At first glance Mary Cholmondeley's two works ‘Votes for Men: A Dialogue’ (1909) and ‘The Dark Cottage’ (1919) may appear to have little in common. ‘Votes for Men’ is an excoriating one-act suffragist play, whilst ‘The Dark Cottage’ is a short story about the life of a wealthy industrialist who becomes a soldier in the Great War. Yet both texts were written for Christmas editions of popular literary journals, both are set in an imagined utopian – or possibly dystopian – Britain of the future and both deal with the same issues of eugenics, nationhood, the sexual double standard and the responsibilities that come with power. What follows is an exploration of Cholmondeley's two futuristic fantasies and a comparison of their treatments of these central issues in order to understand how Cholmondeley's ideological concerns, her feminism, her social and political conscience and her hopes and fears for the future – of Britain, of herself and her writing – had changed in the ten years between their publications. This essay asks if the intervening war years had dampened Cholmondeley's feminist fervour and how her writing style had evolved during this decade; it also touches upon the ways in which Cholmondeley's dreams of literary posterity are written into the two focal texts’ treatment of the issues of Victorian cultural and intellectual legacy. The later years of Cholmondeley's life have – until this edition – received relatively little critical attention; however they mark a most interesting phase in her career as she turned to life-writing, drama and short fiction. Cholmondeley's first biographer describes these years as characterized by domesticity and quietude enforced by illness, but the archives and writings of this period offer a glimpse into a busy and interesting time of reflection, experiment and creativity.

‘Votes for Men’

Cholmondeley was fifty years of age when she wrote ‘Votes for Men’ in 1909. The plot sees men long since disenfranchised following the revolutionary election of a feminist government in the year 2009 and now – as the action takes place in the early twenty-second century – ruled by Prime Minster Eugenia.