ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how socialist women brought together their theory and their practice in developing their political role as women and as socialists and the ways in which they negotiated women’s identity as a collective political group. Socialist women propagandists were conscious that they were engaged in redefining what it meant to be a political woman. A deeper concern among socialist men was the fear that if men and women played an ‘equal’ part in politics, then relationships between the sexes, and in particular gender roles within the home, would be transformed. The enfranchisement of some women in 1918 prompted further discussion about the ideal characteristics of the active political woman. Socialist women drew examples from history, and from other parts of the world, to emphasise women’s potential for political activism and their willingness to engage in revolutionary and radical politics if the conditions were right.
