The Ascent of Woman
Richard Wilkinson is impressed by a new study of the women’s movement.
The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement and the Ideas behind it
****
Melanie Phillips
Little, Brown, 2003
317 pages. £18.99
ISBN 0 316 72533 1
Readers of Melanie Phillips’ work in the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail will be familiar with her contempt for hypocrisy and inconsistency. In her book on the campaign for women’s suffrage she adds a perceptive eye for the colorful and the paradoxical. She highlights the relative unimportance of ‘votes for women’ which was really only a means to an end, namely a society based on justice and morality. But what is justice? Phillips shows how feminists could not make up their minds whether women should campaign for equality with men or whether their moral superiority entitled them to dominate men and rescue them from their selfishness and depravity.
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