By contrast, the established social world Mrs. Ward bestrode so influentially viewed political access and agency as necessarily unegalitarian, because power was contextual and relationship-bound—not just for women, but for everyone. One’s social station was as given as one’s sex. The power relations implied by such a worldview are compellingly described in Mrs. Ward’s many novels. The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) depicts a glittering prewar politics whose terrain is not, or not only, Parliament, but also wider networks of association across great families, gilded Mayfair parties, and grand country houses. It is a world of parliamentary candidates chosen among friends and cousins, of landed-interest power bases, and deferential farmhands and servants. In this world, elite women exert all the influence they could desire, just obliquely: The plot of William Ashe turns on the hero’s disastrous marriage to a woman too emotionally erratic to play her allotted part as a charming political wife. Conversely, in the book, the notion that non-elite individuals of either sex should have much say in the country’s government is scarcely considered. In Delia Blanchflower (1913), meanwhile, the figure that most closely articulates Mrs. Ward’s own view of the issue muses at one point that feminists “attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case of men.”
In the view of influential antis such as Mrs. Ward, being denied the vote was no impediment to women making full use of their abilities. By her time, the women’s movement was in fact very well-developed. Industrialization disrupted families and settled social norms. As men and women grappled with how to live together in a world transformed, the result was a vigorous, culture-wide debate on sex roles and relations. A consensus gradually emerged from this on “true womanhood”; in its wake came an increasingly organized women’s movement that was both maternalist and often strongly religious.
If this movement is largely illegible from the liberal feminist vantage-point, this is because its core assumptions leaned into the very “sexist” distinctions that liberal feminism seeks to dismantle. Its vision was of women’s role as flowing from motherly values of kindness, selflessness, nurture, and moral uplift. Ideas spread via reading circles and public lectures. At scale, this coalesced into networks dedicated to public service and moral improvement. Organizations such as the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Mothers’ Union worked to propagate sexual “purity,” frugal living, and strong marriage across society, especially among the lower classes. Women linked domestic and public maternalism and drew parallels between all forms of caring work: The National Union of Women’s Workers, formed in 1895, explicitly framed all women’s domestic, voluntary and professional activities as “work,” whether paid or not, emphasizing the common element of public service.