Women's Suffrage - History

History

In ancient Athenian Democracy, often cited as the birthplace of democracy, only men were permitted to vote. Through subsequent centuries, Europe was generally ruled by monarchs, though various forms of Parliament arose at different times. The high rank ascribed to abbesses within the Catholic Church permitted some women the right to sit and vote at national assemblies - as with various high ranking abbesses in Medieval Germany, who were ranked among the independent princes of the empire and could therefore sit and vote in the Diet. Their Protestant successors enjoyed the same privilege almost into modern times. Generally speaking however, the emergence of modern democracy began with male citizens obtaining the right to vote in advance of female citizens.

A movement for women's suffrage originated in France in the 1780s and 1790s, where Antoine Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges advocated women's suffrage in national elections. Various countries, colonies and states granted restricted women's suffrage in the latter half of the 19th century.

In Sweden, conditional women's suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty (1718–1771). Other possible contenders for first "country" to grant female suffrage include the Corsican Republic (1755), the Pitcairn Islands (1838), the Isle of Man (1881), and Franceville (1889), but some of these had brief existences as independent states and others were not clearly independent.

In 1756, Lydia Taft became the first legal woman voter in colonial America. This occurred under British rule in the Massachusetts Colony. This was in a New England town meeting and she voted on at least three occasions in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Unmarried women who owned property could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807.

In the 1792 elections in Sierra Leone, all heads of household—one-third of whom were African women—could vote.

The female descendants of the Bounty mutineers who lived on Pitcairn Islands could vote from 1838, and this right transferred with their resettlement to Norfolk Island (now an Australian external territory) in 1856.

The seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the conference that refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from America because of their sex. In 1851, Stanton met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, and shortly the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women. In 1868 Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Workingwomen's Associations. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress in 1868 Anthony persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work, although the men at the conference deleted the reference to the vote.

Women in the Wyoming Territory voted as of 1869.

The 1871 Paris Commune recognized women's right to vote, but with its fall women were again deprived of the right, which would only be recognized again in July 1944 by Charles de Gaulle (at that time most of France—including Paris—was under Nazi occupation; Paris was liberated the following month).

In 1881 the Isle of Man, an internally self-governing dependent territory of the British Crown, enfranchised women property owners and delivered the first installment of women's right to vote in parliamentary elections within the British Isles.

The Pacific colony of Franceville, declaring independence in 1889, became the first self-governing nation to adopt universal suffrage without distinction of sex or color; however, it soon came back under French and British colonial rule.

Of currently existing independent countries, New Zealand was the first to acknowledge women's right to vote in 1893 when it was a self-governing British colony. Unrestricted women's suffrage in terms of voting rights (women were not initially permitted to stand for election) was adopted in New Zealand in 1893. Following a successful movement led by Kate Sheppard, the women's suffrage bill was adopted mere weeks before the general election of that year. The women of the British protectorate of Cook Islands obtained the same right soon after and beat New Zealand's women to the polls in 1893.

The self-governing British colony of South Australia enacted universal suffrage and, furthermore, enabled women to stand for the colonial parliament in 1894. The Commonwealth of Australia federated in 1901, with women voting and standing for office in some states. The Australian Federal Parliament extended voting rights to all adult women for Federal elections from 1902 (with the exception of Aboriginal women in some states).

The first European country to introduce women's suffrage was the Grand Duchy of Finland. Amidst administrative reforms following the 1905 uprising, Finnish women's demand for both the right to vote (universal and equal suffrage) and the right to stand for election were met in 1906. The world's first female members of parliament were also Finnish, when on 1907, 19 women took up their places in the Parliament of Finland as a result of the 1907 parliamentary elections.

In the years before World War I, women in Norway (1913) and Denmark (1915) also won the right to vote, as did women in the remaining Australian states. Near the end of the war, Canada, Soviet Russia, Germany, and Poland also recognized women's right to participate in the elective franchise. British women over 30 had the vote in 1918, Dutch women in 1919, and American women won the vote August 26, 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Women in Turkey won voting rights in 1926. In 1928, British women won suffrage on the same terms as men, that is, for persons 21 years old and older. One of the most recent jurisdictions to acknowledge women's full right to vote was Bhutan in 2008 (its first national elections).

Voting rights for women were introduced into international law by the United Nations' Human Rights Commission, whose elected chair was Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Article 21 stated: "(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which went into force in 1954, enshrining the equal rights of women to vote, hold office, and access public services as set out by national laws.