women’s suffrage, the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections.

Overview

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Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States, but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913). In Sweden and the United States they had voting rights in some local elections.

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World War I and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections. Those countries included Soviet Russia (1917); Canada, Germany, Austria, and Poland (1918); Czechoslovakia (1919); the United States and Hungary (1920); Great Britain (1918 and 1928); Burma (Myanmar; 1922); Ecuador (1929); South Africa (1930); Brazil, Uruguay, and Thailand (1932); Turkey and Cuba (1934); and the Philippines (1937). In a number of those countries, women were initially granted the right to vote in municipal or other local elections or perhaps in provincial elections; only later were they granted the right to vote in national elections.

Immediately after World War II, France, Italy, Romania, Yugoslavia, and China were added to the group. Full suffrage for women was introduced in India by the constitution in 1949; in Pakistan women received full voting rights in national elections in 1956. In another decade the total number of countries that had given women the right to vote reached more than 100, partly because nearly all countries that gained independence after World War II guaranteed equal voting rights to men and women in their constitutions. By 1971 Switzerland allowed women to vote in federal and most cantonal elections, and in 1973 women were granted full voting rights in Syria. The United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.”

Historically, the United Kingdom and the United States provide characteristic examples of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Great Britain

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In Great Britain woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the 1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet. The first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865, and in 1867 Mill presented to Parliament this society’s petition, which demanded the vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. The Reform Bill of 1867 contained no provision for woman suffrage, but meanwhile woman suffrage societies were forming in most of the major cities of Britain, and in the 1870s these organizations submitted to Parliament petitions demanding the franchise for women and containing a total of almost three million signatures.

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The succeeding years saw the defeat of every major suffrage bill brought before Parliament. This was chiefly because neither of the leading politicians of the day, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, cared to affront Queen Victoria’s implacable opposition to the women’s movement. In 1869, however, Parliament did grant women taxpayers the right to vote in municipal elections, and in the ensuing decades women became eligible to sit on county and city councils. The right to vote in parliamentary elections was still denied to women, however, despite the considerable support that existed in Parliament for legislation to that effect. In 1897 the various suffragist societies united into one National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, thus bringing a greater degree of coherence and organization to the movement. Out of frustration at the lack of governmental action, however, a segment of the woman suffrage movement became more militant under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. After the return to power of the Liberal Party in 1906, the succeeding years saw the defeat of seven suffrage bills in Parliament. As a consequence, many suffragists became involved in increasingly violent actions as time went on. These women militants, or suffragettes, as they were known, were sent to prison and continued their protests there by engaging in hunger strikes.

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Meanwhile, public support of the woman suffrage movement grew in volume, and public demonstrations, exhibitions, and processions were organized in support of women’s right to vote. When World War I began, the woman suffrage organizations shifted their energies to aiding the war effort, and their effectiveness did much to win the public wholeheartedly to the cause of woman suffrage. The need for the enfranchisement of women was finally recognized by most members of Parliament from all three major parties, and the resulting Representation of the People Act was passed by the House of Commons in June 1917 and by the House of Lords in February 1918. Under this act, all women age 30 or over received the complete franchise. An act to enable women to sit in the House of Commons was enacted shortly afterward. In 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21 to place women voters on an equal footing with male voters.