Women & the Vote - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Women & the Vote

Dawn Langan Teele

There are four contexts in which women have won voting rights: as part of a uni-
versal reform for all citizens (15 percent of countries that granted women suffrage);
imposed by a conqueror or colonial metropole (28 percent); gradually, after some
men had been enfranchised (44 percent); or a hybrid category, often in the wake of
re-democratization (14 percent). This essay outlines the global patterns of these re-
forms and argues that in a plurality of cases, where women’s suffrage was gradual,
enfranchisement depended on an electoral logic. Politicians subject to competition
who believed women would, on average, support their party, supported reform. The
suffrage movement provided information, and a potential mobilization apparatus,
for politicians to draw on after the vote was extended. Together, both activism and
electoral incentives were imperative for reform, providing impor tant lessons for fem-
inist mobilization today.

V oting, either by voice or by secret ballot, has been around for a long time.

But the idea that all citizens living under democratic governments should
have the right to vote, regardless of sex, was once radical for both its class
politics and its gender politics. Although many autonomous European communi-
ties used voting to determine local policy, voting as a way to organize political con-
tests in large nation-states really began to take hold in the late eighteenth century.
With the exception of France–which decreed that all men could vote during its
(hastily reversed) first revolution in 1789–most of the first nations to adopt elec-
toral governance extended the vote only to a select group of men. Typically, these
men were from the landed elite and often had to be “householders,” meaning that
they were the person legally responsible for others that resided in their household.
Under these rules, sons who lived at home may not have been allowed an inde-
pendent vote, and in some places, such as the United Kingdom and Sweden, pos-
session of more than one domicile (for example, a country house) allowed male
householders an additional vote for each place where their property was located.
Since plural voting arrangements gave men with more property more official say,
social class and sex determined early voting rights in a concrete way.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, many countries in Western Eu-
rope and the Americas experienced economic growth due to imperialism (which
thrived on resource extraction and slave labor) and industrialization (which

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thrived on primary goods from the new worlds and poorly paid labor of men,
women, and children). In places where voting rights were tied to specific levels of
wealth, or to educational or literacy requirements, men could gradually acquire
voting rights as their incomes rose above the threshold or as they became edu-
cated.1 Although there are a few exceptions, women, even if they met income or
educational requirements, were typically unable to select their representatives or
represent others in government.2 By the mid-nineteenth century, the few places
where women had previously cast ballots (like in New Jersey or present-day Qué-
bec) rewrote their rules to make explicit that only men were included. The illib-
erality of the so-called liberal regimes of the nineteenth century has thus been an
important topic of study among gender scholars.3

Popular movements for men’s and women’s franchise rights began to perco-
late after the 1840s, and in 1848, Switzerland became the first country to grant a
lasting manhood franchise (though, ironically, it was the last major European
country to allow women to vote, in 1971, trailed only by Liechtenstein).4 In coun-
try after country the connection between property and “interest,” that is, between
land ownership and a philosophically decreed legitimate stake in governance, was
shucked off in favor of a system of one man, one vote. Of course, most countries
did not go so far as to say that all men could vote.5 Many countries that moved to a
broad male franchise continued to exclude ethnic and racial minorities. And oth-
er groups that were considered dependents–like children and wards of the state,
convicts, or the mentally ill–could easily have their voting rights taken away. By
the logic of economic dependence, women, who were legal property of first their
fathers and then their husbands, were necessarily excluded. In most countries, if
a woman needed to contract or earn wages, the signature of a man was crucial.
If a woman committed a crime, the men of her family could be held responsible.
Although women were considered citizens (as jurisprudence and court cases in
many countries established), their duties were often different, and their rights
were circumscribed.6 But during the course of the nineteenth century, the gradu-
al acceptance of women’s legal personhood, and the collapse of the householder
as the basis for male political participation, cleared the legal hurdles that had pre-
vented women’s enfranchisement. The rest, as they say, is political history.

This essay paints, with broad strokes, the global picture of women and the
vote. I identify four different institutional settings in which women were enfran-
chised and outline the global and regional patterns of enfranchisement. After
briefly summarizing the big debates about causes of women’s suffrage, I argue that
for the largest set of countries, electoral politics and women’s activism were cru-
cial determinants of the timing of women’s enfranchisement. I make the case that
feminists today have a lot to learn from the failures and successes of the wom-
en’s suffrage activists. Far from being a mere bourgeois women’s movement that
serves to embarrass rather than inspire, it bears stressing that in most countries,

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesWomen & the Vote

suffrage activism encompassed women from across the class and racial and eth-
nic spectra. The way that movement leaders at times successfully corralled these
different sets of actors, all with different interests, and sometimes gave into baser
impulses in their single-minded quest for the vote, are informative for the inter-
sectional politics of the twenty-first century.

