Opposition against women in parliament: a historical study of the first women MPs in Belgium (1921-1949)

Political institutions such as parliaments are historically gendered spaces that have long exposed women to various forms of opposition (Puwar, 2004; Verloo, 2018). This opposition manifests in multiple ways – through verbal attacks, snubbing, interruptions, sexual objectification (Hendriks, 2024; Keohane, 2024), exclusion from networks and spaces (Harrison, 1986; Krook, 2022), and even physical abuse (Krook, 2017). Opposition can be overt, like public ridicule during debates, or subtle, such as dismissing women’s interventions, or it can be intimate, like unsolicited touching. Together, such forms of opposition sustain a political culture that remains unwelcoming to women. While opposition against women MPs is well-documented in contemporary contexts, its historical dimensions remain understudied. Existing research provides only fragmented and sometimes anecdotal insights into the forms of opposition encountered by early women MPs and the strategies they used to respond to them. This paper addresses this gap by examining opposition directed at the first generations of women MPs in Belgium. It explores what forms this opposition took, who enacted it, and how women responded, and pre-emptively tackled, it. The goal is not only to better contextualize how early women MPs entered parliament as ‘political newcomers’ and navigated the highly gendered environment in which they had to operate; but also to examine ‘opposition against women MPs’ within a broader historical framework focusing on its historical manifestations and patterns, and ultimately see how these results can inform theory. To this end, we introduce a new framework for studying opposition against women MPs in historical political research and apply it to a pilot case study of three women active in the Belgian Parliament between 1921 and 1949. Drawing on newly collected materials from private and party archives, parliamentary records, and broadcasting and newspapers archive, we trace the social and personal factors that impacted the political trajectories of those women, as well as the traces of opposition they encountered and counterstrategies they employed. This historical perspective enriches contemporary understandings of gendered opposition in politics and offers insights for ongoing theoretical debates.