Shame and the Anti-Suffragist in Britain and Ireland: Drawing Women back into the Fold?

• Published in: The Australian journal of politics and history Vol. 60; no. 3; pp. 346 - 359
• Main Author: Crozier-De Rosa, Sharon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Brisbane Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2014
• Subjects: 20th century; Conservatism; Emotions; England; Females; Great Britain; Ireland; Nationalism; Nationalists; Political Campaigns; Political opposition; Political science; Radicalism; Shame; Sisterhoods; Twentieth Century; United Kingdom; Voting Rights; Women; Womens studies; Womens suffrage; United Kingdom > UK; Ireland
• ISSN: 0004-9522; 1467-8497
• DOI: 10.1111/ajph.12063

Shame has been heavily relied on as a political tool in the modern world and yet it is still a much under‐historicised emotion. Using the examples of early twentieth‐century Britain and Ireland, I examine how women opposed to the campaign for female suffrage used shame instrumentally in their writing. Exploring the versatility of this political device, I find that shame was used with the oppositional intentions of binding and excluding. Whereas British conservatives used it to protect an already well‐established imagined community of good imperial women, Irish radicals drew on it to invite women to take part in the construction of a new nationalist sisterhood. This paper further problematizes claims that as an emotion that plays on a sense of the communal, shame has had no place in a highly individualistic modern world.