T here are many levels of government in which elections can be used to

pick leaders: from local school board elections, to municipal or state level
elections, to national parliamentary or congressional elections, to super-
national elections for the European Union. Although in most countries a single
national body determines who has the right to vote at these different electoral lev-
els, some federal countries–like the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany,
and Switzerland–allow subnational governments to delineate voting rules. Of-
ten, governments tested the waters of women’s electoral participation by allow-
ing women to partake in local elections prior to extending national voting rights.
These lower levels of enfranchisement may have been “concessions” to stave off
more encompassing demands for gender equality, or they may have served a trial
function, allowing politicians to observe and learn more about women’s political
engagement and decision-making.

In addition to the multiple sites where voting occurs, voting rights can also
take on multiple forms. “Limited male suffrage” rules allowed only some men to
vote, while “manhood suffrage” allowed all men to participate. Many countries–
even those that had granted manhood franchise–first experimented with women
voters under limited rules, for example by allowing wealthy women to vote pri-
or to opening the polls to all women (Norway and the United Kingdom). If the
rules were applied in the same way for men and women, then we say that wom-
en had “equal suffrage.” If all adult men and women could vote, we call this “uni-
versal suffrage.” As several scholars have noted, countries in Latin America that
used educational or literacy requirements to determine voting rights, or the Unit-
ed States, Canada, and South Africa, which maintained racial exclusions until the
1960s or later, allowed women to partake in equal suffrage throughout most of the
twentieth century, but did not achieve universal suffrage until relatively recently.

I n 1880, virtually no women had access to the electoral franchise at the nation-

al level. The first movers included the Isle of Man, which allowed women to
vote for its independent legislature, the Tynwald, beginning in 1881; several
states on America’s Western frontier (which had authority to grant suffrage at all
levels of election); and the semisovereign governments in New Zealand and Aus-
tralia. Beginning in the 1910s, equal suffrage rights–that is, women’s right to vote
on the same terms as men–proceeded at a quick clip.7 By 1930, more than thir-
ty countries had extended the equal franchise and, since 1950, every new consti-

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149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

Figure 1
Regional Patterns of Women’s Enfranchisement

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Note: The y-axis plots the number of countries that extended equal suffrage–women’s suffrage
on the same (sometimes exclusive) terms as men–in each decade. Overall, 177 countries are
included. Source: Author’s calculations; and Dawn Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political
Origins of the Women’s Vote (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018).

tution that provided for male franchise rights has included women on the same
terms.8

There were distinctive regional patterns of enfranchisement around the world.
Figure 1 presents the number of countries in each region that extended equal suf-
frage to women by decade. The charts are organized by the earliest average region-
al date of enfranchisement to the latest. Since some regions (like North America)
have fewer countries than other regions (like Europe and Central Asia), the lines
will be lower for the whole region, but the figure highlights key moments of change.
The North American and European countries were the first to rapidly expand
franchise rights to women, with high growth rates beginning in 1910 and again
around the end of World War II (when France, Spain, and Italy enfranchised
women). The early European surge includes Finland, the first to extend univer-
sal voting rights in 1911, and a large number of its neighboring countries that ag-
glomerated into the Soviet Union at the end of World War I. Suffrage adoption

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesWomen & the Vote

Figure 2
Paths to Women’s Equal Suffrage by Region

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, ,

Note: The x-axis shows the fraction of all the world’s countries that are in each region. The
y-axis shows the fraction of countries in each region that followed each path toward enfran-
chisement. Source: Dawn Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018).

took off in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as the Latin American countries, in the
1940s. Nearly every Latin American country had granted women voting rights by
the 1960s, but several countries in East Asia and the Pacific held out until later in
the century.9 Sub-Saharan Africa saw a large expansion in women’s rights around
the 1950s, which peaked with the massive decolonization efforts and shift toward
independence in the 1960s.

