The Palgrave Handbook of Women's Political Rights

Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook, Netina Tan, Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook, Netina Tan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137590749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Palgrave Handbook provides a definitive account of women's political rights across all major regions of the world, focusing both on women's right to vote and women's right to run for political office. This dual focus makes this the first book to combine historical overviews of debates about enfranchising women alongside analyses of more contemporary efforts to increase women's political representation around the globe. Chapter authors map and assess the impact of these groundbreaking reforms, providing insight into these dynamics in a wide array of countries where women's suffrage and representation have taken different paths and led to varying degrees of transformation. On the eve of many countries celebrating a century of women's suffrage, as well as record numbers of women elected and appointed to political office, this timely volume offers an important introduction to ongoing developments related to women's political empowerment worldwide. It will be of interest to studentsand scholars across the fields of gender and politics, women's studies, history and sociology.

Part ITheories and Concepts

© The Author(s) 2019

Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook and Netina Tan (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Women’s Political RightsGender and Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59074-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Global Patterns and Debates in the Granting of Women’s Suffrage

Ann Towns¹

(1)

University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Ann Towns

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 1912, German women’s rights activist Käthe Schirmacher proclaimed that “woman’s suffrage is the most radical demand made by organized women and is hence advocated in all countries by the ‘radical’ woman’s rights advocates” (Schirmacher 1912). Claiming suffrage to be radical was no exaggeration at a time when only four countries—New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1907)—had granted women the right to vote. This was about to change. In the coming century, virtually every state introduced women’s suffrage, making the measure global in scope and hardly extreme. In fact, to most, the radicalism today is found in the extremely rare denial of women’s suffrage on the same terms as men’s. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, women are only allowed to vote in local elections, and that right was exercised for the first time only in 2015.

The first aim of this chapter is to show how women’s suffrage spread internationally, both in terms of global adoption patterns and in terms of the transnational suffrage activism which preceded adoption. As we will see below, suffrage activism and suffrage adoption were clustered along some major lines of international hierarchy. Transnational suffragism developed in at least four overlapping waves with distinctive membership, geographical scope, and suffrage arguments rooted in international social hierarchies between so-called civilized states and others. The first emerged in what was then referred to as the “society of civilized states,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the 1920s. Transnational suffrage mobilization in the socialist East constitutes a second, closely overlapping wave, from approximately 1907 until the 1920s. The third wave developed in the Pan-American context, from the 1920s until the 1940s. Although much less research and evidence is provided, a fourth wave of transnational suffragism appears to have developed in the Afro-Asian post-colonial context in the 1950s. Suffrage adoption closely followed these waves of activism.

The second aim of this chapter is to analyze some of the arguments made in favor and against women’s suffrage, focusing particularly on claims about the relation between suffrage and so-called civilization. Women’s suffrage initially became expected behavior of so-called civilized states, around the end of World War I (WWI). Suffrage became indicative of having reached a more advanced level of civilization and thus helped to set these states apart from presumably inferior societies. Since far from all societies were regarded as civilized (nor desired to be), it was not clear what this new standard of civilization suggested for them, however. It was a formidable task of non-European activists to justify why their states should also pass suffrage laws. After all, as the Europeans claimed, this was behavior proper for “civilized” states rather than the “less advanced” or non-civilized. Creative reinterpretation of the initial arguments was needed to explain why it was appropriate for states not part of the core of Western civilization to approve the vote for women.

Activist organizations and networks were the primary associational arena promoting women’s suffrage internationally, rather than international organizations or state actors. Transnational suffrage advocacy supplies a good empirical entry-point to study the debates on women’s suffrage around the globe. The rest of this chapter is therefore organized around demonstrating the existence of no less than four waves of transnational suffragism and analyzing their arguments. Before delving into these waves of transnational activism and the understandings of suffrage, however, the chapter begins by looking at the global route of suffrage law adoption. The chapter ends with an assessment of prior attempts to account for the global emergence of women’s suffrage.

Suffrage Adoption Trajectory

Women first won the vote in new states on the outskirts of the core of international society—New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1907)—rather than in, say, France and Great Britain (see Table 1.1). By 1919, another twenty European states had passed suffrage legislation. It would nevertheless take many decades for a few European states, like Switzerland (1971) and Lichtenstein (1984), to allow women voting rights. In short, women’s suffrage initially moved from the margins to the center of European and neo-European international society.

