Essay Series 6.3: Women gained some human rights during the 1800s in some Western countries.

Prior to writing this essay, I didn’t realize how intense the battles for women’s human rights were and how long these battles lasted. Assumptions about women being inferior to men held advocates back. For example, during the 1800s, people who opposed women’s suffrage (having the right to vote) did so, in part, because they believed women lacked the decision-making capacity to vote. Another belief was that women lived in a permanently child-like state. Some people thought women would grow beards if they voted.⁴⁴⁸

Evolution of Women’s Rights in Western Societies

By the mid-1800s, women were getting some freedoms like being able to get a divorce, gaining access to some professions, escaping their father’s control, suing for custody of their children, owning property, and entering into contracts.⁴⁴⁹ How much and what types of freedoms women had varied by country and by state within the United States.

Women in Western societies gained the vote in three phases. At the local level in the 1860s, some women gained the vote in Bohemia (part of the present-day Czech Republic), Sweden, Russia, and the State of New South Wales in Australia, as well as in Great Britain and Ireland. These women often got the vote in recognition of their domestic competence. In the second phase, by the late 1800s, more women gained the vote in parts of the western United States and in English colonies. This happened via women’s political action, the suffrage movement in Britain, and because the territories were willing to experiment. The third phase occurred in the early 1900s as most countries in Europe and North America gave women the right to vote by 1920. Exceptions were full voting rights coming to women in Great Britain in 1928, France in 1944, and Switzerland in 1971.⁴⁵⁰

Suffrage in Britain

Mary Wollstonecraft was a philosopher who had a profound effect on struggles for women’s rights. Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman asserted that differences between women and men were due to the differing opportunities they had. Men were educated with the idea that they would make something of themselves in the larger world, while most women didn’t receive more than an education related to domestic tasks. Wollstonecraft demanded that women get as much education as men and no longer be treated as tame, domestic animals.⁴⁵¹ This book was key to some of the early thinking related to women’s suffrage in the 1800s.⁴⁵²

In Britain, the suffrage movement used two primary advocacy methods in the early 1900s. One involved “suffragists” trying to persuade men and women that women were capable of voting. Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies had 50,000 members in 1913 and used legal political tactics to advocate for the vote.

The other method was to use aggressive protests to push for women’s right to vote. Emmeline Pankhurst was a suffragette who formed the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 to fight for women’s voting rights. This Union, which had about 2,000 members in 1913, disrupted political party meetings and Parliament, held demonstrations, smashed shopfront windows, purposefully got arrested, went on hunger strikes, bombed churches, and burned the country homes of rich people. Other targets were banks and post offices. About 1,000 suffragettes were in prison by 1913, and many of them went on hunger strikes. Jailers responded by force-feeding them through tubes. This form of torture disabled many women, ruptured their digestive systems, and eventually led to death for some.⁴⁵³ The men’s power structure resorted to oppression, torture, and the death of women’s rights advocates.

Reflections

Across the world, women’s progress toward gaining full human rights, including the right to vote, has moved at a glacial pace. Women began to make some gains in the early 1800s related to education, property, divorce, and custody of their children. However, it wasn’t until about 100 years later in 1920 that women gained voting rights in the United States.

None of these achievements could have occurred without eventually winning the support of enough men within the existing power structures. Some men are persuadable when it comes to women gaining certain rights. Men’s participation is critical to women gaining full human rights and to helping prevent backlash.

Why are some men persuadable? How can women and men work together at the state, local, and national levels to ensure that women have full human rights?