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The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights, by Ben Griffin; pp. xii + 352. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, £62.00, £21.99 paper, $103.00, $32.99 paper.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a virtual revolution in the rights and legal position of British women: the Married Women's Property Acts, fairer child custody laws, legal recourse for battered wives, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, and increased voting rights in local elections. Although women did not achieve parliamentary suffrage until after the First World War, that victory was a culmination of a wave of legal reforms in women's favor that were primarily enacted in the late Victorian period. The focus of Ben Griffin's The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain is not the movement for women's rights, which has been widely studied by others; instead it takes a close look at the ideological convictions, personal motivations, and political evolution of the men who debated these issues in Parliament, the traditions and outlooks they represented, and the relationship between women's rights issues and other pressing political concerns of the era. This interesting and thoroughly researched volume is made up of two quite different halves: the first puts parliamentary debates about women's rights in the context of Victorian constructions of masculinity, while the second traces the reshaping of philosophies of parliamentary representation in a period of almost continual electoral reform. Since parliamentary debates were recorded more-or-less verbatim in Hansard, The Times, and other publications, the author has been able to reconstruct the terms in which Members of Parliament supported or opposed the various women's rights...