Women's Suffrage Movement Timeline

The seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention in the United States at Seneca Falls, New York, was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

Image source: World Anti-Slavery Convention

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in America, held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, launching the organized movement for women's rights including suffrage.

Image source: Seneca Falls Convention

In 1851, Elizabeth Cady Stanton met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, beginning a decades-long partnership that would shape the American women's suffrage movement.

Image source: Susan B. Anthony

In 1868, Susan B. Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Working Women's Associations. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress that year, she persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work.

Susan B. Anthony helped form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in May 1869, a key American organization campaigning for women's right to vote.

Image source: National Woman Suffrage Association

Throughout the world, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), established in the United States in 1873, campaigned for women's suffrage in addition to ameliorating the condition of prostitutes.

Image source: Woman's Christian Temperance Union

One major division in the movement, especially in Britain, was between suffragists, who sought constitutional change, and suffragettes, led by English political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, who in 1903 formed the more militant Women's Social and Political Union.

Image source: Women's Social and Political Union

National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts towards women voting, most notably the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, founded in 1904 in Berlin, Germany.

In 1869, women in the Wyoming Territory were permitted to both vote and stand for office, making it the first territory in the United States to grant women full political participation rights.

Image source: Wyoming

The territory of Utah granted women the right to vote in 1870, following Wyoming Territory's lead as one of the earliest instances of women's suffrage in the United States.

Image source: Utah

In 1881, the Isle of Man, an internally self-governing dependent territory of the British Crown, enfranchised women property owners, an early instance of women's suffrage in the British Isles.

Image source: Isle of Man

The Pacific commune of Franceville (now Port Vila, Vanuatu), maintained independence from 1889 to 1890, becoming the first self-governing nation to adopt universal suffrage without distinction of sex or color, although only white males were permitted to hold office.

Image source: Port Vila

The first national granting of women's suffrage occurred in 1893 in New Zealand, then a self-governing British colony, largely due to a movement led by Kate Sheppard. The British protectorate of Cook Islands rendered the same right in 1893 as well.

Image source: Women's suffrage in New Zealand

Another British colony, South Australia, followed in 1895, enacting laws which not only extended voting to women but also made women eligible to stand for election to its parliament — a first for the modern world. Suffragist Catherine Helen Spence stood for office in 1897.

Image source: Women's suffrage in Australia

Utah, upon its admission to the Union, and Idaho both granted women the right to vote in 1896, extending women's suffrage among US states.

Image source: Idaho

Following the federation of the British colonies in Australia in 1901, the new federal government enacted the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, which allowed female British subjects to vote and stand for election on the same terms as men. However, many indigenous Australians remained excluded from federal voting until 1962.

Image source: Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902

The Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906 became the first place in Europe to introduce women's suffrage, and the first place in continental Europe to implement racially-equal suffrage for women. It was one of many self-governing actions in the Russian autonomous province leading to conflict with Russia and ultimately Finnish independence in 1917.

As a result of the 1907 parliamentary elections, Finland's voters elected 19 women as the first female members of a representative parliament in the world.

Canada gave the right to vote to some women in 1917; women got the vote on the same basis as men in 1920, though men and women of certain races or status were excluded from voting until 1960, when universal adult suffrage was achieved.

Image source: Women's suffrage in Canada

Dutch women won the passive vote (the right to run for parliament) after a revision of the Dutch Constitution in 1917, followed by the active vote (electing representatives) in 1919.

The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote, a major milestone for the British suffrage movement after decades of activism by suffragists and suffragettes.

Image source: Representation of the People Act 1918

Germany extended voting rights to women in 1918, during the interwar period when most major Western powers moved to enfranchise women.

Austria and the Netherlands extended voting rights to women in 1919, part of the wave of interwar enfranchisement across major Western powers.

Image source: Women's suffrage in Austria

American women gained the right to vote on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 later secured voting rights for racial minorities.

Image source: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Irish women won the same voting rights as men under the Irish Free State constitution of 1922.

Image source: Irish Free State

In 1928, British women won suffrage on the same terms as men, meaning for ages 21 and older, completing the equalization of the franchise in the United Kingdom.

Image source: Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928

The suffrage of Turkish women was introduced in 1930 for local elections and extended in 1934 for national elections.

Image source: Women's suffrage in Turkey

By the time French women were granted the suffrage in July 1944 by Charles de Gaulle's government in exile, by a vote of 51 for and 16 against, France had been for about a decade the only Western country that did not even allow women's suffrage at municipal elections.

Image source: Women's suffrage

Switzerland was a notable European exception: since 1971, women could vote at the federal level, and between 1959 and 1990, women gradually got the right to vote at the local canton level.

In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Article 21 stated that everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

Image source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which went into force in 1954, enshrining the equal rights of women to vote, hold office, and access public services as set out by national laws.

Image source: Convention on the Political Rights of Women

The United Nations encouraged women's suffrage in the years following World War II, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) identifies it as a basic right, with 189 countries currently being parties to this convention.

Image source: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

One of the most recent jurisdictions to acknowledge women's full right to vote was Bhutan in 2008, with its first national elections.

Image source: Bhutan

Most recently, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, after both national and international condemnation and activism by feminist groups, granted Saudi women the vote and the right to run for office for the first time in the 2015 local elections.

On 26 April 2023, Pope Francis announced that women would be allowed to vote at the Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, marking the first time women were allowed to vote at any Synod of Bishops. Earlier, on 6 February 2021, he had appointed Nathalie Becquart an undersecretary of the Synod, making her the first woman with the right to vote there.

Image source: Synod of Bishops in the Catholic Church