Background

Suffrage means the right to vote in elections, and it is a hallmark of modern political systems. 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. Women especially 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, uneven 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. That gave the movement more strength. So before we can discuss how women successfully achieved the right to vote, we need to look at these more local triumphs. 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. The Electoral Act of 1893 made the country 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 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 first be allowed to vote if they were going to make changes. She traveled across the country gathering women’s signatures demanding the right to vote. She presented the signatures to the New Zealand Parliament and was rejected. Still, Sheppard did not give up. By 1893, she had gathered the signatures of almost 32,000 women. This time, the men in Parliament passed the resolution. Even though New Zealand granted all women suffrage, they would have to wait until 1919 before women could run for elected offices.

Other state and local areas had given women the right to vote prior to 1893. However, New Zealand was the first to give all women¹ 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 for suffrage.

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 major game-changer. Historians see this lengthy essay as the starting point for women’s calls for equal rights. Her work was inspired by the Enlightenment. This was a period of new ideas about equal treatment and natural rights given to each person. Wollstonecraft supported the education of women. She wrote that the sexes were not naturally unequal, but that society put unequal burdens on men and women. Women’s main burden was a 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. Married women still could not vote. Finland followed 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. 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. English people fighting for women’s suffrage sometimes used violence to bring attention to the cause. It took more than a century of organization, protests and arrests to win suffrage. Then, in May 1929, Parliament voted to give all women over the age of 21 the right to vote in general elections. This gave 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. 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

Asia is a large continent with many different cultures. To understand the history of women’s suffrage in an area so large, let’s break it up 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. Thai women could vote in local elections as early as 1897, though. Women in China had to work to change the existing structures of government before the fight for suffrage could begin. The new draft constitution for the Republic of China written in 1936 included full women’s suffrage. However, then came Japan’s 1937 attack, World War II, and the Communist Revolution. Women would have to wait until 1947 to actually exercise their voting rights.

Japanese women faced a similar fight. The country was ruled by an emperor until 1945. The Meiji dynasty did allow for some reforms during their rule, though. 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. Women in the United Kingdom were granted full voting rights in 1928. However, 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 local regions. Both the British government and many Indian officials fought against women’s suffrage. These men argued that women did not have the knowledge required to vote and it would go against traditional family values. However, India 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. 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. They could not exercise that right, though, due to a sudden change of leadership. Oman and Qatar allowed women to vote in 1997 and 1999, respectively. 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

North America’s suffrage movement began as part of a larger call for social justice. It was led mostly by nineteenth-century women. In addition to voting rights, many women took to the streets for a number of issues. They included 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 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. Women’s work for the war effort during World War I helped secure their right to vote. It proved women’s work was essential during a difficult time. Not all women were included, though. 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, indigenous people did not get full voting rights until 1960. African American women in the U.S. legally won the right to vote in 1920. Many states still restricted the voting rights of black men and women, though. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were put in place to prevent African Americans from even registering to vote. Those practices 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 continues. It 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

In Mexico, Central and South America, feminist and suffrage movements were part of a bigger story. It happened 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 in this area came later than in others. 

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 Chile and Costa Rica in 1949. Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay followed later. These countries 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 in other countries. However, most women in Latin America also had to fight another form of discrimination. It was 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. They argued it would 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 mistreated 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 “scramble for Africa” refers to when imperialist nations began to claim large parts of African land as theirs. Prior to this, indigenous African women often held positions of political and economic power. Women’s and men’s roles in society were often viewed as supporting each other. Women were seen as spiritual leaders, but their political role was often restricted. Many communities also practiced matrilineal descent.³ 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. These movements protested colonial governments while women requested more rights. They formed organizations, wrote articles, and lobbied the government for reforms.

African women called for full suffrage. First, though, they 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. These same differences gave 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 lay it out across time and place. 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 include equal pay, health rights, and access to education. These struggles 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 native to Australia.
3 Matrilineal descent is the cultural practice of tracing family lines through women. It begins with the mother, then the grandmother, then the great-grandmother, and so on.