The Ascent of Woman by Melanie Phillips

At first sight, there is something rather incongruous about this book. The ascent of woman? Surely we already have enough substantive accounts of one of the most-chronicled popular movements in history: the struggle for the vote for women? Even the cover, with its picture of a demure Edwardian woman holding a copy of the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, has a delicously old-fashioned look. It could easily have adorned one of those first Virago paperbacks, published back in the Seventies when older feminist movements were first being disinterred.

But this historical account of a key feminist campaign has not been penned by an eager utopian scholar but by Melanie Phillips, one of the most renowned socially conservative columnists of our time. For one awful moment, I feared she might be about to declare votes for women a terrible mistake.

Thankfully, not. Instead, Phillips has written a thorough account of both the political campaign to secure women the vote and the vast canvas of ideas and campaigns that formed the backdrop to this momentous struggle. While it may take some digging out, she has written it with a typically clear agenda: to trace back through the past what is, in her view, feminism's continuing confusion, indeed hypocrisy, about the roles of women and men.

Phillips begins her story with the French Revolution and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the seminal Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As one might have anticipated, she is dismissive of the radical and experimental Wollstonecraft, dwelling, in a spirit somewhere between gloom and glee, on her apparent moral hypocrisies and personal tragedies.

There is a much more respectful account of the daughters of the educated and well-resourced middle class who became female pioneers in their fields, or more moderate campaign leaders. These include the sisters Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Florence Nightingale (who as a rather bitter single woman gets suprisingly kind treatment from Phillips) and the glamorous Josephine Butler, who fought hard for the repeal of the brutal Contagious Diseases Act.

By the second part of the 19th century, much feminist discontent had become focused on the struggle for the vote. From here onwards, the book is a long, sustained attack on what Phillips calls feminism's own double standard. By this she means that many Victorian and Edwardian feminists argued for political equality on the grounds of an assumed feminine superiority, a distinct set of qualities which, it was suggested, women could then bring to the public sphere. In the later period of militancy, some of these ideas intensified, with some feminists associated with campaigns to "banish the beast" of rampant male sexuality and promote chastity for all.

But trawling through the bewildering array of arguments used to justify women's claim to the vote, one is struck not so much by their hypocrisy as by their helplessness. It is hard for modern readers to understand the context in which these debates took place and the degree to which campaigners of the 19th century emphasised, or felt they had to emphasise, either women's domestic and moral capacities or their sexual continence. But the thrust and tenor of many of these arguments is also hardly suprising, as Phillips has the grace to concede, given the rigid and unjust social mores of the times.

Victorian England was ruled by an appalling sexual double standard which permitted male sexual excess and cruelty, while punishing women for any sign of independent sexual life. There were also grossly unfair divorce, custody and property laws. It is surely striking that as legal equality has been slowly gained throughout the 20th century and beyond, so claims about women's moral and domestic superiority have dwindled.

In one sense, Phillips's account is not harmed by her passionate partisanship. One reads it as one might read of a contemporary struggle, with all the complex interplay of personality and public events, class politics, and national and international crises. But the book is also dangerously lopsided. If, as she suggests, feminism was made up of hysterical women with terrible personal problems, where are the potted psycho-biographies of opponents of women's suffrage, of the bigoted male politicians who opposed the vote for women for so long? Why is Millicent Garrett Fawcett allowed a "happy marriage" while the devotion of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst considered highly suspect?

Phillips loathes the Pankhursts – their apparent personal dysfunction, their blatant narcissism, their quixotic politics. For her, the larger portion of the blame is always placed squarely on the shoulders of radicals, on those who would change existing structures, never on those who would preserve them even in naked self-interest or for the most unjust of reasons.

It is only when Phillips comes closer to the present that one sees most clearly her limitations. Her Epilogue argues that one can see direct descendants of the 19th century in modern feminism. Giving just one example, she cites those women who represent "the encouragement of the feminised 'New Man' and the attempt to remove men altogether from the reproductive process".

That single "and" is either deeply disingenuous or plain mischievous. Those who believe that men should take a greater part in domestic life neither wish the feminisation of men nor their extinction. Nor have they anything in common with those who desire to "remove men" from the reproductive process. Who are these feminists?

"Do women need greater equality in the public sphere, or have women gone too far in their emancipation?" Phillips asks at the end, observing with some justice that 19th-century women would have been amazed, and not always cheered, by how things have developed. But she then avers that "women have still not settled the great questions and dilemmas about their place in the world".

She is right of course; any honest person will acknowledge a massive, continuing uncertainty at the heart of what was once "the woman question". That makes it all the more sad and galling that one ends this book feeling that, despite great victories (the granting of votes for women and the social and economic changes that have followed), somehow everything wrong with the modern world can be placed at the door of feminism, past and present.

Melissa Benn's 'Madonna and Child: towards a new politics of motherhood' is published by Vintage