Women's Suffrage

[Penumbra]

I figured I'd make a thread about some countries and the right to vote for women. I found some of these facts amazing when I first found them out a few years back. Here's wikipedia's timeline of when women achieved voting rights in various countries.

Probably the craziest fact on that list is that Switzerland didn't have voting rights for women on the federal level until 1971, and the last canton of Switzerland didn't allow women to vote locally until 1991 when the Swiss Federal Supreme Court forced them to allow it. So a huge list of countries including Iran, Uganda, and Papua New Guinea were way ahead of Switzerland in terms of women's suffrage. :areyoucra

Liechtenstein didn't allow women to vote until 1984, where it was the last European country to allow it. Only men were allowed to vote on the matter, there was high voter turnout, and the measure narrowly passed to allow women to vote.

And of course on that timeline, many middle eastern countries have only recently allowed voting rights for women in the last decade or two, and some still haven't.

 

[Alceste]

That's incredible. Switzerland! What were they thinking? And they didn't even manage to enforce it across the country until 1991?

What a bizarre world we live in.

I was surprised to see Quebec held out until 1940. Those crazy French Canadians.

 

[Sunstone]

This reminds me of how confusing it was to some Japanese when women were first allowed to vote (following World War II). The story goes that many Japanese women thought they could vote only for women. So, the first Japanese parliament after the war contained a record number of women members.

One might almost wish that Japanese women had never learned they could vote for men.