Casting my vote by Maggie Brookes

Whenever I cast my vote I feel I can hear the cheers of all the women suffragists and suffragettes who worked so hard to win that right for me, but when I was posting my ballot paper this time, I wondered how many countries in the world still don't give women the right to vote. 

I was amazed and pleased to discover that technically it's only one. In Vatican City elections only cardinals of the Catholic Church (all men) are allowed to vote for a new pope. However, in looking this up, I discovered that the right to vote and the experience on election day can be two different matters. For example in Kenya, a 2019 United Nations report registered concern about harassment or violence against female voters. Voting can also involve a long and sometimes dangerous walk to a polling station, and in some areas it's culturally unacceptable for pregnant women to be seen out in public, which obviously limits voting.

At the recent UK election, voters were asked to present ID at the polling station for the first time. This seems sensible, but in some countries it can work against women. A report from the Borgen Project said that in Egypt women are less likely than men to have an ID card, and even if they do, their husbands often 'look after them' and simply refuse to hand them over, preventing them from voting. Also, having to reveal their faces in public can also put women off voting if they normally wear a niqab. Not to mention the attitudes of the men. In Nigeria in 2016 President Muhammadu Buhari said, 'I don’t know exactly what party my wife belongs to. Actually she belongs in the kitchen, the living room and the other rooms in my house.'

President Muhammadu Buhari

Of course there are countries where there is no suffrage at all. Brunei hasn't held a national election since 1962, there haven't been elections in Eritrea since its independence in 1993, and a recent election in the United Arab Emirates granted suffrage to only 12% of all men and women.

But hang on. I've disappeared down a research rabbit-hole (this happens all the time to us novelists) and this is supposed to be a history blog, so when did women first get the vote? I've always assumed it was after the first world war, but I realise I'm looking back through a Western, patriarchal lens.

In 1639, a young nun called Marie Guyart (later known as Marie of the Incarnation) set sail for Quebec in 'New France' where she was keen to convert the 'savages.' 

Marie of the Incarnation

Working with the Iroquois women, she discovered, 'These female chieftains are women of standing amongst the savages, and they have a deciding vote in the councils. They make decisions there like their male counterparts, and it is they who even delegated as first ambassadors to discuss peace.' It turned out that many First Nations peoples of North America had a matrilineal system, where belongings and wealth were passed down from mother to daughter and yes, they even had voting rights. Unfortunately, the settlers did not adopt this system, and when women were given the vote in Canada in 1917 that did not even include First Nation people, who weren't allowed to vote until 1960. Canadian First Nation people did not win the vote until 1960.

Back in the Old World, I've always thought of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, as being the very first call for equality for women, but a limited form of women's suffrage had already been introduced in Sweden during Age of Liberty (1718–1772) and also in the Corsican Republic in 1755. 

Mary Wollstonecraft

Sometimes women were given the vote by accident: in a new British Colony called Sierra Leone, all heads of households were given the vote in the 1792 elections because nobody expected a third of them to be African women!  In a similar way in New England in 1756, Lydia Taft became the first legal woman voter when her husband Josiah died, leaving her as the largest landowner in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. In a community calling for 'no taxation without representation,' they had no option but to allow her to vote in local town meetings, 164 years before women were enfranchised in the USA.

Uxbridge, Mass.

Coming into the 19th century, there are odd instances of female suffrage on small islands and territories. The Pitcairn islanders who were the European descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty were allowed to vote from 1838 – including the women – and some women on the Isle of Man had the vote from 1881. In the United States in 1869 the Territory of Wyoming decided to try to attract new settlers by giving women the vote. It's not clear whether that was a success!

A little later, in 1893, the British colony of New Zealand became the first country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections, though they were not allowed to stand for election. In the following year, South Australia allowed women both to stand for election and to vote.

But of-course it took women's huge contribution to national life during the First World War, before the UK Parliament finally passed the 1918 Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act. It was only one page long and gave women the vote if they were over the age of 30 or property owners or UK university graduates. (At a time when most universities did not confer degrees on women, no matter how brilliant!) Unfortunately, although my own grandmothers were working, married women, they were not yet 30 in December 1918 and very far from being property owners or graduates, and so would not be able to vote for another ten years.

It took some other countries a lot longer to give women the vote, the most surprising laggard being Switzerland. It took till 1991 for The Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden to give women the vote, and women as a whole in Switzerland only gained the right to vote at federal level in 1971.

In the UK the 1918 Act also gave women to right to stand for Parliament and seventeen women took up the opportunity, though only one was elected: the Sinn Fein candidate Countess Constance Markievicz, who never took up her seat. The first woman to actually take her seat was the American Nancy Astor after a by-election in December 1919. Two years later Margaret Wintringham joined her in the House of Commons.

Margaret Wintringham MP

I wish I'd talked to my grandmothers about how this huge change seemed to them. I do remember my maternal grandmother's excitement when Margaret Thatcher was elected as our first female Prime Minister in 1979. I wasn't aware at the time that the first ever female PM in the world had been elected almost twenty years before! Sirimavo Bandaranaike had become Prime Minister in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in July 1960 after the assassination of her husband.

Sirimavo Bandara

 Then the first woman was elected president of a country in 1980. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir of Iceland won the 1980 presidential election as well as three subsequent elections, remaining in office for 16 years.

A quick look at the number of women in government in any given country gives a clue to the levels of equality and the likelihood of women exercising their right to vote, though the countries with biggest percentages of women in parliament might be surprising. The Interparliamentary Union report of 2019 cites Rwanda ahead of the front runners with 63%, and Cuba and Bolivia not too far behind with 53%. The UK came in with 32% at the time. Down at the bottom of the league table were Solomon Islands with 2%, Oman with 1%, Yemen with 0.3% (one woman - go you!) and Micronesia and Papua New Guinea with none.

Chile's first female president Michelle Bachelet has observed, 'When one woman is a leader, it changes her. When more women are leaders, it changes politics and policies.'

Michelle Bachelet

In June 2024, there were 27 countries with women as Heads of State and/or Government. However, UNwomen.org points out this means that 'at the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.' It also notes that the 'five most commonly held portfolios by women cabinet ministers are Women and gender equality, followed by Family and children affairs, Social inclusion and development, Social protection and social security, and Indigenous and minority affairs.'   So, we still have a way to go.

However, the good news is that following the UK election two weeks ago in July 2024, 263 women were elected to the British parliament, representing taking  40.5% of the total seats, including 50 black and minoritised women MPs. I can hear those cheering suffragettes now!

Maggie Brookes. Novelist and poet. Author of Acts of Love and War and The Prisoner's Wife.

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