Emotion and Space in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH)

Lucy McCormick recently completed a summer internship at the IHR, in which she focused on representations of social class in the Bibliography of British and Irish History. In this blog, she explores how anti-suffragists weaponised emotion in relation to politicised spaces in mid-Victorian Britain – and how suffragists tactfully renegotiated such links between emotion, space, and gender.

Separate spheres

The doctrine of the ‘separate spheres’ – women’s confinement in the home while men freely roamed the public world – is entrenched in popular imaginings of Victorian life. Historians have long debated the usefulness and accuracy of this gendering of space in the context of the suffrage movement, but the emotional dimension of space has received less attention. Mid-Victorian suffragists deployed a range of arguments to dissolve spatialised emotional norms which denied women access to public arenas of politics. Political spaces prescribed, but did not determine, gendered ideals of emotional experience and expression. Suffragists were embroiled in reflexive and dynamic relationships with the spaces they occupied, enabling them to play with the plasticity of the links between space, femininity, and emotion. In so doing they multiplied the available ways for women to perform their gender in political spaces. They collectively chipped away at the monolithic rationalisation for women’s exclusion from those spaces and the electorate – merely that they were too emotional.

The Ballot Act, 1872

The 1872 Ballot Act disbanded the system of hustings at elections. Gathered at town halls or marketplaces, men had hitherto raised their hands or verbally declared their vote. Often accompanied by drunkenness and violence, many politicians and voters alike deemed hustings incompatible with their ideals of an orderly and rational electoral system. The Act introduced the secret ballot, rendering the polling booth an enclosed space in which voters marked their ballots privately.

The polling booth

In 1872, the Women’s Suffrage Journal recognised that ‘[t]he question of the Ballot has been intimately concerned with that of the extension of the suffrage’.[1] Indeed, anti-suffragists had long contested women’s enfranchisement on the basis of raucous electoral procedure, exploiting the contemporary ‘anxiety’, expressed in The Times, ‘that women shall not be dragged “from their drawing rooms” to the polling-booths’.[2] In an 1871 parliamentary debate, Sir Alexander Beresford Hope MP warned against ‘forcing [women] into the arena of political excitement, where they would be exposed to the animosities, the bickerings, and the resentments which are so unhappily inherent in the tough work of electioneering’.[3] Beresford Hope’s description of ‘the arena of political excitement’ was laden with vivid emotional language, through which he asserted that casting a vote would prove pernicious to feminine emotional virtues.

Playing with the spatial metaphors her adversaries used, suffragist and educationalist Maria Grey (1816-1906) disputed that women’s emotional characters were fixed and discordant with ‘the animosities, the bickerings, and the resentments’ of the male-dominated public sphere.[4] If women were denied the franchise because they lacked ‘public spirit’, Grey prescribed a change in ‘stand-point from the house, or street, or parish which shuts you in, to one whence a wider horizon becomes visible’ as ‘the best cure for narrowness of views’. In her 1870 lecture, Grey declared that emotional responses were not fixed to a particular gender, nor did spaces determine emotional experiences; instead, women’s admission to political spaces would expand their emotional repertoires.

This was not the only response suffragists offered to the changing emotional valences of the polling booth. ‘[A] measure which must exercise a powerful influence on the question of the removal of the electoral disabilities of women,’[5] an 1873 meeting of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS) illustrates how the Act incited a proliferation of imaginings of space to justify women’s enfranchisement. Liberal MP Denis Heron Caulfield framed the Act as a measure which eradicated ‘a great deal of the excitement and annoyance… which of old discountenanced women from going to the polling booth’.[6] Whereas Maria Grey depicted women’s emotional profiles as malleable to the spaces they occupied, Heron Caulfield argued that women’s emotional dispositions were fixed but congruous with the reformed polling booth.

Alternatively, Lady Anna Gore-Langton (1820-79) offered women’s withdrawal from public space to render women’s suffrage more palatable: ‘if men dislike seeing their faces at the polling booth, why not allow women voting papers, such as are used at the University elections; they can be sent by post.’[7] Leader of the Manchester branch of the NSWS, Lydia Becker (1827-90) reiterated that women could go to polling booths without necessarily being seen: ‘Any woman could go and give her vote under the Ballot Act with no more publicity than going to a place of amusement’.[8] Gore-Langton and Becker implied that it was not women’s but rather men’s emotional responses to a female presence in the polling booth which precluded women’s access.

