For most of recorded history the question of who may vote barely arose, because few people of either sex voted at all. When the revolutions of the late eighteenth century declared that governments draw their power from the consent of the governed, they opened a door that their authors mostly meant to keep half shut. If the people are sovereign, who counts as the people? For more than a century after 1789 the answer in nearly every country was adult men, often only those with property. The campaign for women's suffrage, meaning women's right to vote in elections, was the long effort to change that answer.

Coverture and separate spheres

The case against women voting rested on two pillars. The first was legal. Under the English common law doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's: she generally could not own property in her own name, sign contracts or keep her own wages. William Blackstone summed it up in his Commentaries of 1765, writing that "the husband and wife are one person in law." If a wife had no separate legal existence, many reasoned, she needed no separate vote. Her husband voted for the household.

The second pillar was cultural. The ideal of separate spheres held that men belonged in the public world of politics and business and women in the private world of home and family. Defenders presented this not as an insult but as a sensible division of labor suited to natural differences, and they warned that the rough world of elections would coarsen women and weaken the family. Many women sincerely agreed, believing they were protecting something valuable.

The revolutionary challenge

The French Revolution sharpened the contradiction. In 1789 the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, yet the constitution of 1791 gave the vote only to "active" male citizens who paid a set amount of tax. A few voices objected. The philosopher Condorcet published an essay in 1790 arguing that women should be admitted to the rights of citizenship. He asked why beings who could reason, and who were bound by the laws, should have no say in making them. In 1791 the playwright Olympe de Gouges answered the Assembly with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman, and in 1793 she was guillotined during the Terror.

In England, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Her main target was not the ballot but women's education. She argued that women appeared frivolous because they were trained to please rather than to think, and that a nation which kept half its members ignorant harmed everyone. She wrote that she did not wish women "to have power over men; but over themselves." She raised political representation only briefly, hinting that women "ought to have representatives." Her book nonetheless became a founding text for later campaigners, because it attacked the claim that women's supposed weakness was natural rather than made.

Justice and expediency

From the beginning supporters used two broad kinds of argument, and historians still find the distinction useful. Arguments from justice said that women are persons and citizens with the same right as men to consent to their government. Arguments from expediency said that women's votes would make society better: women would bring moral seriousness to politics, protect children, fight drunkenness and clean up corruption. The justice argument was more radical in principle, since it demanded equality whatever the results. The expediency argument was often more persuasive in practice, because it reassured listeners that voting women would remain recognizably feminine. Many campaigners used both, sometimes in the same speech.

Each argument carried a risk. If women deserved the vote because they were morally purer, opponents asked, did that not prove they were fundamentally different from men and suited to a different sphere? And if voting was a natural right, why had it been tied to property and sex for so long? A third line of reasoning drew on the old revolutionary slogan against taxation without representation. Women who owned property paid taxes and obeyed laws like any man, so they asked why they alone had no voice. As early as 1832 Mary Smith, an unmarried woman from Yorkshire, put exactly this case to Parliament.

Worked example: the petition of Mary Smith

In August 1832, as Parliament settled the details of the Great Reform Act, the radical MP Henry Hunt presented what is usually called the first petition for women's votes ever laid before the House of Commons. It came from Mary Smith, a wealthy unmarried woman from Stanmore in Yorkshire. Her reasoning was simple: she paid taxes, she was subject to the laws, and she could be punished under them, so she should have a share in electing those who made them.

Notice how her petition sidestepped both pillars of opposition. As a single woman she was not covered by a husband, so the household argument did not apply to her; nobody else voted on her behalf. And she did not claim women were morally superior, only that they were taxpayers like any other. The House reportedly greeted the petition with laughter, and it went nowhere. Yet the logic she used, that obligation without representation is unfair, would be repeated for the next ninety years until legislatures could no longer find a convincing reply.