The Year Women Became Eligible To Vote in Each Country
- Danny Dutch
- May 27
- 4 min read
It’s easy to forget how recently women in many parts of the world were granted the right to vote — and just how uneven the journey to equality has been. In the United Kingdom, women would not be able to vote on equal terms with men until the passage of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. This pivotal piece of legislation finally gave women over the age of 21 the same voting rights as men, ending a long and often frustrating chapter of partial progress.
That said, some women in Britain had already been granted limited suffrage a decade earlier, thanks to the Representation of the People Act 1918, which allowed women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications to cast their vote. This came one year after women gained the vote in Russia and Canada, but a staggering 93 years before Saudi Arabia followed suit.
Yet even this limited progress in Britain was far behind other parts of the world. Take the Isle of Man, for example — a British Crown dependency often overlooked in broader discussions of suffrage history. In 1881, it became one of the first jurisdictions in the world to grant women who owned property the right to vote. While not part of the UK, this small island in the Irish Sea set an early example that many larger nations failed to follow for decades.
Across the Atlantic, the US territory of Wyoming granted women full voting rights in 1869, when its population was still under 10,000. Often described as a frontier experiment in democracy, Wyoming later joined the Union in 1890 with its suffrage laws intact. Several other US states followed suit before national suffrage was achieved with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. A fascinating glimpse into this staggered process can be found in contemporary materials like the 1917 Map of Women’s Suffrage in North America and the 1919 Victory Map, both of which predate federal reform.
Perhaps most famously, New Zealand, still a British colony at the time — became the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote in national elections in 1893. Its pioneering status in the annals of suffrage history has rightly earned it international acclaim. Australia followed in 1902, although the law pointedly excluded Aboriginal women (and Aboriginal men) from voting, a limitation that would not be fully overturned until many decades later.
Other early adopters include Finland (1906), Norway (1907), Denmark (1915), Iceland (1915), and Canada (1917). In Russia, women’s suffrage came in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. That same year saw women granted the vote in Armenia and Estonia as well.
However, a quick glance at any global map of women’s voting rights can be misleading without attention to the fine print. Many early examples of “universal suffrage” were anything but. In Belgium, for instance, women did not gain full voting rights until 1948. Before that, only a select few — such as the widows and mothers of servicemen killed in World War I — were permitted to vote, starting in 1919. These narrow exceptions often went hand-in-hand with property ownership, marriage status, race, or social standing.
This pattern of partial inclusion is repeated across multiple regions. In Australia, the 1902 suffrage law explicitly excluded Indigenous women. In South Africa, white women gained the vote in 1930, but Black South Africans — male or female — would not enjoy comparable rights until the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s.
As the 20th century progressed, more nations joined the movement. The trend gathered pace following the Second World War, with voting rights becoming a hallmark of democratic modernity and post-colonial nation-building.
At the opposite extreme, Saudi Arabia did not grant women the right to vote in municipal elections until 2011, making it one of the last countries in the world to do so. Similarly, Qatar and Oman did not implement women’s suffrage until 1997, and Bahrain followed in 2002. Even Samoa delayed until 1990.
And then there’s the Vatican City, which stands alone in its complete lack of electoral rights for women — and men. Technically, Vatican City has no popular elections. Instead, governance is handled by the Holy See, and the Pope is elected by the College of Cardinals, a body composed exclusively of men. While no citizens vote in the traditional sense, this all-male institution means Vatican City remains the only state where women have no representation in the highest ecclesiastical authority.
Maps depicting the year women gained the right to vote offer a striking visual record of global inequality and reform — but they also highlight how long it took for the principle of equal representation to gain traction. Some entries come with asterisks denoting partial rights or exclusions, underlining that even where reform occurred early, it was often only partial and conditional.
In short, the global story of women’s suffrage is not a simple tale of gradual progress, but rather a fragmented and often contradictory path shaped by war, colonialism, race, and political revolution. The right to vote, hard-won in every case, remains a powerful symbol of citizenship — but one that arrived late for far too many.