Gore-Langton and Backer shared Maria Grey’s understanding of a reflexive, recursive, and mutable relationship between space and emotion. Becker contended that women had already acclimatised to the emotional norms of public spaces: any objection to ‘involv[ing] women in considerable publicity and turmoil… was done away with by the granting of the School Board Franchise’ because they were ‘already involved… in the excitement of political discussion’.[9] A member of the Manchester School Board herself, Becker knew from personal experience that women already thrived in the ‘turmoil’ and ‘excitement’ of political spaces.

Emotional heterogeneity

Suffragists deployed a range of emotion-based arguments, some of which contradicted one another. This need not be interpreted as a fragmented ideology but can instead be understood as a powerful representation of the emotional heterogeneity of the women who sought the franchise. Anti-suffrage rhetoric depicted men as dynamic individuals with rich interior lives, and women as less emotionally complex and thus more predictable. On this premise, anti-suffragists asserted that women would ‘vote according to their feelings’,[10] rationalising their silencing of women’s political opinions. By conceptualising the link between emotion and space in multiple ways, suffragists exemplified the emotional agency and political acuity their opponents denied them.

BBIH

The Bibliography of British and Irish History is a fantastic resource to learn more about suffrage and emotion. It’s a good idea to begin with the BBIH online reading lists on women’s history and the history of emotions, as these should provide some useful historiographical context. The BBIH emotions reading list, in particular, has been responded to by leading academics in the history of emotions (Professor Claire Langhamer and Dr Sarah Collins).

Searching each topic in isolation may help to provide a broader understanding, before delving into the details. Searching for ‘women’s suffrage’ in the subject tree produces 1,018 results; if narrowed down to my period of interest (1850 to 1880), this falls to 378. A separate search identifying all records in the ‘emotions and mental states’ subject yields 3,150 results; if I add the subject of ‘women’ to the search criteria, this reduces to 594 (still too many to read, but adding multiple criteria is a helpful step towards more specific results). Using the subject tree in BBIH can be very useful to navigate the existing scholarship on an unfamiliar topic, but it may omit results that are relevant to your precise research interests because the BBIH subject tree was introduced in 1992. Using ‘search anywhere’ broadens the search remit to catch those more subtle references or older publisher works included in BBIH. It is therefore worth trying several searches using different search terms and combinations of criteria to find the most relevant literature.

BBIH also facilitates research at the interstices of ostensibly distinct topics, approaches, and methodologies. Typing ‘suffrage’ and ‘emotions’ into the ‘search anywhere’ field yields sixteen results, each of which has been carefully catalogued to ensure it meets at this intersection. All except two of these results have been published in the last five years, illustrating a recent upsurge in interest in the emotional history of the suffrage movement. Sharon Crozier-De Rosa’s chapter on ‘Emotions and empire in suffrage and anti-suffrage politics: Britain, Ireland and Australia in the early twentieth century’ offers an impressively broad scale of analysis, whereas Cherish Watton’s article on ‘Suffrage scrapbooks and emotional histories of women’s activism’ explores this topic through a detailed analysis of material artefacts. Ana Stevenson’s article, ‘Screening women’s history in the film Suffragette (2015): between intersectional feminist activism and historical memory’ illuminates the emotional resonances of historical memory of the suffragettes and, in ‘Reparative Remembrance: Feminist Mobilizations of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Sylvia Pankhurst’, Clara Vlessing reflects on the politics of feelings of identification with prominent suffragists.

NOTES

[1] ‘One of the Most Noteworthy Events in the Political World during the past Month Is Undoubtedly the ….’, Women’s Suffrage Journal, August 1, 1872, Women’s Studies Archive (accessed September 4, 2024). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/IEGVDE549070527/GDCS?u=bham_uk&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=2001224b.

[2] ‘Report of a public meeting,’ April 1873, London, 13,Women’s Suffrage Pamphlets, LSE Women’s Library.

[3] Julia Wedgwood, The Political Claims of Women (London: W. Wilfred Head, 1873), 9, Women’s Suffrage Pamphlets, LSE Women’s Library.

[4] Mrs. William Grey, Is the exercise of the suffrage unfeminine? (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1870), 5-6, Women’s Suffrage Pamphlets, LSE Women’s Library.

[5] ‘One of the Most Noteworthy Events in the Political World during the past Month Is Undoubtedly the ….’.

[6] ‘Report of a public meeting’, 13.

[7] ‘Report of a public meeting’, 8.

[8] ‘Report of a public meeting’, 8.

[9] ‘Report of a public meeting’, 8.

[10] Arabella Shore, The Present Aspect of Women’s Suffrage Considered (Taplow, Maidenhead: Orchard Poyle, 1877), 23, Cavendish-Bentnick Pamphlets and Leaflets, LSE Women’s Library.

Banner image: Nineteenth-century hustings in Covent Garden, Wikicommons

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