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.54The radical independent model of citizenship promoted by Montefioreand other suffragettes after 1900 animated militancy’s emergence within thetwentieth-century women’s suffrage movement.It was a model of citizenshipthat offered consent as a primary obligation of citizenship, exposed thestate’s reliance upon the exercise of physical force, and offered a more dem-ocratic conception of the state.55 This model of citizenship suggested tosome suffragists a wider extension of enfranchisement than that envisionedby the mainstream movement.In the months leading up to the commence-ment of hostilities in South Africa, articles in the New Age urged that not onlythe Uitlanders but also indigeneous Africans should be enfranchised.An ed-itorial from November 1899 stressed that “democracy does not permit of thecontrol of one community by another.It does not contemplate an Imperial-ism with physical force as its fundamental principle, but it does contemplatethe Brotherhood of Nations, the Empire of the principle of peace and good-will among men.”56It is tempting to view radical suffragists’ deployment of arguments againstan imperial war as a strategic move, demonstrating principled solidarity withAfricans and other disenfranchised people of South Africa.More likely, how-ever, the rhetoric was employed tactically, with radical suffragists playing met-ropolitan concerns off a colonial crisis within the imperial state.Radicalsuffragists revealed their allegiances in their frequent comparisons betweentheir situation and that of the Afrikaners; the state of disenfranchised Afri-35t h e m i l i ta n t s u f f r a g e m ov e m e n tcans and Indians in South Africa featured infrequently in their rhetoric.The Afrikaners’ fight for national self-determination was compared alter-nately with that of the Irish, the American colonists, and the Polish, Greek,and Italian independence movements, which suffragists made analogous withtheir own cause.57 Their complaints were not with the Afrikaners.Rather, theycriticized the British government, both for exerting force on behalf of theUitlanders’ franchise rights and for using that force illegitimately against aweaker state.While radical suffragists’ understanding of democracy arguedagainst an understanding of the state as based on force and suggested a rangeof possible outcomes, including the eventual end to British sovereignty, it didnot challenge racialized conceptions of citizenship, nor ultimately white su-premacy, in South Africa.58British involvement in the South African War accelerated expansion of thepowers and reach of the state.59 Yet the war had further political significance, both for the organized campaign for women’s suffrage and for the practiceof citizenship in Britain at the turn of the century.The controversies sur-rounding this imperial war linked the changing consciousness of women suf-fragists in the 1890s to the new methods and tactics of the twentieth-centurymovement.Liberal suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett alluded to this whenshe wrote of the women’s suffrage movement’s increased vigor after theSouth African War.The war, she acknowledged in 1912, “ultimately strength-ened the demand of women for citizenship, for it has been observed againand again that a war, or any other event which stimulates national vitality, andthe consciousness of the value of citizenship is almost certain to be followedby increased vigour in the suffrage movement, and not infrequently by itssuccess.” 60The South African War provided a critical turning point in the develop-ment of new idioms and organizations in the ongoing campaign for women’sparliamentary enfranchisement in Britain.It presaged many of the issuesthat preoccupied suffragists and the nation during the First World War, suchas the vexed relationship of service to citizenship.Just what did citizens owethe state? This question became especially difficult when the state did notrecognize certain groups as citizens, that is, when it did not acknowledgewomen’s political rights but nevertheless expected them to fulfill duties tothe state
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