Women were not allowed to cast their vote or choose their representatives in ancient Greece and Republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was extended, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women's voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States; but these countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis.1 The women remained without the right of casting a vote for centuries and they had been facing male chauvinism, however, in the early nineteenth century, women were provoked for their rights and a historical struggle for getting their equal rights started. In the late 19th century they succeeded to get some of them, but full rights were only given to women in the early twentieth century in USA and United Kingdom.
A term citizenship has also been used to indicate such rights that women have been demanding for a long time. According to Mann Michael:
In contemporary Britain, the term citizenship has been used to indicate a populist notion of fairness and justice for all Britains, as in the development of Citizens Charters. The intellectual focus of British social science debate on the topic has often been concerned with the extent to which class restricts the effective access to citizenship.2
The debate on citizenship is concerned with the relationship of class to social mixing and omits gender. The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to end with valid contracts, and the right to justice. As far as the political element is concerned, it is meant that the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority. The corresponding institutions are parliament and councils of local government and the social element is considered the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social custom and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards currently in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services.3
However, women in Britain before 1928 and in the US until 1920 did not have many of the features of either civil or political citizenship. Married women lacked the right to live anywhere other than where their husbands insisted. Married women, until late in the nineteenth century, did not have “the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts”, losing this right on marriage. Married women did not have “the right to justice” in that they did not have the right to be free from the physical coercion of their husband. Women certainly did not have political citizenship either, since the vote was only granted to women in stages in 1918 and 1928. Women did not have the civil right to work at the occupation of their choice since there were so many restrictions on the forms of employment open to women, ranging from the marriage bar in many white-collar employments to lack of access to skilled manual labour since they were denied access to apprenticeships.4
Citizenship, especially the political aspect of this, has historically been bound up with participation in the public sphere. European women have historically been structured out of the public by the restrictions on their paid employment, restrictions on speaking in public, threats of violence if unaccompanied in public spaces, and their confinement to domestic duties.5 This implies that the citizenship project is as open to women as it is to men, if certain overt forms of discrimination are removed. It implies, further, that there is a single model of citizenship to which women can aspire alongside men, that is, a certain modernist universalism about the citizenship project. But, this notion of a single model of citizenship has been brought into doubt by some recent feminist work.6
Turning to social citizenship, Lister suggests that the structure of payment of these benefits is detrimental to women because it is predicated on married women's dependence. Three things are very important to secure the women social citizenship. Firstly, a change to individual rather than household entitlement. Secondly, a change so that the right to benefit is not dependent upon contributions since that would be affected by labour market position where women are disadvantaged. The one example of this is rather small and currently susceptible child benefit. Thirdly, she suggests that a coherent childcare policy is needed to facilitate women’s participation in the labour market.7
Marshall describes civil citizenship as being related to individual freedom -- including liberty of the person, freedom of speech, the right to own property, and the right to justice.8 Yet these are rights which most women did not obtain until after political citizenship, and some, such as the right to justice from male violence, are still not fully secured.9 For most social theorists social citizenship is bound up with the provision of welfare, with the provision of an infrastructure which enables people to be guaranteed a minimum of provision of necessities.
The actual struggle for women’s rights was started in the middle of the nineteenth century and it has been one of the most significant forces for democratic changes in the modern history. Feminism the conscious desire for equality between the sexes was first originated in the countries of the west and particularly in the industrialised countries but later on it was introduced to almost all the countries of the world. Woman suffrage, the centrepiece of women’s rights has been a self-consciously international and political movement. The term women rights entered the vocabulary in 1792 with the publication of Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The earliest known feminist treatise, Vindication was a response to the declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), the central document of the French Revolution, which had failed to address women’s inequality.10 With the new economic order, paid work for the emerging middle class moved outside the home and into factories, offices, and shops. Accompanying and ing this differentiation between public and private worlds was a new ideology about women, variously called the “cult of true womanhood,” the “cult of domesticity,” or the “ideology of separate spheres.” Woman, it was argued and should be pious, pure, maternal, domestic, passionless, and submissive. The middle class, intent upon distinguishing itself from society’s “lower orders” and retaining its values in the face of rampant industrialization and urbanization, did so by promoting notions of feminine respectability and moral superiority. If men were creating an amoral political and economic order (and many believed they were), women would embody religiosity and virtue.
For much of the 19th century, the actual struggle for women’s rights remained largely the province of socialists. However, women suffrage challenged the ideology of separate spheres at its core because voting was understood as a distinctly masculine privilege and prerogative. As women left the home to reshape and reform society, however, they came to understand that the vote would provide them with the best means of reforming society. Women’s organizations in many countries made the fight for suffrage their most fundamental demand because they saw it as the defining feature of full citizenship. The philosophy underlying women’s suffrage was the belief in “natural rights”. Woman suffrage claimed for women the right to govern themselves and choose their own representatives. It asserted that women should enjoy individual rights of self-government, rather than relying on indirect civic participation as the mothers, sisters, or daughters of male voters.
Women’s enfranchisement took many decades to achieve because women had to persuade a male electorate to grant them the vote. Many men and some women believed that women were not suited by circumstance or temperament for the vote. Western political philosophers insisted that a voter had to be independent, unswayed by appeals from employers, landlords, or an educated elite. Women by nature were believed to be dependent on men and subordinate to them. Many thought women could not be trusted to exercise the independence of thought necessary for choosing political leaders responsibly. It was also believed that women’s place was in the home, caring for husband and children. Hence, entry of women into political life inadvertently lead to some reservations of a potentially disruptive family unit.
American women were the first in the world to voice organized demands for the vote. Abolitionist activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with several other women friends, convened a meeting in Stanton's hometown of Seneca Falls, N.Y., “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” At the convention, held on July 19-20, 1848, Stanton read her “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions”, and the convention debated and approved a series of resolutions designed to win equality for women. The most controversial, included at Stanton’s insistence, stated that “it is the duty of the women in this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the franchise.”11
To be continued...