In addition to regional diversity in the timing of enfranchisement, there were
several different pathways that countries took to women’s suffrage: universal, im-
posed, gradualist, and hybrid (see Figure 2).10 In the universalist path, countries
granted universal franchise to men and women at the same time, the first time suf-
frage was extended. The imposed route occurred when a colonial metropole de-
creed women’s suffrage in its territories, or when suffrage was insisted upon by an
occupying power, for example at the end of a war. The gradualist route implies an

149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

alternation between men’s and women’s inclusion. There are several variants of
this, but typically countries went from limited male, to manhood, to universal suf-
frage.11 Finally, there are hybrid cases where countries may have allowed some men
to vote early on, and then a new constitution implemented after regime change
(or after periods of dictatorship) allowed for universal suffrage. In the world as a
whole, universal franchise was implemented in 15 percent of countries that grant-
ed women’s suffrage, while the hybrid category applies to 14 percent of countries.
Imposed suffrage was second most common (28 percent), while gradual enfran-
chisement was the most common pathway (about 44 percent of today’s countries).
Figure 2 reveals striking differences in the pathway to enfranchisement by re-
gion. For example, the most common route to enfranchisement in East Asia and
the Pacific countries, and nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, which were heavily col-
onized, was by imposition. After independence, many of the later democratizers
in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as in South Asia, went for universal extension
in one fell swoop. We see too that the gradualist path dominated North America,
Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe and Central Asia,
a pattern that is related to early moves in some of these countries toward limited
male franchise rights. The varying regional patterns of enfranchisement hint at
the notion that women’s enfranchisement was related to the conditions of impe-
rialism and the overall trajectory of democratization within countries, although
we know a lot less about imposed suffrage than we should.

Figure 3 provides a final way of visualizing the path toward suffrage over time,
demonstrating the historical prominence of the gradualist path–most countries
that adopted suffrage for women had already extended some form of voting rights
to men–and of the imposed path, suggesting that once the first democracies ad-
opted suffrage they were not shy to impose these values on the world at large, par-
ticularly in their imperial outposts.

O ver the years, there have been many social-scientific arguments forward-

ed to explain variations in the timing of women’s suffrage, including that
women won voting rights because of their participation in war, that en-
franchisement happened naturally as a result of industrialization, that it was an
apolitical gift when the stakes were low, or that it stemmed from men’s political
needs.12 Typically, these theories evolved from thinking about cross-national dif-
ferences in the timing of suffrage, rather than from thinking about specific cases
of women’s enfranchisement.

Historians and most feminist political scientists and sociologists who have
studied suffrage extensions in specific cases give more credence to the impor-
tance of women’s mobilization for the vote, both within domestic movements
and within international feminist organizations.13 What I suggest in my recent
book Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote is that while there

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesWomen & the Vote

Figure 3
The Evolution of Equal Suffrage around the World

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Note: The y-axis shows the cumulative number of countries that had extended equal suffrage
to women (sometimes with exclusions) in each decade in each pathway. Gradual cases gave
some men voting rights before women. Imposed cases were often colonies or countries defeated
in war. Universal cases extended the vote at the same time to men and women. And hybrid
cases are combinations of the other pathways. Source: Dawn Teele, Forging the Franchise: The
Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018).

may not be a unified cause of women’s enfranchisement, specific logics may have
emerged within particular pathways. I focus on explaining gradualist cases: that
is, women’s enfranchisement in a context where some men had already attained
the right to vote. In this set of countries, I argue that heightened electoral compe-
tition could provide an incentive for politicians to reform electoral law. When the
strategy of the women’s movement provided information consistent with certain
parties’ electoral needs–in other words, when some parties believed they would
benefit electorally from the votes of mobilized women–electoral competition, in
combination with a strong movement, produced reform.14

The electoral argument helps to make sense of a series of puzzles that crop up
in country-specific accounts of enfranchisement related to the timing of reform
and the political alliances that brought reform to bear. For example, why did some

149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

countries resist reform in one year but then accept it the very following legislative
session? Well, this could happen if an election was on the horizon and one of the
vulnerable but powerful parties hoped to win with women’s votes (such was the
case with the Liberal Party in Québec in 1939).15

