Women's Suffrage
The campaign that took the vote for women from unthinkable to universal in roughly one lifetime, and rewrote what a democracy is understood to mean.
For most of the nineteenth century, extending the franchise meant arguing about which men should have it: property owners, then tenants, then workers. The claim that the category itself was wrong, that half the adult population had been excluded for a reason nobody could defend once it was stated plainly, was treated as an eccentricity even by reformers. It went from eccentricity to near-universal practice in about seventy years, which makes it one of the fastest reversals of a settled political assumption in history.
Who went first
New Zealand in 1893 was the first self-governing country to give women the national vote, though not the right to stand for parliament until 1919. South Australia followed in 1894 and included the right to stand. Finland in 1906 was first in Europe and first anywhere to grant both at once, and elected nineteen women the following year. Wyoming Territory had done it in 1869, partly to attract settlers.
Then the main wave: Russia in 1917, Britain and Germany in 1918, the United States with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Britain's 1918 act was partial, covering women over thirty who met a property qualification, which enfranchised the respectable and excluded the young factory workers whose war work was supposedly the justification. Equal terms came in 1928.
The stragglers are instructive. France waited until 1944, Italy and Japan until 1945, and Switzerland until a federal referendum in 1971, with the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, forced by the federal court in 1990. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote in municipal elections in 2015.
Two strategies
The British movement split over method, and the split is the most instructive thing about it.
The suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett, worked constitutionally for fifty years: petitions, lobbying, private members' bills, and patience. The suffragettes, organized by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters after 1903, concluded that patience was being mistaken for acquiescence and turned to deeds not words: heckling ministers, smashing windows, arson against empty buildings, and hunger strikes in prison, which the government answered with force-feeding and then with the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913, releasing weakened prisoners and rearresting them once they recovered. Emily Davison died days after stepping in front of the King's horse at the 1913 Derby.
Whether militancy helped is still argued. It made the issue impossible to ignore and it hardened opponents; the most defensible reading is that the two wings worked as a pair, with the militants creating urgency and the constitutionalists supplying a respectable body for government to concede to.
The American movement had the same division in gentler form, between Carrie Chapman Catt's state-by-state Winning Plan and Alice Paul's picketing of the White House during wartime, which produced arrests, hunger strikes, and exactly the publicity intended.
The war argument, carefully
It is often said that women got the vote as thanks for the First World War. That is too generous to the governments involved. What the war did was make the existing argument untenable. States had conscripted, mobilized, and moved millions of women into munitions plants, transport, and offices while claiming they lacked the capacity for citizenship. The position could not be held, and governments that needed national unity for reconstruction preferred to concede rather than face a resumed campaign.
The echo
Two qualifications keep this from being a simple story of progress.
Formal enfranchisement is not access. Black women in the American South were covered by the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and kept from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is forty-five years of a right that existed only on paper.
And the vote was the beginning of the argument rather than its conclusion; equal pay, credit in one's own name, and legal control over marriage and property took another two generations in most countries.
Still, the central fact is worth sitting with. A woman born in Britain in 1890 grew up in a country where the proposition that she might vote was a joke in the newspapers, and died in one where the idea of excluding her would have been unintelligible. Political facts that feel permanent are frequently about eighty years old.