Abstract

In 1818 Hannah Mather Crocker, one of the first feminists’ representatives, simultaneously stated that God “has endowed the mind of women with equal powers and capabilities” to those of a man and that “to convince by means of reason and power of persuasion should be both the duty and the adequate privilege of women”. A hundred years later promoters of universal suffrage used the same formula of equality, with a slight difference. In a strategic meaning, they based their demarche upon the power of persuasion, because of the little political power they had. However, many of them were convinced that women would bring virtue in the area of politics, extending the maternal condition to the public domain, replacing rough power with the power of persuasion and party politics with progressive beneficent governing. Many theorists who support those ideas nowadays in their writings are not trying to replace a political vocabulary based on power with a careful, intimate one. Their goal is to integrate within political thinking a rich vocabulary and a sum of life-based aspects that have been neglected because they were usually assigned to the domestic field and were classified as private, non-political or even anti-political.