The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s by Christine Bolt

Author:Christine Bolt [Bolt, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317867289
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

At this point suffragists and ‘antis’ coincide, for feminism’s opponents – predictably – saw militancy as a negation of everything they revered in women. Equally predictably, the historian’s careful distinctions between degrees of militancy were not mentioned. It was simply equated with violence, lawlessness and radicalism, and presented as elitist: taken up as a fad by ‘a set of women who are always looking for “some new thing”, especially anything approved by English social leaders’. It was dismissed as counterproductive. The defeat of women’s suffrage in Michigan in 1912 was accordingly explained as a reaction by men against ‘the continual spectacle of British Sabotage’, although opponents did not fear that Michigan women ‘would become rioters and arsonists and vengeful public nuisances in imitation of their misguided, law-breaking sisters across the ocean’.93 And it was also offensive to anti-suffragists who recoiled from enthusiasm and were suspicious of those who would go to the stake for the vote, having in mind a martyr’s crown. ‘I wish I could feel so about any political measure’, was the cool judgement of the prominent journalist Ida Tarbell.94

In sum, it is apparent that their stronger cult of domesticity and greater confidence in their country’s democratic polity inclined American suffragists to cling to ladylike tactics for longer than their British sisters. In economic matters, by contrast, they were more willing than they had been to learn from Victorian activists. After all, the British had sustained the lead in this aspect of feminism since the 1850s, and by the later nineteenth century American reformers were ready to recognise the challenges posed by their country’s increased acquaintance with industrial, urban and class problems.

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