Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

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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
THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION Equality before the law is the original feminist demand, and the 1915 amendment to the Constitutional Act was celebrated with parties, parades, and memorials across Denmark because the recognition of women’s political rights was regarded as the constitutional establishment of women’s rights. This view was supported by the fact that the government had changes to remaining gender discriminatory legislation on its to do list, and that those political parties that did not already have equal rights on their agendas now revised their platforms to include it. According to this logic, the women’s movement had accomplished its mission, and many of the extensively ramified movement’s associations dissolved themselves. Their take on the future was that women should safeguard their interests in the voting booth, through membership of political parties, and in Parliament. However, the pioneering Danish Women’s Society kept up its work. The first elections were something of a wet blanket to this mood of victory. The municipal elections of 1909 resulted in a female representation of 1.3 per cent and a gender distribution in municipal politics of 127 women to 9682 men. Women fared only marginally better in the national elections of 1918. Only 4 of the 140 elected candidates were women. Those who put the initial results down to teething troubles were about to be even more disappointed. As Figure 1 shows, the following elections brought a decline in women’s representation. FIGURE 1 Women in the Danish Parliament 1918-2011 6 200 150 100 50 0 1920 1924 1932 1943 1950 1957 1966 6 Note: In the lower house up until 1953, when the present unicameral system was adopted. Source: Kvinder i Folketinget http://www.ft.dk/Demokrati/~/media/Pdf_materiale/Pdf_publikationer/Informationsark/Folketingets_medlemmer/kvinder_i_folketinget%20pdf.ashx WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 51 1973 1979 1987 1994 No. of MPs No. of female MPs 2005 2015
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 and 48: ulation were now able to read about
Page 49: y American, French, German, and Bri
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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