Background

Suffrage means the right to vote in elections, and it is a hallmark of modern political systems. However, most nation-states that emerged from the revolutions of the eighteenth century limited suffrage to small groups. Voting rights expanded to other groups slowly over time. This is especially true for women, who had to fight hard for the right to vote.

The story of women’s suffrage has an unusual timeline. Women gained voting rights in a series of small, irregular victories around the world long before most nations would permit it. Some states, provinces and local areas started allowing women to vote in state and local elections, giving the movement more strength. So before we can discuss how women successfully achieved the right to vote, we need to look at these local triumphs. The fight in some areas lasted much longer than in others. The movement can’t be neatly outlined according to time and place. Factors such as race, class and age also make the history of this movement even more complex and interesting.

So maybe the best way to tell the story is to take a journey around the globe. We’ll look at the when, where, who, and how of suffrage movements in six different regions of the world.

Region 1: New Zealand And Australia

In 2018, New Zealand celebrated the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage. With the passage of the Electoral Act of 1893, the country became the first self-governing nation to award women the right to vote in national elections. This achievement was largely due to the work of Kate Sheppard. She was an English woman who migrated to the city of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. She became the head of a Presbyterian group called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1887. The group’s main focus was to make it illegal to sell or drink alcohol. However, Sheppard argued that women must be allowed to vote if they were to have any effect on the issue. She traveled across the country gathering women’s signatures demanding the right to vote. She presented the signatures to the New Zealand Parliament, but she was rejected. Still, Sheppard did not give up. By 1893, when she had gathered the signatures of almost 32,000 women, the men in Parliament passed the resolution. Even though New Zealand granted all women suffrage, it would not be until 1919 before women could run for elected offices.

While this national achievement was remarkable, other state and local areas had given women the right to vote earlier than 1893. However, New Zealand was the first to give all women ¹ the right to vote at the national level. Neighboring country Australia would also grant women the right to vote, first at the local and then at the national level in 1902. However, in Australia only white women were given this right. Aboriginal women² would have to wait another 60 years before suffrage was granted to them.

Region 2: Europe

The next stop on our world tour is Europe. The publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in 1792 was a game-changer. Many historians see this lengthy essay as the starting point for women’s calls for equal rights. Her work was inspired by Enlightenment ideas of equal treatment and natural rights given to each person. Wollstonecraft supported the education of women and wrote that the sexes were not naturally unequal, but that society put unequal burdens on men and women. The main burden for women was the lack of educational opportunities that kept them obedient to men.

Women’s suffrage in Europe began at the local level in 1862. That year Sweden granted voting rights to rural widows and unmarried women, but not to married women. Finland followed suit in 1872 by allowing women to vote if they paid taxes. Other nations also allowed certain classes of women the right to vote in local elections. They included England, Wales and Scotland. However, women would have to wait until the early twentieth century before securing full voting rights throughout Europe.

One of the most well-known efforts during the suffrage movement was in the United Kingdom. Violent tactics were sometimes used to bring attention to the cause. In May 1929—after a century of organization, protests and arrests— Parliament voted to allow all women over the age of 21 the right to vote in general elections. This afforded women the same voting rights as men.

In France and Italy, women had to wait until the end of World War II for full suffrage. The women of Spain and Switzerland did not get the right to vote until 1971. Women in Liechtenstein had to wait even longer, with full voting rights secured in 1984. If you do the math, that’s 91 years later than New Zealand. We weren’t kidding when we said women’s suffrage has an unusual timeline.  

Region 3: Asia

The massive continent of Asia holds a wide variety of cultures. To understand the history of women’s suffrage in an area so large, let’s break it up geographically into three parts.

Central Asia

Many Marxists believed that women’s suffrage was needed in a socialist state. In fact, this right was granted toward the end of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Central Asian nations with ties to Russia did the same. Over the next 20 years other areas, even those Central Asian nations without ties to Russia, followed suit.

East and Southeast Asia

Nations in East and Southeast Asia gave women the right to vote at various times. Mongolia led the way in 1924 and Thailand soon followed. The official year for full suffrage in Thailand was 1932, but Thai women could vote in local elections as early as 1897. Women in China had to work to change the existing structures of government before the fight for suffrage could begin. In 1936, the new constitution for the Republic of China included full women’s suffrage. However, then came Japan’s 1937 attack, World War II, and the Communist Revolution. Chinese women would have to wait until 1947 to actually exercise their voting rights.

Speaking of Japan, Japanese women faced a similar fight. The country was ruled by an emperor until 1945 but the Meiji dynasty did allow for some reforms during their rule. When full male suffrage was granted in 1925, Japanese women continued their fight to be included. However, in the following decades, Japan’s imperial conquests in Asia, and of course World War II, would overshadow the rights of women. Suffrage was finally granted to women at the end of 1945.

The last stop on the Southeast Asian leg of our tour is India. While women in the United Kingdom were granted full voting rights in 1928, British colonies such as India were another story. Indian men only had limited suffrage under British colonial rule. A small percentage of women were allowed to vote in provincial regions. Opposition to women’s suffrage came from both the British government and many Indian officials. These men argued that women did not have the knowledge to participate and that voting would go against traditional family values. However, India then gained its independence from Britain, and the Constitution of India went into effect in 1950, with full women’s suffrage granted.

