on the belief that woman's natural sphere was the home and maternity her true vocation, the Antis emerge paradoxically in the history of the cause more as the heiresses of the mother of feminism herself than as her fundamental opponents.