Women and the Right to Vote

Amidst the election activity earlier this year, I was having a conversation with my next door neighbor (who moved here from Sweden). He was asking me questions to try to understand how our country’s campaign and election process came to be the way it is today. This got me thinking about when women gained the right to vote in various countries. Below is when our ancestors and counterparts around the world gained this right- a right which our generation can’t imagine not having.

1893 New Zealand
1902 Australia
1906 Finland (was a duchy of Russia at the time)
1913 Norway
1915 Denmark, Iceland
1917 Canada (province of Ontario in 1884, by 1917 the rest of Canadian women except for Quebec who followed in 1940 and “First Canadians”, Native Indians, in 1960)
1918 Austria, Russia, Germany, Poland (first woman elected to Parliament in 1919)
1919 Netherlands (yet first woman elected to a political office was in 1917)
1920 U.S.A.
1921 Sweden
1924 Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan
1926 Turkey
1928 England, Ireland
1931 Spain
1944 France (first extended to Parisian women in 1871, later revoked)
1945 Italy
1946 Algeria
1947 Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Argentina
1949 China
1950 India, Haiti
1963 Morocco, Iran
1971 Switzerland
1976 Portugal
1994 South Africa (for black women, was 1930 for white women)
2005 Kuwait
2008 Bhutan

Source = Grolier Encyclopedia

In the U.S.A. the petitioning and demonstrating formalized in 1756 and it took 164 years of insistence and protests (some enduring imprisonment and torture) to gain this right.
In Lebanon today only women with proof of an elementary school education are allowed to vote (yet voting is mandatory for men of any educational level). In the United Arab Emirates and Brunei (a sultanate) neither gender is allowed to vote, although the E.A.E. has announced this may change in 2010.
Only 2 countries today allow men to vote but not women: Saudi Arabia and the Vatican City (where the only election is that of the Papal Conclave, wherein only male candidates can run for the position of Cardinal).

I was touched by the CBS interview of a 106 year old American Catholic nun living in Rome. Sister Cecilia Gaudette was 18 years old and living in New Hampshire when American women gained the right to vote. Although the online absentee ballot form’s date of birth field only went back to 1905, she persisted by sending in her identification, determined to contribute her vote in this presidential election.

My own aunt is a Dominican nun in New York. At age 88, she is one of the youngest of the Queen of Rosary Convent residents. Remembering their childhood years when women were not allowed what the United Nations has categorized as a “basic human right”, these 100 or so nuns, equipped in walkers, wheelchairs, and whatever it took, waited in the rain to board several city buses to go experience the gratification of putting their ballots in the box at the poll.

Thank you to the women who came before us who made our voting right possible!

Copyright 2008 Amy Mosher http://livelifewellinfo.blogspot.com/