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Page 1 of 2

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

  • from Part I - Democracy
  • Edited by Philip Schofield, University College London, Xiaobo Zhai, Universidade de Macau
  • Book:
    Bentham on Democracy, Courts, and Codification
    Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022, pp 68-87

  • 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

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