West Asia (also called the Middle East)

Women in the Middle East have fought the longest battle for suffrage and equal rights. Some majority Muslim nations extended suffrage rights from the 1950s to the 1970s. They include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Yemen. However, other nations took much longer, and internal conflicts suspended the rights of many. For example, the Taliban got rid of women’s suffrage in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Women in Iraq gained the right to vote in 1958, but could not exercise that right due to a sudden change of leadership. Oman and Qatar allowed women to vote in 1997 and 1999, respectively, but in Bahrain it didn’t happen until 2002. The last country to extend voting rights to women was Saudi Arabia, in December of 2015.

Region 4: North America

Now we journey to North America. Its suffrage movement began as part of a larger call for social justice led mostly by nineteenth-century women. In addition to voting rights, many women took to the streets for issues including religious reawakening, making alcohol illegal, and ending slavery. They also demanded educational, labor and legal reforms. As in the United Kingdom, the American suffrage movement was inspired by the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights and equal treatment.

Both American and Canadian women won the right to vote in 1920. Many women could already vote in state and provincial government elections before that, though. Only after World War I, when women’s contributions to the war effort were recognized, did women gain voting rights. However, it did not include all women. Indigenous American women were granted United States citizenship along with indigenous men in 1924. Restrictions at the state level meant that some men and women could not vote until 1948, though. In Canada, the indigenous population was excluded from full voting rights until 1960. African American women legally won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Many states still restricted the voting rights of black men and women, though. The calculated use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses prevented most African Americans from even registering to vote. Those tactics were finally made illegal with the passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sadly, the struggle for voting rights has become a subject of disagreement as recently as the 2018 midterm elections in the United States. New rules have revived the argument that many minorities are still being denied full access to their voting rights.

Region 5: Latin America

Let’s travel south. In Mexico, Central and South America, feminist and suffrage movements were part of a bigger story happening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The people in this region were fighting hard to form independent nation-states. Women in these areas first had to fight for freedom from colonial rule, and the right to even have national elections. That’s why women’s suffrage here came later than in other places. 

Women’s suffrage came to Uruguay in 1927, Ecuador in 1929, and Chile in 1931. They were among the first newly independent nations to grant women both access to higher education and suffrage. Brazil and Cuba followed in 1943. Then Guatemala and Venezuela in 1946, Argentina in 1947, and finally Chile and Costa Rica in 1949. Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay did not extend suffrage to women until the 1950s and early 1960s.

Many women who organized groups to fight for suffrage were from the upper classes of society. Often they had been educated abroad. However, most women in Latin America also had to overcome discrimination based on the traditional roles they were expected to fulfill. Local culture and the Catholic Church made those traditional female roles difficult to change. As a result, women made the case for how suffrage would improve family life and strengthen the government of their newly independent nations. They drew on examples set by European and North American women. At the same time, Latin Americans fighting for suffrage were not crazy about copying the same countries that had colonized and repressed them. As a result, many women in Latin America took a more nationalistic and socialist view of equal treatment and rights. They focused on the rights of workers, the ills of capitalism, and the need for social reforms. This contrasted with the more individualistic, personal efforts of Western women.

Region 6: Africa

The final stop on our tour is where humanity began. Prior to the “scramble for Africa”—in which imperialist nations claimed large chunks of Africa as theirs—indigenous African women often held positions of political and economic power. Women’s and men’s roles in society were viewed as supporting each other. They were also seen as spiritual leaders, but their political role was often restricted. Many communities also practiced matrilineal descent in much the same way as some areas of Southeast Asia did. However, European powers then began carving up the continent, and it all changed. Men were given the power to act politically through indirect rule. In the early twentieth century, women joined the resistance and nationalist movements for independence. They protested colonial governments while also requesting more rights for women. They formed organizations, wrote articles, and lobbied the government for reforms.  

While African women did call for full suffrage, they first had to fight to create independent states. Once colonialism was ended, the new right to vote was almost always extended to women at the same time as to men. In South Africa, white women were given the right to vote much sooner than black women. This was due to a system of racial segregation called apartheid. Black women, therefore, did not achieve full suffrage until the end of apartheid in 1994. Two countries, Liberia and Ethiopia, retained their independence in the “scramble for Africa.” Even there, women were not allowed to vote in elections until the mid-1950s.

Conclusion

There is no part of the world where the fight for women’s suffrage could be called easy. Across societies, differences in culture and views of class and race gave an advantage to some women and a disadvantage to others. In most nations, upper-class, educated women organized for voting rights first. They had time and resources that working-class women did not. Yes, the history of women’s suffrage can seem pretty disconnected when you attempt to lay it out across time and geography. The goal was the same across the world, though. Women must be allowed to participate in their governments if they are to achieve equal rights. The social justice struggles that continue into the twenty-first century including equal pay, health rights, and access to education could only be fought once women gained the right to vote.

1 All women meaning that there were no race or ethnic restrictions placed on women’s suffrage.
2 The word aboriginal can be a synonym for indigenous. However, it is also a proper noun describing people indigenous to Australia.
3 Matrilineal descent is the cultural practice of tracing kinship through the mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc.