The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley

Author:Linda Colley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Why Were Women Left Out?

Russell Elliott’s willingness to extend political rights to female Pitcairners in 1838 – positively to incorporate them within the terms of his constitution – inevitably raises the question of why it was that the vast majority of other constitutions drafted before the early twentieth century confined active citizenship only to men. The answers may seem already abundantly clear and straightforward.

In multiple – though not all – cultures, a woman’s legal identity had traditionally been subsumed in that of her husband and/or other close male relations. The position set out in the ancient Hindu law code, the Manusmriti, that a woman should ideally pass from the authority of a father to that of a husband, or if necessary to that of a son or brother, was broadly echoed by commentators from many other legal and cultural backgrounds, including most practitioners of the European Enlightenment. Marriage, conceded the German philosopher Christian Wolff in the 1750s, was an ‘association based on equality’. Nonetheless, he went on, it represented a ‘pact of submission’, by which a woman effectively accepted subjugation to her husband.11 Defined in this fashion as dependent beings, it was difficult for women to lay claim to, or even to imagine, an autonomous political identity for themselves. Unless, that is, they happened to be reigning monarchs or chieftains in polities which allowed females to assume these roles; or if they derived some political heft from possession of extensive property, or through close proximity to a powerful man.

All that said, the spread of the new political technology made a difference to the treatment of women and, in some ways and in many places, it made things worse. In the 1790s, barely a decade after Massachusetts had issued an ambitious state constitution enfranchising every modestly incomed ‘male inhabitant of twenty-one years of age and upwards’, its leading masonic lodge published a version of one of this period’s most popular Freemasons’ songs, both a skit on and an affirmation of a vital episode in the Book of Genesis:

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