New Zealand First Country to Grant Women Right to Vote
“5. Which country was the first to grant women the right to vote in national elections? a. New Zealand”
Summary
New Zealand was the first self‑governing nation to legally grant women the right to vote in national parliamentary elections, doing so in September 1893. No other country had extended full national suffrage to women before that date.
Sources 60 searched
- World suffrage timeline - Women and the vote
* Strictly speaking women in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia won the right to vote in 1917, when revolutionary Russia granted women the right to vote in all its territory. This technically included Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but German occupation prevented elections.
- New Zealand women and the vote | NZ History
On 19 September 1893 the governor, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law. As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
- Brief history | NZ History
Suffragists celebrated throughout ... would be jostled and harassed in polling booths by ‘boorish and half-drunken men’, but in fact the 1893 election was described as the ‘best-conducted and most orderly’ ever held....
- Women’s Suffrage in Aotearoa New Zealand | Ministry for Women
On 19 September 1893, Governor Lord Glasgow signed a new Electoral Act into law, and New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to enshrine in law the right for women to vote in parliamentary elections.
- 125 Years of Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand | In Custodia Legis
With this Act, New Zealand “became the first self-governing country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections.” Sure, Wyoming granted this right in 1869, and a couple of other U.S.
- Voting rights | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world where women were able to vote in national elections. New Zealand’s first parliamentary election was held in 1853. Like most aspects of New Zealand’s political system, the right to vote (also called the electoral franchise or suffrage) ...
- The women's suffrage petition – archives new zealand
In 1893, for the first time in the world, all women in New Zealand gained the right to vote in general elections, thanks to the women who created, organised and signed the Women’s Suffrage Petition.
- Which was the first country, and which was the last, to give the vote to women. Have any countries always been equal in their voting rights between men and women? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk
Skip to main content · THE FIRST to give the vote to women was New Zealand in 1912. I do not know which was the last, but I do know that some otherwise "democratic countries", eg Liechtenstein and Kuwait, still deny them this
- Timeline of women's suffrage - Wikipedia
Illinois (U.S. state) Women were granted an equal vote for all statutory offices, but no constitutional ones, which would have required amending the state constitution. Statutory offices included presidential electors, and 876,700 women voted for the top five candidates in 1916. ... Montana (U.S. state) Two years later, Montana's Jeannette Rankin is the first woman elected to a national legislature in an English-speaking country...
This fact check is free and donation-based. $1 powers ~30 fact-checks.
