ABSTRACT
For most of the period covered by this book women were excluded from the formal world of politics, that is party politics and parliament. It is therefore necessary, if we wish to seek out women’s political activity in the past, to take a wider definition of the word ‘politics’. We have to extend ‘politics’ and ‘political activity’ to embrace any challenge to authority (or, more rarely, public endorsement of it) on whatever grounds. When poor women rioted in the late eighteenth century because they could not afford to feed their families, that was political action, and when middle-class women joined societies from the 1820s onwards to ban Negro slavery in Britain and the United States, on religious and moral grounds, that was political action. Similarly, campaigns organized around feminist demands, in the nineteenth century or in the present, should be squarely located under the heading politics. Clearly, when women campaigned for the vote that was political because they sought access to the male world of politics, but equally, nineteenth-century campaigns for higher education for women or for reform of married women’s property rights were political in that they were challenging authority and the status quo. Thus when in the second half of the twentieth century women took up such issues as abortion, violence against women, nuclear disarmament or lesbian rights, they were making political demands. Finally, the term ‘political action’ should not only be taken to mean a long, well-organized campaign, but should include spontaneous local actions which may have lasted days or just hours rather than months or years. In short, when women group together and take action on issues which affect them as individuals, as wives, mothers, workers or consumers, then we must properly view their activities as political. If we adopt such a wide definition, there will be no difficulty in discovering women’s political involvement in the past, even though they were for such a long time not given any recognition as citizens.
