I t is difficult to imagine a richer subject for a comparative history of democracy than the enfranchisement of women. Indeed, extending over more than a century and including most nations of the globe, the cause of woman suffrage has been one of the great democratic forces in human history. Whereas manhood suffrage, for instance, or the breaking of the political colour bar, have occurred more erratically, with limited links between national experiences, woman suffrage has been a self-consciously transnational popular political movement.
As such, it resembles nothing so much as international socialism. This is especially true in the Third World, where enfranchisement, measured by numbers of countries in which women vote, has actually been accelerating since the s. One factor that has discouraged scholarship, especially from a left perspective, is the assumption that the enfranchisement of women has been, on balance, a conservative development.
This notion, which predates not only the actual enfranchisement of women but even the heyday of the woman-suffrage movement itself, footnote 1 has left, right, and even feminist versions. However, all are based more on prejudice than serious analysis. However, inasmuch as the enfranchisement of women was so long delayed or, as we might say, so fiercely resisted , its achievement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century coincided with and participated in the decline and exhaustion of liberalism.
George Dangerfield titles his history of England in this period, in which the woman-suffrage movement plays a major part, The Strange Death of Liberal England, β In Germany, he contends, woman suffrage was deliberately adopted as a tool against the upsurge in proletarian political challenges.
A slightly modified version of this interpretation acknowledges that socialists advocated woman suffrage but emphasizes the irreconcilable conflict between the bourgeois woman-suffrage movement and proletarian socialism, particularly in the β heyday of both.
