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Ginger Frost, Ben Griffin. The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Struggle for Women's Rights., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1601–1602, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1601
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This book is a reassessment of the struggle for women's rights, based on an analysis of parliamentary debates primarily on three subjects: married women's property acts, child custody, and women's suffrage. Ben Griffin demonstrates that many MPs split their votes, supporting some measures but not others, or changing their votes over time. Thus, most men's views of women's rights were complex and not based solely on assumptions about “women's natures.” Indeed, the author critiques previous works for studying women's rights campaigns in isolation from broader political and religious trends. Griffin argues, instead, that the history of women's suffrage must be integrated with ideologies of domesticity, masculinity, and political theory. Only then can historians understand both the opposition to women's rights and the slow collapse of that opposition in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The first part of the book analyzes men's arguments over women's rights in the context of gender, class, and religion. One of the strongest reasons for men's opposition to women's suffrage was that Victorian domestic ideology valued harmony between spouses, and most men believed this could only happen if women submitted to their husbands. These beliefs got strong support from Christianity's emphasis on wifely obedience and selflessness. (Only the most radical MPs agreed with J. S. Mill, whose influence Griffin believes has been overstated.) Laws that indicated a difference in interest between husbands and wives rarely passed, as neither Liberals nor Conservatives voted for them. These gender concerns interacted with class issues. If a measure threatened upper-class men's control of their households, such as the Guardianship of Infants Bill (1886), the majority voted against it until it was heavily revised. If a measure could position itself as a way to control working-class husbands, such as the married-women's property acts, it might pass. By the 1880s, much of this ideology faced strong challenges. Feminist critiques of male sexuality specifically blamed the upper classes, and the divorce court revealed that not all men used their power rationally. In addition, religious arguments were undermined by liberal interpretation of scripture. These factors contributed to the rising support for separate rights for women at the end of the century.
