Talk:Women's suffrage

Can Kuwait be removed from list of countries not supporting women's suffrage due to their allowance now in the 2007 national election?

Someone started a change yesterday; I've added more today. In 2007, we can drop them from the list entirely. Somone put it on their "things to do" list! :-) Atlant 12:28, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Can someone clarify the apparent disconnect between 'The earliest country extending...' and the countries listed before Australia? What is the disqualification?

In UK, wasn't the age requirement different for men and women when women were first allowed to vote (age 30 or so)? -- Someone else 21:19 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Where is it called "female suffrage?" I have never heard of this phrase. Do people in England or Australia call it female sufferage? Slrubenstein

Where is it called "woman's suffrage?" I have never heard of this phrase. Do people in England or America call it woman's sufferage? Tannin

I don't know if "female suffrage" passes the google test or not. I get 4200 hits on that phrase, compared to 48300 for "women's suffrage". I agree that as long as female suffrage redirects to women's suffrage, which it currently does, we are fine.

women's (plural), not woman's. While women's suffrage is the most popular phrase online, but ~8% "female suffrage" is sufficient to call for a bolding in the intro, I suspect. Martin

Sorry. The "female suffrage" stub was there in the first place because someone had been looking for that phrase and, not finding it, had added a comment. I turned it into a stub without realising there was already an article under women's suffrage -- I should have known, because that's how I normally refer to it! Deb 23:15 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Wouldn't the list of countries be more illustrative in chronological order? --- Timo Honkasalo 14:46 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)

I think so :) Martin

---

The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a highly respected, reliable and serious organization, established in 1889 and now working in close cooperation with the UN, clearly states that full women's suffrage was institued in Australia from 1962. From 1902, women's suffrage was subject to race, where by 'aboriginal natives were not allowed to vote. See also [1] (http://www.wcc2002.asn.au/suffrage.htm) -- Egil 14:52 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

What a load of silly nonsense: tell me, just exactly how were the voting rights of women different from the voting rights of men during the period 1902 - 1962? (Ans: none - they were exactly the same.)

Egil, that is one of the most absurd distinctions I ever heard! Tell me this also: how many women were allowed to vote in ... oh ... let's say Alabama ... in the 1950s? You want to make a point about race, that's fine with me. Do it in a page where it has some shred of relevance.

Oh, and you had better remove that 1962 date as well, because there are still all sorts of exceptions. For one thing, you cannot vote if you are serving a prison term. Seeing as there are some women in prison in Australia right now, then we had better say that we still don't have female sufferage.

And seeing the male prison population outnumbers the female one by something like 15 to 1, we don't have votes for men either. Tannin 16:04 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

In terms of years, I am referring respected sources, not making things up. Please study my sources carefully.

You call me words like "silly", "fool", "absurd", "nonsense". I will not call you words, you seem to manage that yourself by seeming you believe that the title of this article is White women's suffrage. How dare you compare the rights of the original inhabitants of Australia to those of criminals? (I did not know that serving prison time automatically lead one to loose ones right to vote, but perhaps that is the ways in Australia).

In the case USA, the case is not quite clear. The 15th Amendment did in fact mean there was a constitutional women's suffrage from 1920. But de facto women's suffrage in all states cannot really be claimed before 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.

In Australia, there were laws that explicitly took away the rights of men and women to vote due to race. That situation is exactly similar to that of South Africa, where true women's suffrage cannot be said to exist before 1994. Or do you mean to say that South Africa had women's suffrage from 1930? (Oh wait, was it only white women that mattered?)

-- Egil 16:53 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

You've got it arse-about again. According to the 1902 act (which I am not going to look up again right now because my cable link has gone belly up and I've dug out a 56k modem and brushed the dust off it to tide me over, which is painfully slow by comparison), the responsibility for allowing/not allowing the vote on the basis of race was assigned to the individual states. At the time, being Aboriginal was indeed very similar to being a criminal (only you didn't have to actually do anything, except be born). Aboriginal people were not really considered to be part of the nation or to be citizens: they were "too primitive" to understand civilised things like elections (or at least this was the more-or-less unquestioned assumption). It is more sensible to compare white Australia's interaction with the Aboriginal people with America's interaction with Native Americans than with African Americans. That parallel is fairly exact, although it didn't go as far as outright war - not, in my judgement, because the European colonists of Australia were any better than their opposite numbers in the US, but simply because there was no particular point to it: Europeans arrived in Australia 250-odd years after they started colonising North America: this meant that the technology gap was bigger, and because Europeans spread across the country faster, the impact of disease was more concentrated and the possibility of armed resistance even less.