Table 1.1

Women’s suffrage adoption in national politics, on the same terms as men, 1893–2018

Year	European civilization	Socialism	Pan- Americanism	(Post)-colonialism	Other/Unclear
1893	New Zealand
1902	Australia
1906	Finland
1913	Norway
1915	Denmark Iceland
1917	Canada
1918	Austria Germany Hungary Ireland United Kingdom	Russian Federation Estonia Georgia Latvia Lithuania Poland
1919	Belgium Luxemburg Netherlands Sweden	Belarus Ukraine
1920	Czechoslovakia United States	Albania
1921		Armenia Azerbaijan
1924		Kazakhstan Mongolia Tajikistan			Saint Lucia (UK)
1927		Turkmenistan
1929	Romania		Ecuador
1930	South Africa (‘whites’)
1931	Portugal Spain		Chile
1932			Brazil Uruguay		Thailand (Siam)
1934			Cuba		Turkey
1935				Myanmar (UK)
1937					Philippines
1938		Uzbekistan	Bolivia
1939			El Salvador
1941			Panama
1942			Dominican Republic
1944	Bulgaria France				Jamaica (UK)
1945	Croatia Slovenia Italy			Indonesia Senegal (FR) Togo (FR)	Japan
1946	Romania Yugoslavia	DPR of Korea	Guatemala Venezuela	Viet Nam Djibouti (FR) Cameroon (FR)	Liberia Trinidad and Tobago (UK)
1947		China	Argentina Mexico	Pakistan Singapore (UK)
1948	Israel			Niger (FR) Seychelles (UK) Suriname (NL)	Republic of Korea
1949	Bosnia and Herzegovina		Costa Rica		Syria
1950				India	Haiti Barbados (UK) Antigua and Barbuda (UK)
1951				Nepal	Dominica (UK) Grenada (UK) Saint Kitts and Nevis (UK)
1952				Ivory Coast (1952)	Lebanon
1953	Greece			Bhutan	Guyana (UK)
1954			Colombia	Ghana (UK)	Belize (UK)
1955			Honduras Nicaragua Peru	Eritrea Ethiopia Cambodia
1956				Benin (FR) Gabon (FR) Comoros (FR) Egypt Mali (FR) Mauritius (UK) Somalia (UK/IT)
1957				Malaysia
1958		Laos		Nigeria (South—UK) Burkina Faso (FR) Chad (FR) Guinea
1959	San Marino			Madagascar Tunisia Tanzania (UK)
1960	Cyprus			Tonga (UK) Gambia (UK)
1961			El Salvador Paraguay	Malawi (UK) Burundi Rwanda Mauritania Sierra Leone	Bahamas (UK)
1962	Monaco			Algeria Uganda Zambia (UK)
1963				Kenya Fiji (UK) Kenya Congo (FR) Morocco	Afghanistan Iran
1964				Sudan	Libya
1965				Botswana Lesotho
1967
1968				Swaziland
1970	Andorra	Yemen
1971	Switzerland
1972				Bangladesh
1973					Bahrain (reintroduced 2002)
1974					Jordan
1975				Angola Cape Verde Mozambique
1977
1978		Moldova
1979
1980					Iraq
1984	Lichtenstein
1986					Central African Republic
1989				Namibia
1998					Quatar
2003					Oman
2005					Kuwait
2006					United Arab Emirates

Table assembled from data provided in IPU (2000), Arat (2000), Edwards (2000), Al Kitbi (2008)

One striking and overlooked aspect is that the ensuing adoption path was clustered, as is evident in Table 1.1. The timing of adoption seems to cluster around four intersecting transnational contexts in international society: European civilization, socialism, Pan-Americanism, and Afro-Asian post-colonialism. After suffrage had successfully won ground in a handful of “civilized” states, an overlapping though more concise second cluster of adoption took place in the emerging socialist states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. These states recognized women’s suffrage primarily between 1918 and 1924, simultaneously with many states of Western Europe. The so-called New World of the Americas passed suffrage laws in a third cluster, mainly between the late 1930s and mid-1950s. The fourth cluster consists of the post-colonial states of Africa and Asia, where suffrage was extended to women primarily when national independence was won, between 1945 and 1975. The clustered timing of adoption corresponds roughly with the timing of four waves of transnational suffrage activism.

Four Waves of Suffragism and Debates

Suffragism in the Society of Civilized States

Nineteenth-century Europe was characterized by tremendously intense struggles over the nature of sexual difference and the implications of that difference for women in terms of participation in political lif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Theories and Concepts
• Part II. Suffrage and Political Participation
• Part III. Eligibility and Political Representation
• Back Matter