Women's Suffrage

Abstract

This article presents the concept of women's suffrage and its political importance as the most visible feature of the larger historical movement for ending women's subordination to men that we now call feminism. The first section, ‘Women's Suffrage and Democratization,’ discusses the meaning of the vote to women in societies that were undergoing democratization, but enfranchising men alone. A second section, ‘History of Women's Suffrage,’ examines the first demands for enfranchising women, looking briefly at Europe (especially France) and the United States from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, and at the first ‘neo-European’ countries to enfranchise women at the local and national levels—New Zealand and Australia. A third section, ‘The International Woman Suffrage Alliance,’ looks at the development of sustained campaigns for women's suffrage in European countries and North America at the national and transnational levels in the early twentieth century. Section four traces the spread of—and reactions to—women's suffrage enactment from the 1920s to the 1950s, taking note of the campaigns in Latin America, and women's enfranchisement in South Asia, China, and Japan and other parts of the world. The article finally sketches the development of historical scholarship concerning women's suffrage since the 1960s.