Sex And Suffrage In Britain 1860 - 1914

Susan Kent analyses the issues and concerns about sexuality that permeated women's suffrage in Britain from its inception in the 1860s right up to 1914. Although other historians have viewed the suffrage movement as aimed at exclusively political ends, she argues that such a categorization ignores many of the most compelling reasons why thousands of respectable middle and upper class women risked ostracism, abuse and even physical harm in the pursuit of the right to vote and why their efforts met with such intense opposition.

To challenge the dominant discourse on sexuality, Kent argues, the suffragists created their own discourse of resistance. Physicians and scientists had given scientific' validation to the view of a woman as the Sex', an identity that justified the continued disenfranchisement of women and rendered them, the suffragists believed, vulnerable to sexual depredations and abuse by men.

In conjunction with other feminist demands for reform, suffragists sought the vote in order to overturn the cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity that confined them in a separate sphere' and determined their powerlessness in both public and private worlds.