Moving from the Vote into Citizenship: Crafting Chinese Women’s Political Citizenship (original) (raw)
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Opposition to Women's Suffrage in China
Perspective (Muenster: LIT, 2005). This essay explores the opposition faced by the women's suffrage movement in China to their campaign to have equal participation in parliamentary politics for both men and women -funü canzheng yundong. The essay explains the comparative rapidity of the women's suffrage victories in China -albeit fragmented and patchy in coverage -as resulting in part from the ineffectiveness of the anti-suffrage lobbyists. While the success of the campaigns is primarily due to the strategic perseverance of the women's suffrage activists, it is also important to consider the strength of the opposition the women faced in any analysis of the comparative success of their movement to appreciate its full historical significance. Brian Harrison argues that the study of anti-suffragism places the suffrage campaigns "firmly into context" (Harrison 1978:14). Moreover, in her 1994 article on the state of academic research on women's suffrage, Carole Pateman raised the concern that little was known about struggles for suffrage outside of the Western world. She also pointed out that there was equally little known about the nature of the opposition to women's suffrage across cultures (Pateman 1994:346). How does a specific cultural and historical context affect the nature of the public debates about women's participation in politics? This essay aims to contribute to what will no doubt be the ongoing and lengthy procedure of filling this gap.
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In 1918, suffragists lamented that the global Spanish flu pandemic had complicated their efforts to get the Nineteenth Amendment through Congress. "Everything conspires against woman suffrage. Now it is the influenza," one suffragist told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. 1 After the Senate defeated the amendment by just two votes that fall, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), vowed to never again watch another vote. Days later, she herself contracted influenza. Her friend and biographer Mary Gray Peck described Catt as "chained to bed like St. Lawrence to the gridiron." 2 But not even the flu could keep Catt from exercising the right she had devoted her life to securing. In November, she dragged herself from her sickbed to cast her very first ballot in her home state of New York, which had enfranchised women in 1917. Two years later, she would mark the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment by voting in her first presidential election. One hundred years on, another pandemic has hampered commemorations of the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, the anniversary has compelled scholars to revisit familiar questions and ask new ones about the history of women's suffrage and the legacies of the Nineteenth Amendment. What did it mean in a country so deeply divided by gender, race, class, region, ethnicity, and the significance of citizenship? How did women's campaigns for the vote and the eventual passage of the amendment impact ongoing struggles for universal suffrage, racial equality, and women's rights? How were efforts to define American citizenship influenced by suffragists? How did Indigenous women engage those conversations in their advocacy for tribal sovereignty? How did changing ideas about gender and sex, derived from new scientific thinking about brains and bodies, influence the debates about female autonomy? How did female anti-suffrage activists define and engage in politics? Perhaps most significantly, what new sources-beyond those generated by the mainstream, whitedominated suffrage groups-can we mine to tell a more complete and nuanced history of suffrage and women's rights more broadly? This special issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era marks the suffrage centennial by highlighting previously untold stories, new digital archives, and an expanded timeline. Notions of race, gender, sexuality, suffrage, and citizenship rights were central to multiple political debates and movements. The essays in this issue destabilize the idea that the movement for women's suffrage was singularly focused on the
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From 1904 to 1914, the British debate on women's suffrage was at its height. Suffragism has been the subject of numerous studies, however, few have paid attention to its opponent, "antisuffragism". This article focuses on antisuffragists' speeches, pamphlets and books to examine their uses of "democracy" and grasp the conceptual struggles at play. Most "Antis" painted women's suffrage as a step towards a degenerate democratic society. However, more surprisingly, some also mobilised the democratic vocabulary positively, as a reason to disallow women the vote. Several authors considered that "democracy" rested on the capacity of the majority to impose its decisions through physical force-thus rendering a government elected by women impotent. Politicians also opposed granting women suffrage on a censorial basis since it went against the "democratic spirit of the time". These findings demonstrate the increased importance of "democracy" in Britain and how a "conservative subversion" of the concept was attempted.
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