Well quite.
There were plenty of women who did not believe in Woman Suffrage. When John Stuart Mill raised the issue during one of the parliamentary debates which led to the passing of the 1867 Reform Act (which extended the vote to working class men) with an amendment which proposed that the word ‘man’ be changed to ‘person’, Lady Frederick Cavendish called it an odious & ridiculous notion.
Lucy Cavendish could hardly be called hypocritical or self-hating, although with William Gladstone for an uncle, the formidable 7th Duke of Devonshire for a father-in-law, & her close-up view of Parliament in action, she might be forgiven for recoiling from the idea of women playing a direct personal part in politics.
And, according to David Marquand in Britain Since 1918 Gladstone opposed female enfranchisement precisely because he thought women were too refined for such hurly-burly.
Mill of course was not proposing that all women should get the vote, just as the reform act did not extend the vote to all men, but only to those (mostly widowed) who were householders in their own right. But even when universal male suffrage became the accepted aim, there were still women who resisted the extension of that right or privilege to all women.
Nor was such opposition necessarily founded on the idea that women were weak & feeble creatures, constitutionally unfitted to make political decisions. Since votes were assumed to be cast according to economic interest, & since it was assumed that there could be only one such ‘interest’ per household, shared by all its members, then extending the franchise to women would give an unfair weighting to larger households.
There are plenty of things which I do, & should like to continue to do, which, I might also concede, society would be better off for my not doing. It does not make me a hypocrite for me to say so.
And it is in any case a strange kind of bullying, or an attempt to restrict my freedom & independence of thought, or at the least condescension, for you to call me a hypocrite because, according to your analysis, I ought to agree with your way of looking at things.
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