Polity Of Women In The 1800s

The idea of women as the fairer, nurturing, compassionate dates back to notions of Victorian sexual polarity, which viewed women by nature as passive and emotional and men as are naturally assertive and dominant (Rosenberg.) The “circle of domestic life” was used to justifies women from the political, economic, higher education an access to birth control and abortion. Women occupied a different “world” than men, one that utilized their natural predisposition towards nurturant activities (Kerber 1988). While the idea that women should be banned from the polity dates back to ancient greece, the idea of women as the more moral, domestic sex took hold during industrialization (Kuersten 2003.) Prior to the industrial revolutions, family members
Thus, men were scientifically seen as the sex should occupy competitive realm of economics and politics, while women were the spiritual guardians of men’s morality (Kerber 1988). Indeed, the justification for the separate spheres was based around biological essentialism: women and men were thought to have a fundamentally different biological makeup (O’Briend 2009). Women, were predisposed to nurturing roles because of their genetic makeup (O’Briend 2009). Upper and middle class women’s function was to nurture the morality of their husbands, children and other dependents. However, there was push back to these essentialist assumptions by many woman. In Beyond Separate Spheres, The Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, Rosalind Rosenberg details the active role that a wave of women intellectuals had in replacing notions of “true women” with “new women” at the end of the industrial revolution and at the term of the progressive era. Thus, while notions of “true women,” which were intrinsically linked to biological essentialism and used to limits women's autonomy to the domestic sphere, several women, like (), worked actively to overturn this paradigm and, to a degree,
Today, it is used to argue that women should occupy more leadership roles within government. An overwhelming wave of research in the early 2000s argued that women were more moral in leadership positions than men. (Dollar, Fishman, and Gatti, 2001; Swamy et al., 2001). The most cited study, by Dollar, Fishman and Gatti (2001) found that “a one standard deviation increase in [female participation in government] will result in a decline in corruption... of 20 percent of a standard deviation.” This study, along with a survey of corruption in Georgia (Swaney et al., 2001), culminated into a 2001 World Bank report suggesting that women were more likely than men to express altruistic values and condemn bribery. The report suggested integrating “...women in politics and in the labor force—since they could be an effective force for good government and business trust” (World Bank, 2001). This sparked a wave of feminization initiatives to combat corruption. However, more recent research, however, exposes that the relationship between gender and corruption is far more complex than simply integrating women into government as an anti-corruption force. Specifically, recent research on the gender corruption gap shows that the relationship between gender and corruption depends on regime type, opportunities for corruption, and culture. Others, however, find no difference