Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T00:59:38.636Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Interests of Women in Bentham’s Late Constitutional Thought

from Part I - Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2022

Philip Schofield
Affiliation:
University College London
Xiaobo Zhai
Affiliation:
Universidade de Macau
Get access

Summary

In Constitutional Code, Volume 1, Bentham proposed ‘virtual universality’ of suffrage, giving the right to vote to ‘the whole body of the inhabitants, who, on the several days respectively appointed for the several Elections … are resident on the territory of the state, deduction made of certain classes’. Among the ‘classes thus deducted’, alongside minors and non-readers, stood ‘[F]emales’.1 Women were thus excluded from the ‘constitutive authority’, the founding authority in the State. Unlike other provisions of the code deemed to require explanation, this ‘enactive’ law was not justified by any corresponding ‘ratiocinative’ text. This cursory exclusion would have passed unnoticed in the context of nineteenth-century dismissals of women’s political rights, had it not contradicted other statements in which Bentham openly justified female suffrage. For instance, as late as 1822, at the time he was working on Constitutional Code, he lamented in manuscripts that ‘the gentler half of the species stand as yet excluded [from the suffrage] by tyranny and prejudice’.2

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×