Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women's movement

Abstract

The nineteenth-century English women's movement has usually been studied in terms of its attempts to increase the access of women to the public and political spheres. This approach to the movement ignores the immense concern amongst its members with the private and domestic lives of women. Within the movement there were widely differing views as to how reform in the private sphere and in the public sphere should be integrated. This concern is most clearly evident in the many discussions of marriage which accompanied not only the campaign to reform the legal status of married women, but all the educational, suffrage and employment campaigns as well. These differences came to the fore in the early 1870s in the controversy aroused by the Contagious Diseases Acts. The split within the suffrage movement over this issue reflected differing views as to whether political rights or sexual and moral questions ought to be the primary concern of the movement.