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Suffragism and internationalism: The enfranchisement of British and Indian women under an imperial state

The terms of women’s franchise in 1927 in Britain and in India led the Irish feminist, Margaret Cousins, one of the founding members of the leading suffrage organisation of women in India, to make the following comparison: ’Women now have exactly the same voting rights as men in India, unlike in Britain where only women over thirty can vote.’’ Cousins’ comment, of course, carried special resonance because it implied an ironic reversal of a familiar rhetoric of British suffragism. British ’imperial suffragism’, as Antoinette Burton has argued, had depended upon the ubiquitous stereotype of ’the helpless Indian woman’. The image of the ’helpless Indian woman’, according to Burton, was crucial not just for the ’upliftment’ of Indian women per se, but, more crucially, for the emancipation of British women themselves: it provided moral prestige for, and an imperial articulation of, the demand for the vote for British women.’ Yet British suffragism’s imperialist rhetoric of the ’white woman’s burden’ was trumped-ideologically delegitimated-by the enfranchisement of Indian women. What Cousins’ comments gestured towards, indeed, is precisely the contradictory articulation of the enfranchisement of British and Indian women in the imperial context. Since the imperial state, as Nira Yuval-Davis reminds us, ’position[s] different civil societies and nations in very different relations to the same state’, the