La citoyenneté des Anglaises, 1850-1914. À la conquête de l’opinion publique

Following the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the women’s suffrage campaign was forged around the slogan “on the same terms as men”. The suffrage, though restricted at the time to men, was gradually extended to include some workers (1867), farm workers who were heads of households (1885) and finally all men, with the advent of universal male suffrage in 1918. In 1884, those wives who now had control over their own bodies, joined single women in demanding representation and the right to vote at local and national level. Citing their irrefutable status as citizens in their own right, British women opposed and denounced the clear injustice of biological arguments used to justify political inequality. In calling for social and political reform based on the equality of the sexes, such women asserted both their status as political subjects and their place in history. In so doing, they called on the state to provide financial assistance to poorer pregnant women and to take action in the struggle against wage inequality and the doctrine of “separate spheres”. Women’s history in the 1970s, and gender history in the 1980s, precipitated the emergence of new approaches in the vast majority of academic fields. Gender inequalities – linked to themes such as masculinities, consent or sexual violence – are thus constitutive of history.