Women's suffrage

The international movement that fought for women’s right to vote was known as the suffragist movement. Despite generally having a common goal, the movement developed differently throughout many decades and nations. From its beginnings, the women’s suffrage movement has been tied to the cause of universal suffrage, which refers to voting rights for people of all races, though previously it had been applied mainly to universal male suffrage. Some consider that the women’s suffrage movement was an offshoot of the universal suffrage movement, and in the United States it was allied with the abolitionist movement for a time. The first nations to enact women’s suffrage were New Zealand (1893) and Australia (1895 in the state of South Australia, 1902 throughout the country). Australia was also among the first to allow women to run for office.

Brief History

In 1791, French activist and playwright Olympe de Gouges (1748–93) published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, intended as a complement to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). The following year, English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. These were among the first calls for women’s rights, including voting rights, in the modern era. However, although these documents had an impact in intellectual circles, the idea was then considered too risky to pursue seriously.

In the United States, women’s suffrage expanded gradually, mostly at the state level. When the nation was first established, women were allowed voting rights in several states, but by 1807, the right had been rescinded throughout the country. Though a few activists spoke out in favor of women’s suffrage in the intervening years, the idea did not gain much traction with the public until the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Attendees drafted a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions demanding, among other things, the right to vote. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several western states and territories granted suffrage to women, but eastern states were reluctant to adopt the practice, and an amendment to allow women’s suffrage on a national level was defeated in the Senate in 1886.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, England had moved to the forefront of the suffragist movement. In 1903, the influential Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was born. In order to reach their objectives, the group strove to exert political pressure; they organized protest marches and hunger strikes and were often brutally repressed. As World War I broke out in 1914, however, this movement died down.

In 1918, Britain passed a law that permitted British women older than thirty to vote, and in 1928 the law was amended to include women from twenty-one years of age. Germany allowed women to vote beginning in 1918. In North America, the first nations to grant women voting rights were Canada (1918, except for the province of Quebec, which held out until 1940) and the United States, which granted women the vote in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The amendment had been drafted by activists Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) as early as 1878. Women of color also played an important role in gaining suffrage in the US and supporting women in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. While White women gained the right to vote in 1920, many women of color continued to be banned from voting. Mary McLeod Bethune, for example, led voter registration drives in her home state of Florida in the early 1920s to help more Black women get to the polls.

Latin America followed suit, with Ecuador granting women the right to vote in 1929 and Brazil and Uruguay in 1932. Guatemala allowed women to vote in 1946 but excluded illiterate women until twenty years later. Argentina granted women the right to vote in 1947, a cause linked to Eva Perón. Other Latin American nations granted voting rights to women in the following decades. Some European nations waited a long time to allow women’s suffrage. Women were banned from voting in Switzerland until 1971 and in Liechtenstein until 1984.

Overview

Momentous political, economic, and social changes arrived in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution during the late nineteenth century, which fueled an acceleration of the feminist movement into the late twentieth century. The expansion of the women’s rights movement involved specific social changes in the more technologically advanced nations. In early twentieth-century Britain, for example, almost 70 percent of adult single women between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four were wage earners. The integration of more women in the workplace in the United States, Great Britain, and other nations during World War I led to increased demands for voting rights and social equality. Greater numbers of women in the workforce reflected the need of industry and business to replace men who were at the war front, resulting in the empowerment of many women.

The main issues for women’s rights movements across nations generally remained the same from the beginning of the feminist movement: enfranchisement, increased access to and better quality of education for women, greater workplace opportunities, social equality of genders, and emancipation of women from their subordinate position.

English-speaking countries were at the forefront of the suffragist movement, which benefited as a whole from the growth of collective mobilization in advanced nations. According to many scholars, the suffragist movement grew more rapidly in those nations that had adopted the capitalist system, developed a strong middle class, and established democratic ideals through its institutional policies. However, the movement met with varying degrees of success across the mosaic of European nations. In northern European cultures, for example, a progressive mentality prevailed that offered relatively little resistance to the idea of voting rights for women. In Russia, women acquired voting rights after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which deeply changed the traditional social order. Central European countries such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as the European nations previously dominated by the Ottoman Empire, presented a very different situation. The fragmentation of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian, and Polish societies after World War I brought about progressive reforms to these cultures, which included voting rights of women, even though they had relatively little previous experience with the suffragist movement. In nations dominated by the Ottoman Empire until World War I—Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria—tradition remained too strong, and no suffragist movement formed, nor were there any immediate reforms regarding the situation of women.

By the twenty-first century, women’s suffrage had become the norm in democracies worldwide. Only one state, Vatican City, expressly denied women’s suffrage while allowing men the right to vote. This is because Vatican City’s head of state is the Pope, who is elected by the all-male College of Cardinals.

Bibliography

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McConnaughy, Corrine M. The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment. Cambridge UP, 2013.

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