Essays on Women's Suffrage

Women’s suffrage is the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections.

Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913).

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Emmeline Pankhurst, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Lucy Burns.

Saudi Arabia gave women the right to vote in 2015, leaving Vatican City as the only place where women’s suffrage is still denied today.
The U.N. first explicitly named women’s suffrage as a human right in 1979.
Not all suffragists were women, and not all anti-suffragists were men.
Susan B. Anthony (and 15 other women) voted illegally in the presidential election of 1872