Politics was not a place for women, that was the consensus until the end of the nineteenth century. The struggle for the extension of the right to vote was therefore initially aimed at universal suffrage for men. How did the women get their right to vote in 1919?
There was no public role for women in the nineteenth century and that idea had a religious background. The woman, according to the Bible, was subordinate to the man and her place was with her family. The liberal idea that men and women should have equal rights was only a small minority. For a large proportion of Dutch women, the right to vote was therefore not a priority at all.
Monique Leyenaar, professor of comparative politics, explains why:“Most women worked hard to survive and were not involved in politics. Or they were mediated, but they didn't get permission from their husbands. In addition, research from the 1920s shows that women read few newspapers at all, so that they were also less well informed about what was going on in the political field.”
Due to the arrival of factories in the nineteenth century, there was a lot of work, but at starvation wages and under poor working conditions. Social legislation was still in its infancy and young and old, man and woman had to do their part. It was therefore a sign of prosperity when women did not have to work outside the home, but ran the household.
Loopholes
Women who cared about women's suffrage came from better backgrounds. They had more time and especially money to devote themselves to a good cause. It all started with the liberal raised Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929). She was the first woman in the Netherlands to graduate. After her medical studies at the University of Groningen, she obtained her doctorate there, also as the first woman. This was quite remarkable in 1879 and foreign newspapers also wrote about this, for a woman, extraordinary achievements.
After her studies, Jacobs opened a medical practice in Amsterdam, which quickly became successful. As a result, she was assessed to pay taxes. At that time, we are talking about 1883, the Netherlands had a system of census suffrage. This meant that you could vote with a tax bill of a minimum amount (the amount differed per city). The names of the eligible voters were on an electoral list and Jacobs did not see herself on this, despite her high tax bill.
Census suffrage was included in the 1848 constitution. Now the makers of this had not explicitly mentioned men:the constitution spoke of persons or inhabitants. In other words, the constitution did not exclude women from voting. Jacobs went to court, but got the opposite result. Until the Supreme Court, the judges ruled that it was logical that they were men, otherwise the constitution would have listed the women separately. To be on the safe side, the politicians added the word "male" in the revised constitution of 1887. Then it was clear forever…
Police Violence
Jacobs' protest again received international attention and she became a figurehead of the fight for women's rights. She was not the only one and in 1894 the Association for Women's Suffrage (VVK) was founded, in which she would play an active role. We are still talking about a minority here:in 1900 the VVK had just a thousand members, mainly liberal women from good circles. Massive popular protests for suffrage are rare in the Netherlands.
The fierce battle of the suffragettes in England and the United States, in which the police acted violently and threw the women in prison, did not take place here. Leyenaar:“The violence by the police there again provoked reactions from women. For example, they smashed windows. In the Netherlands, demonstrations were much more relaxed, the women were more likely to snicker than to intervene.”
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But the zeitgeist changed and in other parts of the world women were already given the right to vote at the turn of the century, with New Zealand being the first in 1893. More and more people outside denominational circles began to wonder why women couldn't vote just as well. . The support of the VVK grew and when they organized a demonstration for women's suffrage in Amsterdam in 1916, about 18,000 people came.
Whether this group was a reflection of the Dutch population can no longer be determined, according to Leyenaar, but she does not think so. Most people didn't have the luxury of getting involved in politics. In any case, politicians were not greatly impressed. The ultimate reason for changing the electoral laws in 1919 lay elsewhere.
Fight in the House of Representatives
The VVK initially worked closely with liberal and socialist political parties and their male leaders. However, this came to an end after a few years because the politicians, and in particular the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), considered women's suffrage subordinate to gaining universal male suffrage. Nor did the socialists trust those neat ladies that much. They could use their influence to get census suffrage for wealthy women instead of suffrage for all women, including working-class women.
Ultimately, all males of adult age would have the right to vote in 1917, without a revolution being involved. It was settled in the House of Representatives, whereby the socialist parties exchanged universal male suffrage for the payment of religion-based education, according to the wishes of the confessional parties. They couldn't get the most out of this deal – women's suffrage.
The socialists were rightly afraid that the confessional parties would not vote for universal male suffrage if they also wanted women's suffrage. The confessionals were strongly against this. They felt that the woman would be alienated from her tasks in the household and from caring for her family by meddling in politics.
Fear of revolution
The confessional politicians never had ideological objections to the ever further extension of census suffrage to ultimately universal male suffrage. This is in contrast to universal suffrage for women:that was a bridge too far and in 1917 they went no further than agreeing to standstill. So it could happen that in the national elections of 1918 a woman, namely Suze Groeneweg of the SDAP, entered the House, while she was not even allowed to vote.
In the first elections under universal male suffrage in 1918, the big winners were not the socialists, as expected, but the confessional parties. So that didn't look good for the future of women's suffrage. The fact that the confessional parties finally gave in was due to the unstable political situation in Europe. The First World War was drawing to a close and a revolutionary atmosphere reigned in Germany. On November 11, 1918, politician Pieter Jelle Troelstra called on the Dutch workers to seize power following a foreign example.
Ultimately, there would be no revolution, but the politicians did not know this yet. Leyenaar:“Research had shown that women would vote confessional instead of socialist parties and thus form a politically stable factor. This was the pragmatic reason that the confessional parties subsequently agreed to universal women's suffrage.” And indeed it did them no harm:in 1922 they won the national elections with flying colors.
The denominational women were law-abiding and listened to the voting advice from the pulpit. This does not mean that they were aware of what was going on and what which party stood for, according to Leyenaar. “There was a lot of ignorance among women. There was, of course, no television and women read very little. For information you had to go to meetings and most didn't have time for that. To vote, they followed their faith and not, for example, the SDAP, while it was fighting for women's rights."
Aversion to women
After the win of 1922, women became an important target group for the confessional political parties and all kinds of political associations sprang up, as counterparts to the liberal and socialist associations. Here the women could get information and become members, but they were also told that family came first. When women were married, work, including in politics, was a thing of the past. “Despite these restrictions, women would continue to vote predominantly confessional until the 1970s,” says Leyenaar.
Until after the Second World War, the number of women in the Senate and House of Representatives together remained at seven percent. They came mainly from the better backgrounds, had a university education and were not married. Mothers were not on the list of candidates anyway.
Leyenaar:“The confessional parties had not changed their minds in 1919, because they felt that women should finally be allowed to enter the political domain, it had been a purely pragmatic choice. That also explains the reluctance of those parties to include women in their midst.” Ultimately, it would take until just after the Second World War before the first woman entered the cabinet. In 1956 Marga Klompé was the prime minister for the Catholic People's Party.