Before the XIX century
In ancient Athens, often considered the cradle of democracy, only adult male citizens could vote. Women, slaves, and metics were deprived of this right. In the following centuries, Europe was ruled by monarchs, although various forms of parliamentarism emerged at different times. The high rank accorded to abbess (abbesses) in the Catholic Church allowed some women to sit and vote in national assemblies – as was the case with high-ranking abbesses in medieval Germany, who were considered independent princes of the empire. Their Protestant successors enjoyed the same privilege almost until the modern era. Marie Guyart, a French nun working among the First Nations of Canada in the 17th century, wrote in 1654 about the suffrage practices of Iroquois women: "These female chiefs... have the deciding vote in the councils. They make decisions there on an equal footing with their male counterparts, and are even delegated as the first ambassadors to the peace talks." The Iroquois, like many First Nations in North America, had a matrilineal kinship system. Property and ancestry were inherited through the female line. Elderly women voted to elect hereditary male chiefs and could dismiss them. Australian suffragette Catherine Helen Spence ran for office in 1897. South Australia, the first in the modern world, granted women the right to run for parliament in 1895. Marie Stritt (1855–1928), a German suffragist, co-founded the International Alliance of Women.
The first independent country to introduce women's suffrage was likely Sweden. Conditional suffrage for women existed there during the so-called Age of Liberty (1718–1772). In 1756, Lydia Taft became the first woman to legally vote in colonial America. This occurred under British rule in the Colony of Massachusetts. At the town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, she voted at least three times. Unmarried white women of property could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807. In the 1792 elections in Sierra Leone, then a new British colony, all deaf families could vote, one-third of whom were women of African descent. Before the 19th century, some countries granted women the vote on a partial or temporary basis.
The XIX century
Female descendants of the Bounty mutineers, residing on the Pitcairn Islands, had the right to vote as early as 1838. This right was retained and transferred when, in 1856, the community resettled on Norfolk Island, now an external territory of Australia. The development of modern democracy typically involved granting suffrage first to men and only later to women.
An exception to this rule was the Kingdom of Hawaii, where universal suffrage was introduced in 1840 without mention of gender. However, this situation changed in 1852, when a constitutional amendment stripped women of the right to vote and additionally introduced a property qualification for men. The ideological foundations for the first women's rights convention in the United States, held in Seneca Falls in 1848, had been laid eight years earlier in London. It was there, during the World Anti-Slavery Convention, that Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott. This conference became symbolic because she refused to admit Mott and other U.S. delegates solely on the basis of their gender. In 1851, Stanton met temperance activist Susan B. Anthony, and the two soon joined forces in the long-standing struggle for American women's political empowerment.
In 1868, Anthony actively encouraged working women in the printing and sewing industries in New York to form their own associations, as they were systematically excluded from men's unions. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress, she convinced the committee to advocate for suffrage and equal pay for equal work, although the men present at the conference ultimately removed the mention of voting from the final documents. Despite resistance at the national level, in 1869, women in the Wyoming Territory gained the full right to both vote and run for office. Later American suffrage groups often differed in tactics, as one organization advocated campaigns in individual states while another focused on an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The XX century
Following the formation of the Australian Federation in 1901, the new federal government passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, which allowed women British subjects to vote and stand for election on the same basis as men. However, many Indigenous Australians remained excluded from voting at the federal level until 1962.
The first place in Europe to introduce women's suffrage was the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906; it also became the first place in continental Europe to implement racially equal suffrage for women. In the 1907 parliamentary elections, Finnish voters elected 19 women, becoming the first female members of a representative parliament. This was one of many self-government actions in this autonomous Russian province that led to conflict with the Russian governor of Finland and ultimately to the formation of the Finnish nation in 1917. In the years leading up to World War I, women in Norway also gained the right to vote. During the war, Denmark, Russia, Germany, and Poland also recognized women's right to vote. Canada granted the vote to some women in 1917; women gained the right to vote on the same terms as men in 1920, meaning that men and women of certain races or statuses were excluded from voting until 1960, when universal adult suffrage was achieved. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 granted the vote to British women over 30. Dutch women gained passive suffrage (the ability to run for parliament) after the revision of the Dutch constitution in 1917, and active suffrage (the ability to elect representatives) in 1919.
American women gained these rights on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment (the Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured voting rights for racial minorities). Irish women won the same voting rights as men in the constitution of the Irish Free State in 1922. In 1928, British women gained the right to vote on the same terms as men, meaning for those aged 21 and older. Women's suffrage in Turkey was introduced in 1930 for local elections and in 1934 for national elections. Until French women received the right to vote in July 1944 by Charles de Gaulle's government-in-exile (with a vote of 51 in favor and 16 against), France was the only Western country for about a decade that did not allow women to vote, at least in local elections.
The XXI century
One of the latest examples of global recognition of women's full suffrage was Bhutan, where the process was finalized in 2008. This coincided with a historic event for the country – the holding of Bhutan's first universal suffrage, a milestone in the kingdom's democratization process. Saudi Arabia later embarked on even more radical changes. Then-King Abdullah, responding to a growing wave of domestic and international criticism, and also under the influence of the determination and activism of local feminist groups, issued a decree granting women political rights.
As a result, in the 2015 local elections, Saudi women were able, for the first time in their country's history, not only to cast their votes but also to run for public office. This was a landmark moment for women's rights in the region, ending a period in which Saudi Arabia remained one of the last countries in the world to deny women the right to participate in the electoral process.
