Suffrage, Sexuality, Citizenship

Abstract The internal problems of the NLOWS were linked to evolving gender beliefs as well as to contested organizational tactics. This chapter reviews various aspects of anti-suffrage gender ideology, developed both within the NLOWS and through dialogue between suffragists and women anti-suffragists. Anti-suffrage women commented with increasing dismay upon female sexual behaviour in early 20th-century Britain, connecting suffragette militancy to various forms of sexual deviance. Feminism was attacked as a sexualized threat to social solidarity and imperial strength. However, anti-suffrage women hesitated to exaggerate links between the more insidious forms of feminism and the suffrage cause, partly because of their awareness of shared ground with many suffragists over issues of moral reform. Though a suffrage truce was never likely in the pre-war years, the anti-suffrage forward policy and related constitutional reform proposals were closely aligned to the suffragists' advocacy of more feminized forms of citizenship.