{"id":1885,"date":"2026-09-23T12:47:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T12:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/power-in-history\/?p=1885"},"modified":"2026-09-23T12:47:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T12:47:44","slug":"making-sense-of-female-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/power-in-history\/making-sense-of-female-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Making sense of female conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The recent conference on <a href=\"https:\/\/aces.uva.nl\/content\/events\/2026\/07\/conservative-women.html\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/aces.uva.nl\/content\/events\/2026\/07\/conservative-women.html\">\u201cConservative Women: Politics and Gender 19<sup>th<\/sup>-21<sup>st<\/sup>&nbsp;century\u201d<\/a> brought together an exciting international and interdisciplinary collection of scholars and their topics. Female conservatism is not an established field of research but, in the light of both this conference and the current rise of female conservative voices on the political stage, perhaps it should be. Across the different case-studies, the repositioning of research in political history and the refraction of gender studies through this conservative lens, research on conservative women seems to prompt us to consider three things that go far beyond the topic of female conservatism itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Influencers and enablers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Research on conservative women, from the early modern period up until the present, reminds us that we need to look beyond formal spaces of rule or political representation. As scholars in women\u2019s history have pointed out before, women often \u201cdo\u201d politics in different ways and in unexpected places, and conservative women are no exception. We can look for their ideological stances or their activism in fashion magazines, in the temple, in the home, in a recipe, or even in the convent. Whilst women have been excluded from formal political participation for most of recorded history, they have often proved to be very skilful at influencing policy or enabling their male allies. In fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as suffragists across the West demanded the vote, conservative feminism often defined itself through this preference for \u2018influence\u2019 over direct suffrage. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that in our current time when public space has been redefined by social media, we seem to see an uptick in female conservative leadership. This is the age of the influencer, in more ways than one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">De-centering men<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What the fascinating case-studies at the conference perhaps showed the most clearly, is the value in choosing a perspective that consciously de-centers men. Not only because this allows us to uncover a wide and diverse range of (biographical) histories that have remained largely untold so far, but also because such a perspective allows us to come to a more complete and realistic definition of conservatism as an ideology and practice. Holding female conservative actors against a definition derived mostly from male-dominated spaces and perspective, writes them out of the history of conservatism. Including the (sometimes idiosyncratic) ways in which women articulated and related to conservative thought, gives us a more capacious theory of conservatism to work with \u2013 one that may well provide better explanations for how conservatism works in the world, how it has changed over time, and what its attractions are for various groups of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Women\u2019s political authority<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Finally, the central place taken up by personal, intimate and embodied experience in conservative women\u2019s accounts of themselves, reminds us that the personal is, indeed, political. Including approaches like those developed by historians of the body, of emotion and of experience enriches political history. The personal stories of the women discussed at this conference illuminated just how important personal experiences (like the experience of motherhood, or feelings of religious belief) were as a foundation for women\u2019s authority in the political arena. The claims conservative women made to political power, and the ways in which they legitimized their practices of political action and speech, gives us an interesting starting point to ask new questions about how political authority has been defined, constructed and wielded in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Josephine Hoegaerts<\/strong>, Professor of European Culture, University of Amsterdam<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you would like to receive notifications of new blog posts in your mailbox, please send an email to <a href=\"mailto:charris.desmet@uantwerpen.be\">charris.desmet@uantwerpen.be<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The recent conference on \u201cConservative Women: Politics and Gender 19th-21st&nbsp;century\u201d brought together an exciting international and interdisciplinary &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/power-in-history\/making-sense-of-female-conservatism\/\" class=\"more-link\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Making sense of female conservatism&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":1886,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[205],"class_list":["post-1885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-no-category"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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