Can Dutch Women Be Politicians? A Discourse Analysis of Parliamentary Debates on Women’s Suffrage (1887 – 1916)

Abstract

Although women are since 1916 allowed to become politicians in the Netherlands, an assumed discrepancy between their maternality and the political body is still present in contemporary Dutch society. To understand this implied incoherence, this thesis focusses on the Dutch debates on women’s suffrage from 1887 to 1916. It examines how the maternal body was historically constructed in the parliamentary debates to find out how this construction contradicts the Dutch somatic norm of the political body. First, a postmodernist epistemological framework with a feminist poststructuralist theoretical context is employed to create a solid theoretical understanding of the maternal and the political body. Drawing on existing literature in the field of sexual difference theory, somatic processes of in-and exclusion are identified and an understanding of the phallocentric notions that inform the political body is created. The theoretical insights are then brought into conservation with the findings of the critical discourse analysis that was conducted on the transcripts of the suffrage debates. The analysis shows that the maternal body is represented as man’s unequal counterpart: ‘irrational’ and unable to transcend the influence of her feminine reproductive processes. She, therefore, does not fit into the masculine somatic norm of the political body. Furthermore, I argue that the maternal body and the political body where co-constructed from the beginning to exclude each other and that this constructed incoherence was accompanied by a demarcation between the public/private sphere, deeming the maternal body as matter out of place. The results show that a renegotiation of the political sphere itself is necessary if we want to establish a political space that is open for every(body).