The History of Women's Suffrage

Podcast Transcript

The earliest forms of democracy go back over 2000 years to Ancient Greece. While this early system did have voting, not everyone could vote.

In fact, most people couldn’t vote.

Voting was limited to free men and then only property-holding men.

The expansion of voting rights to women took centuries, but by the 19th century, a movement was taking place in many countries that eventually led to the widespread extension of the franchise to women in the 20th.

Learn more about women’s suffrage and how women got the right to vote on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

I’ve often wondered if you took 10,000 random people from around the world and teleported them to a new planet, what sort of civilization they would build.

I think that there are many things that were common all over the world in centuries past that we would never even think of adopting today.

I’m pretty sure these 10,000 people wouldn’t want to select one of them as a monarch. They could create a democracy. I’m pretty sure the idea of slavery and owning other humans wouldn’t be considered, and I’m pretty sure that in this democracy, everyone would be given an equal vote.

Before I begin ,I want to address something that confuses many people: the word suffrage.

On YouTube, you can find on-the-street interviews where people are asked if they are for women’s suffrage, and many of them say….no.

They aren’t against women voting. They just confuse the word suffrage with the word suffering. Suffrage isn’t a term that is used that often outside of historical context.

The English words suffrage and suffering both come from Latin words, but they do not have the same root.

The word suffrage comes from the Latin word suffragium which has several different meanings, all of which deal with voting or providing support, but may have come from the word for a voting tablet.

The word suffering comes from the Latin sufferre, which means to bear or endure.

So, they are totally different things, even if they share the first few letters.

The idea of giving everyone an equal vote is a bedrock assumption of today’s world, but it wasn’t always the case.

Whenever some form of democracy existed, wherever it might have occurred, the vote wasn’t extended to women.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t powerful women. There were, and I’ve covered many of them on this podcast, but they were usually powerful because they were royalty or via powerful sons or husbands.

Among the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, clan mothers played a significant role in selecting male leaders and influencing council decisions.

In parts of Africa, women’s councils and market associations had considerable sway over communal and political matters.

These weren’t formal democracies so much as tribal decision-making systems.

The first recorded cases of women voting took place in the 16th century.

In some European regions, voting rights were tied to land ownership rather than gender, allowing women who owned property to participate in local elections or assemblies.

In Swedish cities during the 17th century, widowed or unmarried women who were property owners could vote in municipal elections, though these rights were revoked in the 18th century.

Likewise, property requirements for voting in the American colonies occasionally enabled widows or single women with land to vote in town meetings. However, such instances were rare and often rescinded as voting rights became more explicitly male-oriented.

In 1707, the Isle of Man granted voting rights to women property owners for parliamentary elections, making it one of the earliest known instances of women’s suffrage in a formal legislative context.

The philosophical foundations for extending the vote to women began in the 18th century.

Enlightenment thinkers began discussing ideas of equality and citizenship, inspiring early feminist arguments. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In it, she argued for women’s political inclusion, though it stopped short of directly advocating for voting rights.

In France during the Revolution, the debate over universal suffrage included some discussions about women’s rights. Olympe de Gouges published The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, calling for political equality, but her ideas were largely ignored.

Women participated actively in revolutionary clubs and protests, but formal suffrage was denied.

The French Revolution’s motto of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality fell far short of their stated goals.

The women’s suffrage movement in the United States can trace its origins to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, this event marked the formal beginning of the American women’s suffrage movement.

The Declaration of Sentiments was signed by many of the attendees, which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and listed grievances against the injustices faced by women.

The early women’s suffrage movement was closely tied to the temperance and abolition movements.

The temperance movement aimed to reduce alcohol consumption, as excessive drinking was seen as a major cause of domestic violence, poverty, and social instability and was seen as a women’s issue.

Many women became involved because alcohol abuse often directly harmed their families and limited their economic and social well-being.

One of the early advocates for a woman’s right to vote was Susan B. Anthony. She was a Quaker, which was the religion of many early Suffragettes as they held a firm belief in equality. She was also a supporter of the Temperance Movement.

When she attended a temperance conference in New York State, she was denied the ability to speak because she was a woman. This snub drove her into the issue of women’s suffrage.

She and her friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, went on to form the New York Women’s State Temperance Society as well as the Women’s Loyal National League, which was an abolitionist group.

These early advocates became known as suffragettes.

The ties between women’s suffrage and abolition were one that made sense. Most abolitionists supported women’s suffrage and vice versa.

Oddly enough, the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments which allowed freed slaves the right to vote, caused a major division in the women’s suffrage movement.

