Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage, and: The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (review)

In these two books, Alan S. Kahan and Laura E. Nym Mayhall provide stimulating accounts of the history of franchise reform. Kahan compares the language of exclusion used by nineteenth-century liberals in Britain, France, and Germany to justify only gradual, limited extensions of the right to vote. Mayhall's canvas is smaller, exploring in considerable detail aspects of the "militancy" of the twentieth-century women's suffrage movement in Britain in terms of its cultural and historical meanings.

Kahan's discussion starts from a careful examination of the term "liberalism" and takes note of the differing political cultures in each of his selected cases. His analysis of liberalism emphasises its inner contradictions: its rejection of revolutionary methods and oscillation between radical change and resistance to change; its fear of despotism both from above and from below, an attitude that resulted in constant fighting on two fronts; its rejection of hierarchy but denial of natural rights. Kahan brackets out discussion of liberalism as the advocacy of civil rights and the autonomy of the individual, to focus on its political language and culture. His account analyses the liberal "discourse of capacity" (6) in relation to franchise reform and how this differed over time and in particular political contexts. He also breaks his discussion up chronologically, arguing for three distinct periods in the history of liberalism and the extension of the suffrage: 1830–1847, 1848–1865, 1866–1885.

Liberal discourse, according to Kahan, determined the capacity for the vote in two ways: the "individualist" conception that based a qualification for the franchise upon moral characteristics; and the "social representation" argument that focused on notions of class and interest (12). Whereas the individualist perspective looked for the quality of "independence" (24), deriving variously from property and education, the second approach looked for increased capacity among social groups to exercise the franchise, again often identified in terms of property or education. Kahan argues that the individualist position came closest to the "democratic" discourse of rights (34) and advocacy of universal suffrage, ultimately leading to the merging of liberal notions of political freedom with the social democratic vision. Each form of argument came to the fore at different periods in Britain, France, and Germany; English liberalism survived longest as a distinct political force because of its capacity to renew the language of capacity by making it increasingly inclusive.

Advocacy for women's suffrage has been discussed almost entirely in terms of the history of liberalism. Kahan's study pays scant attention to this question, however, presumably because he sees it as part and parcel of liberal efforts to expand the franchise while denying the capacity to vote in large categories of people. Yet the divisions and conflicts among liberals on the women's suffrage question suggest it would have benefitted from more extensive consideration and made this a still more valuable study.

Historians of the women's suffrage movement in Britain have used the term "liberal" for a range of different purposes and with varying degrees of precision. The term can, therefore, be slippery territory for suffrage historians. Mayhall, for example, uses this label to distinguish those "liberal" suffragists who were not "militant" from those who were (28), whom she generally terms "suffragettes" (the diminutive coined by a tabloid newspaper of the day and taken up and adopted by the Women's Social and Political Union [WSPU] to distinguish itself as a new force in the British movement). A similar imprecision in language is evident in Mayhall's occasional conflation of "citizenship" and suffrage (29); many suffragists, both militant and constitutionalist, saw women as voteless citizens, not simply as aspirants to citizenship. To...