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  • The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women and Civic Life in Scotland, c. 1870-1914, and: The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928
  • Eileen Janes Yeo (bio)
The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women and Civic Life in Scotland, c. 1870-1914, by Megan Smitley; pp. ix + 178. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009, £55.00, $79.95.
The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928, by Ryland Wallace; pp. xii + 338. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009, £48.00, $65.00.

These timely studies about Scotland and Wales focus on women's suffrage campaigns and on women more generally in the public sphere. Ryland Wallace aims to plug what he sees [End Page 321] as a gap in suffrage historiography by giving a comprehensive account of the women's suffrage movement in Wales. Megan Smitley is more interested in exploring the concept of a feminine public sphere by considering the range of public associations in which Scottish middle-class women were active in creating pressure for female suffrage. Both works produce useful insights and suggest agendas for work that still needs to be done.

Wallace takes a more conventional view of suffrage organisations. His carefully researched book devotes chronological chapters to the Victorian suffrage campaign, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU, called the militants); then the more democratic breakaway, the Women's Freedom League (also considered militant); the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS, the constitutionalists); and the postwar campaign for equal women's suffrage. Smitley ranges more widely and explores an interconnected cluster of movements beyond the obvious WSPU and NUWSS, especially the British Women's Temperance Association, the Scottish Christian Union, and the Scottish Women's Liberal Federation. Indeed she extends even further and explores Anglophone connections with temperance organisations in what were originally white settler colonies, especially New Zealand and the United States.

Where Wallace tracks Welsh activity in relation to the national movement chronology, Smitley is more concerned with women's motivation for and validation of their public activity and proposes their idea of citizenship as the feminine part of a middle-class civic identity. Wallace's most detailed examination of attitudes and arguments occurs paradoxically in the chapter on "The Opposition to Women's Suffrage," in which he underlines the fear of women's suffrage as a revolutionary threat to family life. Smitley spotlights the women's religious justification of their public activity as a call from God to the work, which would have been echoed in Wales. Also central was the idea of complementarity, which held that women had a distinctly feminine contribution to make to public life, mainly their mothering qualities, without which public service would be incomplete.

Smitley's concept of a feminine public sphere is an original contribution to the growing body of work that challenges the ideology of separate spheres sharply divided by gender. Although the involvement of women in public action together with their self-representation has been highlighted before, Smitley makes space for women within the public culture of the civic elite, which urban historians, drawing on the early ideas of Jürgen Habermas, have depicted as male territory. The concept of a feminine public sphere embracing women's participation in philanthropic associations, reforming societies, and local government bodies, is fruitful and could also have been explored in Wales.

The concept of a feminine public sphere could be further developed in at least two ways. In regard to Scotland, it would be good to know more about the ways in which gender divisions both persisted and were eroded in relations between the feminine and masculine public spheres. The Liberal Party is an interesting case in point. In Scotland, the Women's Liberal Federation was more consistently committed to women's suffrage than in England, but the men were not especially sympathetic. They acknowledged the place of women in formal politics but wanted to confine that role to unpaid election work such as canvassing. The number of married couples in the Welsh elite who figured in the women's suffrage campaign is striking and would also be interesting to study more closely in terms of the sexual...

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