In addition to making sense of quick reversals regarding suffrage legislation,
the electoral politics argument also helps to combat the idea that conservative ide-
ology was what prevented women from winning the vote. Indeed, if we look at
which party was in power when suffrage was granted in thirty-two countries from
Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia, we find that the ideology of the head of
state was nearly evenly split between left, center, and right.16 That is to say, con-
servatives were just as likely to preside over suffrage reform as centrist liberals
or as far leftists. (In Latin America, however, where the suffrage extensions oc-
curred slightly later than in Europe, a leftist was the head of state in seven of the
twelve countries for which I have information.) Why would conservatives sup-
port women’s votes? Several electoral reasons emerge, including that they might
try to put their stamp on a reform they knew was coming down the line so as not
to lose out in the next election (the strategy of the conservatives in federal Cana-
da in 1917–1918). But perhaps more important, in many countries, conservatives
thought they could win the lion’s share of women’s votes (as in Chile, where the
Catholic Church was believed to have, in the disfranchised women’s population,
a “feminine reserve”).17

Finally, electoral competition also helps to explain why many of the initial ex-
tensions of voting rights to women were limited: that is, on different terms than
men, often requiring women to be wealthier or older than men had to be to vote.
Such was the case in the first Norwegian suffrage extension in 1907 to only prop-
ertied women, and the 1918 reform in the United Kingdom that limited the vote to
wealthier, older women.18 When conservative parties could be forced to agree to
reform, they would only do so under conditions that they thought would not put
them at an extreme disadvantage. This often included demanding that only wom-
en who were potential supporters of their party (and hence would act as a force for
stability) be included.

T he age-old question for scholars of suffrage is: did the women suffragists

matter and to what extent? It can be difficult to argue that women were
responsible for their own political emancipation because women did not
take up arms against the state in order to win the vote, but instead had to earn
it in the context of electoral and legislative politics. This can make it seem like
women were merely there to march in flowing gowns for a public that had already
changed its mind about women’s rights. But to the extent that we can say any so-
cial movement mattered for securing whatever particular right, it is definitely safe
to say that the suffrage movement was important.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesWomen & the Vote

Scholars disagree about the way in which the movement mattered, offering
explanations like the use of public demonstrations (in the United Kingdom and
Switzerland), the collection of large-scale petitions (in New Zealand, the Unit-
ed States, and Sweden), the pressure of the international feminist movement (in
Latin America), the deployment of insider tactics like corralling legislators and
log-rolling, changing public opinion, or doing favors for politicians or campaigns.
Many scholars have noted that the places with the largest movements were in the
first wave of enfranchising countries, and that the use of public tactics like hold-
ing rallies and marches was correlated with early enfranchisement.19 The late en-
franchisement in places like France and Switzerland and in many Latin American
countries are thus partly attributable to the more circumspect actions of wishful
suffragists.

Yet the fact that male legislators in elected chambers presided over reforms has
made it difficult to claim that any movement was decisive. This is especially be-
cause good cross-national data on the size of the suffrage movement over time do
not exist, and because it is clear that a few countries extended the vote to wom-
en in the absence of a massive local push by women for these rights (for exam-
ple, in Turkey). Hence the exact role the women’s movement played for winning
suffrage is part of a scholarly dispute. A key intuition from political economy,
though, is that powerful groups do not concede power to others without some im-
petus, and women’s mobilization was the crucial impetus that put suffrage on the
political agenda locally, nationally, and internationally.

This is not to say that women who wanted the vote came together harmoni-
ously to forward their agenda. In fact, the internal and external tensions between
suffragists and would-be suffragists across class and racial groups have been the
subject of many excellent monographs in history and political science. Although
in the United States the racial conflict was a particularly pernicious cleavage that
affected the nature of the suffrage movement, it is important to understand that
each country had its own cleavage. In France, the cleavage was related to church-
state relations and republicanism; in parts of Latin America, it was about the
Church’s role in fledgling democracies and conflicts over regime type;20 in Swit-
zerland, the linguistic and cantonal cleavage reigned supreme; and in many of the
African countries, the cleavage was racial and ethnic, between colonizers and col-
onized. When women from the more privileged classes were very distant–ideo-
logically and materially–from the majority of women, the difficulties of forming
a cross-cleavage alliance among disparate groups of women loomed large.

