Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

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