Definition
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections, and the name given to the long campaign waged to secure that right. For most of recorded history, voting was reserved for men, often only propertied men, and women were excluded from formal political power entirely.
The organised suffrage movement gathered strength through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Zealand granted women the vote in 1893, becoming the first self-governing country to do so. Britain and the United States followed after the First World War, and many other nations extended the franchise to women across the twentieth century.
Why it matters
How it works
A campaign to extend the vote must overcome the resistance of those who already hold power and benefit from the existing arrangement. Suffragists built their case on the same democratic logic that had already enfranchised men: if government rests on the consent of the governed, then women, who are governed, must have a voice. They combined patient legal and political pressure with public demonstrations that made the demand impossible to ignore, and they pointed to women's wartime contributions to undercut arguments that they were unfit for citizenship.