My contention is that the size of the movement in any given country was re-
lated to the interests of would-be movement leaders. Many of the countries that
extended the vote later in the twentieth century had high degrees of inequality
throughout the 1900s. In these places, the types of women who may have had the
education, initiative, and resources to commit to a long-term social campaign

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149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

were often more concerned with maintaining their class privilege, or with pre-
serving their preferred form of government, than with casting a ballot.21 In some
countries, commitment to other political goals, like socialism and anti-imperial-
ism, crowded out suffrage mobilization among otherwise feminist activists. Thus,
the size of the movement can itself be viewed as a response to local level political
and economic conditions and the desires of would-be suffragists. Viewed in this
way, it becomes possible to understand some of the tensions that have been well
documented between women’s organizations, such as why massive antisuffrage
organizations emerged in many countries (with women in charge of the political
campaign against women’s involvement in politics). It also helps to understand
why, in contexts where male suffrage had already reached manhood status, wom-
en’s suffrage groups were often less well organized than when there was a limited
male suffrage: suffrage extensions would have much more profound consequenc-
es when they had to apply to all women, and often representatives from the upper
class were unwilling to take that bargain.

Finally it is important to acknowledge that although much of the pressure for
the first women’s suffrage extensions was internally derived (albeit with early and
fruitful friendships and correspondences of women hailing from different nation-
states), in many cases, the international suffrage movement proved important
both for inspiring and motivating local political suffragists, and for exerting a
fair amount of moral suasion on male politicians. Although national level politics
were still instrumental for determining the exact coalitions that supported wom-
en’s votes and the timing of the enfranchisement, the international democratic
consensus exerted considerable normative pull in the post–World War II era in
the direction of minimally equal political rights for women.22

W hat can we learn from the suffrage movement that can inform the fem-

inist politics of this new century? The first key lesson is that women
did not win the vote primarily by waiting for men to wake up and re-
alize the justice of the claim, but instead had to fight–both meticulously behind
the scenes as well as loudly in public–to be taken seriously. Although notable men
did aid suffrage in many contexts, the main protagonists in this movement, and
all of its true leaders, were women.23 For those women, the activities that they en-
gaged in were pushing the boundaries of the time, even if the mainstream suffrag-
ists were less avant-garde than some of the far-left feminists.

Second, the class and racial politics that cleaved through the movements,
many of which may seem like an embarrassing stain on a momentous achieve-
ment, actually provide analytic leverage for understanding the size and scope of
social movements today. The fact that many of the leaders of the suffrage move-
ment were upper-middle class does not imply that the movement was won by and
for the bourgeois. To the contrary, the integration of women from all walks of life,

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and particularly the activism of immigrants and the working classes, were cru-
cial in most countries, and particularly in those with the two longest and most
sustained movements, the United States and the United Kingdom.24 But what the
suffragists had that feminists today have not found is a single issue to guide their
fundraising and focus. Although suffragists wanted policy changes in a host of
arenas, coalescing on a single issue may have provided the momentum for their
sustained social movement. It also allowed many of the largest umbrella organi-
zations to claim nonpartisanship and therefore court women from many camps.
The feminist impulse today does not seem to have such a unifying impulse, and
perhaps too few efforts are made to coordinate with women from very different
ideological traditions.

Yet even if feminists can find an issue to agree upon, this does not mean that
dissent from the radical fringe should be suppressed. Because leaders of the more
mainstream movement often decried the tactics of the radical fringes–such as
with the steady Millicent Fawcett and the pugnacious Emmeline Pankhurst in the
United Kingdom, or the formidable Carrie Catt and the brazen Alice Paul in the
United States–historians (and the popular arts) have and will continue to have a
lot to say about the seeming “cat fights” between suffragists and suffrage organi-
zations. But the radicals may have served an important function for the success of
the mainstream movement. The existence of a militant wing allowed the moder-
ates access to the press and to politicians under the mantle of respectability. This
increased the status and sway of the suffrage centrists. In this sense, if the radical
fringe allowed the demands of the centrists to be viewed more favorably by men
in power, both wings were integral to the victory.

Third, although women did not form a solid voting bloc in most countries, it
bears stressing that many major changes in women’s rights were achieved along
the road to suffrage.25 Many of the same women who fought for suffrage argued
for the right to own property, to transact commercially, to have intellectual rights
to their own inventions, to safe working conditions, to maintain their citizenship
even if they married foreigners, and to birth control. These legislative achieve-
ments should be viewed as part of the legacy of the suffrage movement. What
these lessons imply for politics today is that women’s rights are not just normal
goods that emerge automatically over time, but rather are fragile resources that
have to be demanded, tended, and defended. As the saying goes, well-behaved
women have rarely made history.

