Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

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As soon as absolute monarchy came to an end, the liberal bourgeois class broke its alliance with the less privileged classes and grabbed power for itself. Running entirely counter to its egalitarian rhetoric, the bourgeoisie defined democratic citizenship in its own image, and reserved political rights for the educated and married man of means – the paterfamilias. And they called this model ‘universal suffrage’. The revolutionary left responded with socialism – the second great political ideology of modernity – which recycled the liberal criticism of the old regime, but with the emphasis on equality and fraternity rather than on individual liberty. The fact that both bourgeois liberals and socialists conceived of human rights as men’s rights prompted the emergence of feminism – the third great political ideology of modernity – with its demands for liberty, equality, and solidarity for both sexes. Feminist voices were raised in protest from the very outset of the democratic movements. Among the first was Abigail Adams (1744-1818), who was married to John Adams, one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence. When she saw the contours of the man’s rights discourse begin to take shape, she warned her husband that a new rebellion loomed if women remained without legal rights: “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” 2 In France, the voice of protest was raised by revolutionary activist Olympe de Gouges (1748-93), who penned the first declaration of women’s rights, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, in 1791. Here, she replaced the word ‘man’ from the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen with ‘woman’ – and gave us an object lesson in just how patriarchal the famed original text is. Olympe de Gouges was also the first to gender the deprivation of rights by drawing parallels between the King, who deprives the people of their rights, and men, who deprive women of their human rights and tyrannise them: “Liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others; thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny; these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.” 3 It is worth noting that human rights in their original inception are founded in both a religious and a secular world view. In the Christian, American tradition they are God-given, while the secular, French tradition roots them in nature and reason. Likewise, it is important to emphasise that feminism pertains to political views that may be held by both genders. From the outset, men participated in the struggle for equal status, which is, after all, just another word for equality. One example is the French Enlightenment philosopher J. A. Condorcet (1743-94), who forwarded the simple argument that human rights perforce apply to all human beings. Rights that apply only to some sections of the population are special rights, group rights, or inherited privileges, which the revolution had set out to abolish. Rights awarded to wealthy white men can only be called human rights if poor people, coloured people, and women are not human beings. From around 1830, we may speak of an international women’s move-ment, driven 2 History.com 3 Duiker 2006, p. 499 WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 48
y American, French, German, and British women, who developed both theory and practice through close contacts maintained through travel, letters, and exchange of literature. Against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions, the world’s first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, USA, adopted a manifesto entitled the Declaration of Sentiments, which called for full implementation of equal rights. THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE The late fall of absolute monarchy in Denmark meant that feminism had already found a definite form when the Constitutional Assembly convened. It was thus an act of bad faith when the Danish founding fathers, who were well-informed of international developments, inducted the Danish Constitutional Act of June 5th, 1849 into the man’s rights tradition based on the infamous – and erroneous – statement that “it is thus everywhere recognised that persons of incompetence, children, women, criminals shall not be eligible to vote.” Hardly had the ink of the Constitutional Act dried before the men of the new democracy admitted that they had set aside women’s human rights. As early as in 1857, Parliament passed a collection of equal rights laws as part of a major reform programme with the goal of making women full citizens. The first concern was making unmarried women legally competent, independent citizens. This was because the pre-modern marriage code, with its autocratic paterfamilias, stymied the rights of married women. In the article “Three Questions about Womanhood Suffrage”, political scientist Carole Pateman reflects on the differences between women’s and other social groups’ struggles for political rights. Why did suffragettes in Britain and the United States have to fight for half a century for the right to vote? How could demands for voting rights in Western democracies around the year 1900 lead to assassinations and suicides, mass arrests, hunger strikes, and forced feeding? Her answer is that the man’s status as head of the family was regarded as the last bastion of patriarchy. Voting rights was not a question of the women’s cause in general; it was a matter specifically of the position of the married woman. “[S]uffrage was, at bottom, the wife question, not a woman’s question” 4 . Danish equal rights policy between 1849 and 1915 falls into two stages. The most obvious marker of the watershed is the ascent of the women’s movement in 1871 with the formation of the feminist mother organisation Danish Women’s Society. In the first phase, the initiative was in the hands of Parliament, who constructed the female citizen in the image of the paterfamilias by according civilian and social rights to unmarried female heads of household. The second phase is characterised by a close alliance between the women’s movement and the increasingly successful political left, whose agenda was the extension of democratic rights to all, regardless of gender, social class, and civil status. In other words, the women’s cause was integrated into the general de-mand for democratisation, and the struggles for equal and universal suffrage and against patriarchal marriage could be synthesised in the assault on the privileged paterfamilias. The chief architects behind the new equal status strategy were the husband and wife couple Fredrik and Mathilde Bajer. They drew their inspiration from the international women’s movement, and specifically from the British power couple Harriet 4 Pateman 1994, p. 336. “From the outset, men participated in the struggle for equal status.” WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 49
Page 1 and 2: DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DE
Page 3 and 4: DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DE
Page 5 and 6: Of course this search will also bui
Page 7 and 8: CONTENTS 9 Young women in politics
Page 9 and 10: YOUNG WOMEN IN POLITICS From househ
Page 11 and 12: litical parties ‘rely on the stat
Page 13 and 14: ing able to keep up with and ‘bei
Page 15 and 16: youth population. Overall, it could
Page 17 and 18: dialogue across party lines. It als
Page 19 and 20: The program was broadly understood
Page 21 and 22: BIBLIOGRAPHY Ann, Teo Sue and Shuib
Page 23 and 24: WOMEN IN LOCAL LEVEL POLITICS Socia
Page 25 and 26: While contesting the post of an ele
Page 27 and 28: In fact training and capacity build
Page 29 and 30: enforcing these norms in ways that
Page 31 and 32: WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS AT TH
Page 33 and 34: amidst a scenario where only 0.6% w
Page 35 and 36: Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2006. M
Page 37 and 38: WOMEN IN TRANSITION COUNTRIES Strug
Page 39 and 40: A year later, women in the Arab Spr
Page 41 and 42: INSTITUTIONALISED MALE DOMINANCE AN
Page 43 and 44: OPENING SPACES AND INCREASING ACCES
Page 45 and 46: GENDER AND DEMOCRACY Danish democra
Page 47: ulation were now able to read about
Page 51 and 52: THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S REPRESEN
Page 53 and 54: On the municipal level, development
Page 55 and 56: and set new standards of female cit
Page 57 and 58: NETWORKS AND TOOLKITS Some resource
Page 59 and 60: EMPOWERING WOMEN FOR STRONGER POLIT
Page 61: MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK FOR WOMEN: IN
Page 64: CHRISTIANSBORG SEMINAR The ’Chris

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