Review: Masculinity and the Expansion of Women’s Rights in Ben Griffin’s The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: This monograph offers a thorough history of the fight for women’s rights in Britain during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ben Griffin’s writing is engaging and clear, and he offers a unique perspective on gender studies of the Victorian period. Griffin recognizes the extraordinary strides made by British women in terms of their political and legal status during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but he argues that studies of the women’s movement only offer insight into part of the picture. For Griffin, in order to fully understand how women could gain more power, one must also study the men who gave over some of their power to women. He does not devalue the women’s movement, but he attempts to construct a broader picture of the climate in which these changes took place (the Married Women’s Property Act, the Infant Custody Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act, and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts). He thus focuses his attention on the men serving in parliament and “the context of the broader liberal and conservative ideologies that animated their political behavior” (25).