The limitations of middle-class western feminism was not only social and economic but also cultural. The form of emancipation to which their movements aspired, namely to be treated legally and politically like man and to take part as individuals, irrespective of sex, in the life of society, assumed a transformed pattern of social life which was already far removed from the traditional 'woman's place'. To take an extreme case: emancipated Bengali men, who wished to show their westernization by bringing their wives out of seclusion and 'into the drawing room', produced unexpected tensions with and among their women-folk, since it was quite unclear to these women what they gained in return for the certain loss of the subaltern, but very real autonomy in that section of the household which was unquestionably theirs. A clearly defined 'women's sphere' - whether of women singly in their household relations or of women collectively as part of a community might strike progressives as a mere excuse for keeping women down, as indeed, among other things, it evidently was. And of course it increasingly became so with the weakening of traditional social structures.

Yet within its limits it had given women such individual and collective resources as they had, and these were not entirely negligible: for instance, they were the perpetuators and formers of language, culture, and social values, the essential makers of 'public opinion', the acknowledged initiators of certain birds of public action (e.g. the defence of the 'moral economy.), and not least, the persons who had not only learned to manipulate their men, but to whom, in some subjects and in some situations, men were expected to defer. The rule of men over women, however absolute in theory, was no more unrestricted and arbitrary in collective practice than the rule of absolute monarchs by divine right was an unlimited despotism. This observation does not justify one form of role rather than the other, but it may help to explain why many women who, for want of anything better, had learned over the generations to 'work the system' were relatively indifferent to liberal middle-class demands which appeared to offer no such practical advantages. After all, even within the bourgeois liberal society, middle-class and petty-bourgeois Frenchwomen, far from foolish and not often given to gentle passivity, did not bother to support the cause of women's suffrage in large number.

— The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm (Page 208)