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149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

about the author

Dawn Langan Teele is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the So-
cial Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of Field Experiments
and Their Critics (2014), coeditor of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candi-
dacy (2020), and author of Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s
Vote (2018).

endnotes

1 On earning-into the voting population in the United States, see David A. Bateman, Disen-
franchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom,
and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On literacy requirements and
the vote, see Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage
Institutions in the New World,” The Journal of Economic History 65 (4) (2005): 891–921.
2 Electoral laws often differentiated between “active” suffrage–the right to vote–and
“passive” suffrage–the right to hold office. Most countries extended both to women
at the same time, but there are some exceptions like Belgium, the Netherlands, and
Nepal; see Dawn Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 193, note 52. Although typically
women could not vote at all until the twentieth century, John Markoff suggests a few
exceptions: in medieval and early modern Europe, communities in which local rules
were decided by vote often allowed women who owned property to partake in deci-
sion-making. In colonial times, New World enclaves saw voting by property owning,
tax-paying women and widows in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and parts of present-day
Québec. John Markoff, “Margins, Centers, and Democracy: The Paradigmatic History
of Women’s Suffrage,” Signs 29 (11) (2003): 85–116.

3 Important works in political theory include those by Susan Okin, who famously argued
that the assumption of the “private sphere” of women’s lives meant that women were
only partially individualized in liberal societies. The ideological constraints of liberal
thought have put feminists in a constant tension as to whether to pursue policies that
accept difference between men and women or to argue for equality tout court. Nancy F.
Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” The Amer-
ican Historical Review 103 (5) (1998): 1440–1474. And as Eileen McDonagh shows, states
that clung longer to hereditary monarchial institutions often ended up being more in-
clusive toward women in politics due to their emphasis on kinship networks. Eileen
McDonagh, “Political Citizenship and Democratization: The Gender Paradox,” Amer-
ican Political Science Review 96 (3) (2002): 535–552.

4 For an account of the Swiss suffrage movement, see Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements
Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Suffrage (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

5 For a theoretical discussion of the ethics of disenfranchisement of various groups, see
Claudio López-Guerra, Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Ex-
clusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

6 Whether women were citizens and whether citizens had voting rights was adjudicated
in several countries. For example, the Chilean Civil Code from the nineteenth centu-
ry established that the masculine noun ciudadano applied to both men and women, but
women who tried to register to vote in 1875 were prevented from doing so. Asunción

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Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 288. Note that in some countries, wom-
en who married foreigners often lost their citizenship rights, though not so for men
(this was the case in the United States until the Cable Act in 1922). See Cott, “Mar-
riage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States.” Women in many Latin Ameri-
can countries including Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay had better nationality
rights than women in the United States. International feminists tried to standardize the
laws during the Hague Codification Conference of 1930. See Katherine M. Marino, Fem-
inism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

7 Australia excluded aboriginals in its initial constitution, and the U.S. states, via Jim Crow,
excluded most Black people from voting, hence both are cases of equal suffrage. Since
New Zealand’s colonists included Maori voters among their electorate, the 1893 reform
was universal.

8 The global norm change after the 1950s could be due to the 1945 Equal Rights Section
of the UN Charter and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As Marino de-
scribes in Feminism for the Americas, the UN declarations were important for cement-
ing the legitimacy of women’s rights, including suffrage, in internationalist circles in
Latin America. On diffusion, see Francisco O. Ramirez, Yasemin Soysal, and Suzanne
Shanahan, “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition
of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990,” American Sociological Review 62 (5) (1997):
735–745.

9 On the literacy and property requirements that remained in Latin America after the
1960s, refer to Engerman and Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the
New World.”

10 These are my categories; see Teele, Forging the Franchise, introduction. But another way
to conceptualize the pattern is whether the reforms were “joint track” with the male
working classes or piecemeal, with wealthier women included before the masses; see
Blanca Rodríguez-Ruiz and Ruth Rubio Marín, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe:
Voting to Become Citizens (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), introduction.

11 Norway is one of the few places that had manhood franchise (1898) but that limited the
women’s vote, at first to property holders in 1907. By 1913, the contradiction was elim-
inated and universal franchise instantiated.

12 For an in-depth discussion of social scientific theories of women’s enfranchisement, see
Teele, Forging the Franchise, chap. 2. On the role of war, see Daniel L. Hicks, “War and
the Political Zeitgeist: Evidence from the History of Female Suffrage,” European Journal
of Political Economy 31 (C) (2013): 60–81. Hicks finds that the correlation between war
and suffrage is driven by European countries and World War II (ibid., 67).

