Gender and Suffrage Politics: New Approaches to the History of Women's Political Emancipation

Woman suffrage has been a prominent theme of women's history for over four decades. One might ask what can possibly still be written on the subject. As the publications reviewed here illustrate, there are a number of aspects to investigate which open up new questions. British suffrage historians in particular have introduced innovative perspectives influenced by the general methodological changes in the field of history. Among these changes are biographical approaches to ordinary suffragists and suffragettes¹ and shifts both towards cultural history² and, as will be taken up here later, Empire from a postcolonial viewpoint. Analyses of American and British developments still dominate the field, and will do so as well in this review essay. Let me therefore first take up a study of a very different geographical region, China.

Before sinologist Louise Edwards published her research,³ we were only able to catch glimpses of women's suffrage in China through the lens of contemporary "Western" suffragists, who generally viewed the country as uncivilized and its women as oppressed.⁴ In the historiographical survey introducing her book, Gender, Politics and Democracy, Edwards explains why the campaign of Chinese suffragists has been underexposed arguing that the suffrage movement was perceived as a "bourgeois" affair, especially in the People's Republic of China. Edwards' six-chapter book is organized chronologically and relies upon newspapers and journals as sources. Edwards focuses on the period between 1898 and the beginning of the Communist era in 1948 and embeds suffrage history within the larger political context of the time.

In the imperial era, suffragists who came from a privileged educated elite and even participated in military struggles conceived of a concept of the independent (educated) woman citizen who demanded full equality in the desired democratic republic. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, they founded the first major women's suffrage society and were successful in enshrining the right to vote in provincial constitutions, 1919–1923. Throughout this period, they created "a collective notion of women's unity of disadvantage" vis-à-vis men (104). Also, awareness of class came to the fore and the movement began to include both middle-class and working-class women. While the two major political parties, the Communists and the Nationalists, supported equality between men and women in the second half of the 1920s, women activists nevertheless had to make sure that women's rights were not marginalized. Under Nationalist Party rule (1927–1936), constitutional change expanded legal rights for women. However, the draft of a national constitution which included women's equal rights was not ratified, due to the Japanese invasion and civil war from 1936–1948. Nonetheless, in this period women remained active and united in their demand for a minimum quota of ten percent women in politics which, they argued, was necessary due to...