Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

Taylor (1807-58) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73), whose close intellectual collaboration
found its final form in The Subjection of Women (1869) – the first scholarly dissertation
on the societal significance of gender, published by John Stewart Mill as a memorial
to his deceased wife.
In keeping with the women’s movement in general, Harriet Taylor and John Stewart
Mill placed great emphasis on women’s political rights. The right to vote is labelled
“a means of self-protection”, which women had sore need of in questions involving
“interests of women, as such,” since “we know what legal protection the slaves have,
where the laws are made by their masters.” 5
The work was an exemplary exposition of the three classical forms of argumentation
employed by the movement for women’s suffrage, and which will here be labelled
justice, representation, and resources. The first two of these advocate for women’s human
rights, including the right to political representation of their interests. The third
claims that it is not only an obligation of a democratic society to allow its entire mass
of talent to unfold, doing so is also beneficial to that society.
While feminist scholars have agreed on the typology, terminology has varied. The
argument of representation is also known as the interest argument or the feminist
argument, because insisting on gender-specific political interests is often regarded as
especially radical. The resource argument is also known as the utility argument or the
utilitarian argument, with reference to its roots in nineteenth-century utilitarianism.
Today, it is typically labelled the diversity argument.
The historical influence of The Subjection of Women can hardly be overestimated.
The book spurred the formation of the Danish Women’s Society, chaired by Mathilde
Bajer, and it forms the subtext for the political debaztes on equal rights that Fredrik
Bajer, as a Member of Parliament, initiated in close collaboration with the women’s
movement. In the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century, the women’s
movement had changed from being an elite Copenhagen phenomenon to a countrywide
organisation with tens of thousands of activists that had made universal suffrage
a popular demand.
On the local level, the breakthrough came in 1908 with the adoption of a modern
Municipal Voting Rights Act, and on a national level the watershed moment was the
adoption of the new Constitutional Act in 1915.
With its duration of some thirty or forty years, the Danish struggle for universal
suffrage was a brief one when compared with the campaigns in the United States,
France, and the United Kingdom, where the demand for political rights for women
was raised earlier and honoured later. In France, this did not happen until 1946. The
violent confrontations that marked the struggle for universal suffrage in the United
Kingdom were entirely absent in the Danish campaign.
In Denmark, married women were granted the vote by special exemption because
they were unable to fulfil the general demands in the Voting Rights Act that all voters
have disposal over their estate and be taxpayers, until a reform of the Marriage Act
rendered them fully competent in the eyes of the law in 1925 – sixty-eight years later
than their non-married sisters. The tenet that “suffrage was, at bottom, ‘the wife question’”
thus also applies to the history of equal rights in Denmark.
5 Mill 1924, p. 49
“The 1970’ies became the women’s
decade par excellence.”
WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 50