Some activists argued that securing voting rights for Black men was the immediate priority, given the severe racial discrimination and violence they faced, particularly in the post-Civil War South.

Others, notably Stanton and Anthony, felt that extending voting rights solely to men—regardless of race—perpetuated gender inequality.

Stanton and Anthony made controversial and racially charged statements, expressing frustration that uneducated Black men could gain the vote while educated white women could not.

This alienated former allies in the abolitionist movement and caused the suffrage movement to split.

In 1869, the women’s suffrage movement formally split into two factions:

The National Woman Suffrage Association was led by Stanton and Anthony. This group opposed the 15th Amendment and focused on achieving a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. It often took a more radical and confrontational approach.

The other was the American Woman Suffrage Association. Led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others, this group supported the 15th Amendment, believing it was a step toward broader suffrage. They focused on state-level campaigns for women’s voting rights and emphasized collaboration with male allies.

The division weakened the suffrage movement by splitting its resources and leadership at a time when unity was crucial.

In 1890, after twenty years of separation, the two organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

The merger of the organizations brought a renewed focus to the issue.

The 1890s saw advancements in the ability for women to vote in other countries as well.

In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote.

In 1902, Australia granted women the right to vote, but not Aboriginal women. For the next several decades, Aboriginal people were granted the right to vote on a state-by-state basis.

In the UK, the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum with the formation of groups like the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897, led by Millicent Fawcett. The more militant Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, began in 1903.

Finland in 1906 became the first country in Europe to grant full suffrage, allowing women to vote and run for office. Norway followed in 1913, and Denmark and Iceland followed in 1915.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, women gained suffrage under the new Bolshevik government.

In the United States, the First World War shifted public opinion toward women’s suffrage. The war highlighted women’s contributions to society as they took on roles traditionally held by men.

In the United States, after decades of work by suffragettes, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919, and then by the Senate just two weeks later on June 4.

By this time, fifteen states, mostly in the western US, had already given women the full right to vote with many more granting limit suffrage in different types of elections.

Passage of the amendment would require the approval of 36 states.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan all ratified the amendment in just a few days. Technically, Illinois voted a few hours before Wisconsin, but Wisconsin presented its ratification before Illinois, thus becoming the first state to ratify.

By mid-1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, leaving it one state short of the required 36.

The decision came down to Tennessee, where the state legislature held a dramatic vote in August 1920.

If it didn’t pass in Tennessee, it was unlikely to get another southern state to vote for ratification.

The Tennessee Senate had narrowly approved the amendment, but the House of Representatives vote was deadlocked, 48 to 48. In order for Tennessee to ratify the amendment, passage was required in both houses of the state legislature.

After an initial tie, on the last day of voting, on the last state that could ratify the amendment, one of the representatives, Harry T. Burn, broke with the block against it and cast the deciding vote in favor of ratification.

The final vote was 49 to 47.

The 19th Amendment was officially ratified on August 26, 1920, and American women were given full voting rights.

Burn later revealed that his decision was heavily influenced by a letter from his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn.

In her letter, she urged him to “be a good boy” and support ratification, noting that granting women the right to vote was the right thing to do.

There was still a long way to go for women in other democratic countries.

The United Kingdom finally granted all women the right to vote in 1928. Women gained full voting equality with men, with the voting age set at 21 and over for all adults.

They had previously been given limited rights in 1918 when women aged 30 and over with property qualifications gained the right to vote.

The adoption of women’s suffrage accelerated globally after World War II due to shifts in societal norms, international pressure, and the broader push for human rights.

The United Nations promoted gender equality, with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirming that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.”

International efforts to standardize human rights placed pressure on nations to extend suffrage to women.

Many countries gaining independence in the mid-20th century included universal suffrage in their constitutions, seeing it as a hallmark of modern governance.

Other countries took much longer.

Women gained the vote in France in 1944 due to their contributions to the resistance during the German occupation.

Women were enfranchised in Italy in 1945 after Mussolini’s regime fell, fully participating in the 1946 referendum.

One of the last European countries to grant women the right to vote was Switzerland, which didn’t allow women to vote in federal elections until 1971.

India granted women the right to vote at independence in 1947, and China did that same year.

In Africa, Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence, included women’s voting rights from the start in 1957.

Full suffrage in South Africa was extended to all women, regardless of race, with the end of apartheid in 1994.

Today, no country explicitly denies women the right to vote based solely on their gender. Women have formal voting rights in every recognized country that actually allows people to vote.

The goals of the 19th-century suffragettes have been an almost universal success. They didn’t just change their country; they ended up changing the entire world.