Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1977)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "Women Writers and the Suffrage Movement." In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, pp. 216-39. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Showalter explores the response of British women writers to the suffrage movement, noting that the struggle for votes did not seem to have a generally positive influence on writers, stimulating guilt, hostility, and class-based criticism instead.

The lyrical and diffuse feminist protest literature of the 1890s became political in the hands of the suffragettes. Most Victorian women novelists had dissociated themselves from the women's suffrage movement, which had its theoretical origins as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and its formal English organization in Manchester in 1865. The strategy of public anti-feminism came partly from women writers' reluctance to take on the extra burden of this...