Women voted on Pitcairn Island decades before most of the world's capitals
From 1838, the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers on tiny Pitcairn Island could vote, and they kept that right when the community resettled on Norfolk Island in 1856. Such scattered early cases, in colonies, territories and short-lived republics, long predate the great national reforms of the early 20th century.
Some precedents are older still. During the brief pontificate of Innocent IX in late 1591, Rome let men and women over 14 vote. In 1756 Lydia Taft cast ballots at least three times at town meetings in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, becoming colonial America's first legal woman voter. In Sierra Leone's 1792 elections every head of household could vote, and a third of them were African women. Under France's old regime, noblewomen holding fiefs and mother abbesses were summoned to help elect representatives to the Estates General from 1302, yet from 1791 women were shut out entirely until 1945.
The American movement grew out of a snub. At the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, organisers refused to seat Lucretia Mott and other American women delegates, and there Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Mott, sowing the idea for the Seneca Falls convention. Stanton later teamed up with Susan B. Anthony, who in 1868 persuaded a labour congress committee to back votes for women and equal pay, only for male delegates to strike the voting clause. Wyoming Territory let women vote and hold office in 1869, and within months Laramie elected a woman justice of the peace.
The first national grant came in 1893 in New Zealand, then a self-governing British colony, and in 1895 South Australia became the first place in the modern world where women could stand for parliament; Catherine Helen Spence ran two years later. Canada followed in 1917, Germany in 1918, the United States in 1920 and Britain in 1928.
Several European nations lagged. France waited until 1944 and Greece granted full equality in 1952. Swiss women gained a federal vote only in 1971. Today 189 countries belong to the 1979 UN convention that counts voting as a basic right for women.
Source: Women's suffrage
