Women's suffrage

Women's suffrage, the right of women to vote, spread around the world between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. It came first in self-governing British colonies in the Pacific, then in northern Europe, then across most Western states after the First World War, and in a second wave through Latin America, Africa and Asia. Long campaigns by women, supported by many men, changed public opinion until votes for women became a basic norm of democracy, recognised by the United Nations after 1945.

For most of history women were excluded from voting, even in places with elected assemblies; in ancient Athens only adult male citizens voted. There were scattered exceptions. In Sweden some tax-paying single women could vote during the Age of Liberty in the eighteenth century. In New Jersey, propertied unmarried women voted from 1776 until 1807, and in the new colony of Sierra Leone in 1792 women heads of household took part in elections. Among the Iroquois, women elders chose and could remove male chiefs, an example later admired by American suffragists.

Organised demands grew out of the anti-slavery and reform movements. In 1840 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, which refused to seat women delegates; in 1848 they helped call the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. In Britain the philosopher John Stuart Mill took the cause to Parliament from 1865. Small gains followed at the edges: the Wyoming Territory let women vote in 1869, the Isle of Man enfranchised women property owners in 1881, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had allowed women a vote in local elections as early as 1849. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in the United States in 1873, carried the demand to many countries.

In 1893 New Zealand, then a self-governing British colony, became the first to grant women the vote nationally, after a campaign led by Kate Sheppard. South Australia followed in 1895, also letting women stand for parliament, and the new Commonwealth of Australia gave women the federal vote in 1902, though many Indigenous Australians were excluded until 1962. In Europe the Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, led the way in 1906, and in 1907 its voters elected 19 women to parliament. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded in Berlin in 1904 to link national movements.

Campaigning took different forms. In Britain the militant suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903, challenged the gradualist suffragists. The First World War proved decisive in many countries, as women's war work weakened opposition. Canada began enfranchising women in 1917, Russia's Provisional Government did so the same year, and Germany followed in 1918, the Netherlands in 1919 and the United States in 1920. Britain gave the vote to women over 30 in 1918 and on equal terms in 1928; the separate campaigns are told in women's suffrage in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Turkey extended the vote to women in local elections in 1930 and national ones in 1934.

Between roughly 1930 and 1970 women's suffrage reached nearly all of Latin America, much of sub-Saharan Africa and the remaining European holdouts. France granted it in 1944, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights called for universal and equal suffrage. Some states moved much later. Switzerland gave women the federal vote only in 1971, Bhutan held its first national elections, open to women, in 2008, and Saudi Arabia let women vote and stand in local elections in 2015.

Our 1900, 1920 and 1945 maps show the world as the vote spread, from New Zealand and Australia before 1914 to most of Europe and North America by 1920.