Gender, Nationhood, and Transnational Networks: Anti-Suffrage within the British Empire, 1880-1914

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This doctoral project will take a transnational approach to explore how anti-suffrage ideas were spread and interpreted across the United Kingdom, the 'white Dominions', India and South Africa. Through fusing considerations of racial, national, and gendered hierarchies with transnational communication channels, the study will ask three main questions: 1) Why did women across the Empire not want enfranchisement? 2) Why did these women not want other women across the Empire to be enfranchised? 3) What can anti-suffrage tell us about notions of local, national and imperial governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? As the first study of women's transnational anti-suffrage networks and activisms across the British Empire, this project aims to show how women's anti-suffrage was a global movement shaped by contexts beyond the imperial metropole. The project aims to show how notions of the female vote were used by anti-suffrage leagues across the Empire to articulate complex political arguments around race, nationality, citizenship, and development. This will illuminate not only contours of contemporary suffrage debates, but the nuances of contemporary imperial politics. As a result, women, and the issue of their enfranchisement, will be shown to have sat firmly at the centre of ideas of imperial governance in this period. There is currently no historiographical consideration of anti-suffrage within the British Empire, despite movements across Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa. This represents a significant gap within both imperial and women's history. Anti-suffrage has largely been considered as little more than a footnote to the campaign for women's enfranchisement. This focus on pro-suffrage positions has led to a lack of recognition of the full spectrum of female activism within the British Empire in this period. This project thus provides opportunities to uncover alternative female networks, while also nuancing 'conservative' ideas of womanhood that existed, just as much as their pro-suffrage counterparts, beyond the domestic sphere. Consideration of anti-suffrage as its own movement has been limited. Most significantly, Julia Bush and Martine Faraut have respectively argued that anti-suffrage was a 'pro-woman' argument that represented 'one of the different faces of British feminism'. Although these arguments have deepened understanding of some aspects of English anti-suffragism, it does not account for the degree to which the movement was shaped by imperialism. Through showing how anti-suffrage did not look the same across the Empire, this project will challenge existing Anglo-centric scholarship to illuminate diverse and complex movements that existed beyond the imperial metropole. This project will rely upon a range of archival and digital sources to explore anti-suffrage individuals and organisations across the British Empire. Through balancing the way in which anti-suffrage arguments were broadly made with the nuance of what the movement meant to women on an individual level, this approach will challenge the prevailing view of anti-suffrage as a homogenous counter-movement. The published works and records of anti-suffrage women such as Edith Colquhon, Lady Jersey, Nora Tynan O'Mahony, Maud Bernard and others will be used to examine transnational encounters between anti-suffrage individuals throughout the Empire, and the influence that they had on each other. Exploration of the records of prominent anti-suffrage imperialists Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon will also seek to show how anti-suffrage stances were embedded within imperial policy-making. Records of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League and National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage will reveal how imperial rhetoric influenced anti-suffrage ideology, and illuminate links with anti-suffrage leagues in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa.