The Latin word behind suffrage once meant a ballot, then a bribe
Suffrage comes from the Latin suffragium, first a voting tablet or the right to vote. By the second century it had drifted toward patronage and influence, by the fourth it meant asking a patron to intercede with God, and in the fifth and sixth centuries it came to name the bribe itself.
English recovered the original sense in the 17th century, and the right it names has expanded unevenly ever since. In ancient Athens only adult male citizens who owned land could vote. Medieval Germany offered an odd exception: high-ranking abbesses counted among the independent princes of the empire and sat in national assemblies, a privilege their Protestant successors kept almost into modern times. In 1654 the French nun Marie Guyart described Iroquois women holding a deciding vote in councils, and in that matrilineal society female elders chose hereditary male chiefs and could remove them.
The short-lived Corsican Republic, from 1755 to 1769, granted limited universal suffrage to citizens over 25. New Jersey's 1776 constitution gave the vote to any resident worth fifty pounds, which let unmarried women landholders and black landowners take part, until an 1844 constitution restricted it to white men. The Kingdom of Hawai'i introduced universal suffrage without regard to sex in 1840, then rescinded women's votes in 1852. New Zealand became the first self-governing nation to enfranchise all adult women in 1893, and South Australian women won the right to vote and stand for Parliament a year later.
Many systems weighed votes unequally. Before the Jacksonian reforms of the 1830s, American voters had to own land of set size or value, and Brazil's 1824 constitution demanded an annual income of 200,000 milréis to vote and double that to stand. Businesses have held votes too. The City of London retained and even expanded its business franchise under a 2002 act, and Northern Ireland's civil rights movement made abolishing the business vote its first cause, achieved in 1968.
Opponents organised as well. From the 1880s a Massachusetts anti-suffrage association campaigned against further widening the vote, arguing that women belonged at home, and cartoonists mocked suffragists' upswept hairstyles. Today thirty-two countries make voting compulsory.
Source: Suffrage
