Kvinnestemmeretten i Horten og de andre Vestfoldbyene ...

The Suffrage Clubs clearly wanted to have a non-political profile, they wished to unite as
many women as possible regardless of political view. I 1907 some women acquired the
political vote, and the political consciousness of the members grew, with more and more
women wanting to participate in political life. The women achieved the right to vote, and they
were intending to use it. The club worked to make the women able to be fully functioning
citizens and to dare to be a political people. It was a paradox then that the club was supposed
to be non-political. As time went by many of the members of the club became members of
political parties and eventually engaged in politics too. Was it possible then, under such
circumstance to keep party politics outside the club? The women did not belong to the same
political party, and the club had to accept the fact that their members had different political
views and values, and the board of the club worked hard to keep the discussions at the
meetings neutral in terms of party politics.
How important was the contribution of the individual in the local society? The clubs were
open for everyone, but some women played more important parts than others in the struggle
for the acceptance of the women’s right to political vote. I find that in all the towns there
were female leaders who were extremely occupied with the cause of liberation for women.
Some of them were more important than others however, and widened their influence and
engagement from the local society to the other towns and even to the country as a whole.
They were gateways for the feminists in Vestfold to the civil publicity, they were verbal, good
at expressing themselves both orally and in writing and had a strong interest in the question of
suffrage for women. They created around them a lot of women in a social network..
The middleclass-women in Vestfold were engaged in the suffrage-question, but their
discussions, their speeches and their letters to the newspapers show that to av large extend
they believed in a difference between the sexes. Women deserved the right to vote, but they
would represent something different from what men did in politics. They fought for equality,
but not similarity. Politics would benefit from female participation because it would be
different from what men could offer. Womens’ political engagement was often within the
field of caring for the poor, children, old and sick people. Women allowed into the public
sphere connected to their traditional field of activity. Women enlarged their homely female
tasks to society as a whole. But nevertheless the right to vote became an important indicator
of modernism as female suffrage was one step further in the process of democratization.