13 Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail. See also Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and
the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review 186 (1996):
20–45; and Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s
Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1995). For broad
exposure to movements for suffrage around the world, there are a few great edited vol-
umes that feature chapters by country experts. On Australasia and the Pacific, see Lou-
ise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and
Democracy (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), 127–151; and Caroline Daley and Mela-
nie Nolan, eds., Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New

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149 (1) Winter 2020Dawn Langan Teele

York University Press, 1994). On Western Europe, see Rodríguez-Ruiz and Marín, The
Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe. And for work on a variety of countries, including
some in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, see Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-
Nurmi, and Pirjo Markkola, eds., Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspec-
tives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). To
read about internationalism in the suffrage movement, especially in Latin America,
see Ann Towns, “The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage,
1920–1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42 (4) (2010): 779–807.

14 Recently some government scholars have argued that instead of looking to the women’s
movement for information about how women will vote, politicians in New Zealand
used the heuristic of women’s dispositions to infer women’s future political loyalties.
Mariel J. Barnes, “Divining Disposition: The Role of Elite Beliefs and Gender Narra-
tives in Women’s Suffrage,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming).

15 Sylvie D’Augerot-Arend, “Why So Late? Cultural and Institutional Factors in the Grant-
ing of Québec and French Women’s Political Rights,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26
(1) (1991): 138–165; and Manon Tremblay, Québec Women and Legislative Representation,
trans. Käthe Roth (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

16 These figures are calculated for thirty-two countries using Thomas Brambor, Johannes
Lindvall, and Annika Stjernquist, “The Ideology of Heads of Government, 1870–2012,”
Codebook, Version 1.5 (Lund: Department of Political Science, Lund University, 2017).
17 Joan Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018). On Chile and the Catholic Church, see Erika Maza
Valenzuela, “Catolicismo, anticlericalismo y la extensión del sufragio a la mujer en
Chile,” Estudios Públicos 58 (1995): 137–197.

18 Key sources on the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom include Sandra Stanley
Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–
1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Martin Pugh, The March of the
Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); and Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain,
1860–1914 (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2005).

19 Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail; Patricia Grimshaw, Women’s Suffrage in New
Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1972); and Holly J. McCammon, Karen
E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg, and Christine Mowery, “How Movements Win: Gen-
dered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919,”
American Sociological Review 66 (1) (2001): 49–70.

20 See Isabel Castillo, “Explaining Female Suffrage Reform in Latin America: Motivation
Alignment, Cleavages, and Timing of Reform” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University,
2019).

21 In Teele, Forging the Franchise, I present evidence of the ambivalence about the vote for
feminists in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, but other authors have
noted similar patterns elsewhere. For example, in 1922, a prominent Chilean feminist
and newly minted suffragist Amanda Labarca wrote to the famous Uruguayan femi-
nist Paulina Luisi expressing concerns that women would vote according to the will of
Church leaders: “Would the vote of women in Chile favor the liberal evolution of the
country or would it delay it by increasing the numbers and the power of the clerical-
conservative party?” Cited in Corinne A. Pernet, “Chilean Feminists, the International
Women’s Movement, and Suffrage, 1915–1950,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (4) (2000):

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672. Pernet attributes the “slow pace” of Chilean women’s activism for the vote to La-
barca’s concerns.

22 The scholarship on the international women’s movements and collaborations is quite
well developed. An early text is Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an Inter-
national Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). In ad-
dition, see Towns, “The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suf-
frage”; and Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sourc-
es of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). For
a devastating account of the imperialism of U.S. suffragists in the Americas writ large
(which also highlights Latin American feminists’ contributions to antifascist move-
ments and to human rights in the international sphere), see Marino, Feminism for the
Americas.

23 Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (New York: SUNY
Press, 2017); and Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Polit-
ical Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012).

24 For instance, see Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981);
Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015); Ellen Carol DuBois, “Working Wom-
en, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York
Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909,” The Journal of American History 74 (1) (1987):
34–58; Holton, Feminism and Democracy; Pugh, The March of the Women; Susan E. Mar-
shall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Susan Englander, Class Conflict
and Coalition in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907–1912: The San Francisco
Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).

25 J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women’s Ballots (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2016); and Anna L. Harvey, “The Political Consequences of
Suffrage Exclusion: Organizations, Institutions, and the Electoral Mobilization of
Women,” Social Science History 20 (1) (1996).

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