oa VROUWENKIESRECHT ALS OMSTREDEN KWESTIE ONDER NEDERLANDSE FEMINISTEN, 1870-1900

Female suffrage was not the Dutch women’s movement’s central issue from the beginning, nor did contemporary social reformers conceive it as part of the democratisation process they favoured. This article explores the public debate on women’s suffrage against the backdrop of the movement towards universal suffrage in its first three decades. Due to sources refraining from stating the obvious, it remains obscure why exactly parliamentary politics continued to be seen as an exclusively male domain for so long. What is clear, is that conservative feminists associated the demand for women’s suffrage with a radical strand of feminism which they abhorred.