Mate, in Australia in 1902 it was only white people who mattered. (Unless you were not white, in which case your opinion didn't count.) The provisions of the voting laws were not intended to deny Aboriginal people power, the intention was to be kind (in the worst of paternalistic ways, of course) by not imposing the requirement to vote on people who "could not understand it". Voting is compulsory in Australia, remember - you get fined if you don't show up at the polling booth, and in 1902 there were not a lot of polling booths in the Gibson Desert. In fact, there are none there to this day: they use mobile ones now, carried on trucks and in aircraft. Also, there were exceptions: in particular, Aboriginal people who had served the nation in the armed forces were entitled to vote. As I remember, the 1962 constitutional change referendum to give Aboriginal people the vote was carried by the largest majority any referendum in history. The original intention, though, was nothing to do with denying the power of the vote, that was an accidental by-product: in 1902, broadly speaking, it simply didn't occur to European people that there could be such as thing as Aboriginal people with the ability and the interest to be citizens, rather than simply "poor primitives" to be cared for in an off-hand sort of way and ignored so far as possible. Tannin 17:21 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Strange that you believe that the issue of human rights didn't occur to European people 1902? That issue was already well developed at that time. Ever heard of Rousseau? I suggest you make yourself familiar with his ideas; he lived in the 18th century. And what do you think the American Civil War was about (amomg other things)?

Or in other words, Australia had women's suffrage in 1902, but didn't have universal suffrage until 1962? Martin

That is a matter of definition. If we go for the definition of some women being sufficient, then South Africa is 1930, Portugal is 1931 etc. This I feel is quite misleading. If a full women's suffrage was not available, the nature of the restrictions should be noted. -- Egil 13:08 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

It has got nothing to do with gender, Egil. Accuracy is a fine and admirable quality, but absurd hair-splitting is just that: absurd hair-splitting. As a matter of detail, it also affected a very small number of people in population-relative terms, just a few percent, where in the South African example the proportions were reversed. By 1902, there were not many Australian Aborigines left alive; a generally accepted figure is 10% of the original population. Appropriation of land and deliberate violence played a part, but by far the main killers were smallpox, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and various other European nasties. There is debate about the specifics, but a broad consensus view is that around 90% of the population loss was due to disease. Again, the parallel to the fate of Native Americans is close. If we are going to take the view that it must be "all women", then (as I commented above) there is still no female sufferage in Australia, nor is there male sufferage. (I imagine that an identical situation obtains in many (probably most) other countries around the world.) Tannin 13:46 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

Would you both agree that the current notation:

• Australia -- 1902 (some women) -- 1962 (all women)

is misleading? To the casual reader, it suggests that women were treated differently to men until 1962. If Egil wants to continue to split hairs, he'd better do it in a clearer, more accurate way. If Egil doesn't do it I will, when I have time. I suggest finding out the nature of the exception in each of the five cases, and writing something like:

• Australia -- 1902 (except Aboriginal men and women)

-- Tim Starling 14:25 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

In broad, I agree. In detail, I don't think this is really the place to discuss matters of race at all. However, the opening few paragraphs should say something to the effect that "this is about voting and gender, but other matters besides gender are important too and they are discussed at ABC and XYZ". At the end of the entry, there should be a "see also" that leads to the entries that cover the many other ways that:

• (a) Voting rights have been granted or denied to people. Race and economic class are the two obvious front-runners (one imagines that these are covered in some depth here already, if they are not then this ought to be rectified) but there are doubtless others as well.

• (b) Other rights (i.e., not to do with voting) have been granted or denied on the basis of gender. Property rights and inheritance rights are examples.

In summary, this topic sits at the intersection of gender and political rights, and the signposts should lead off in both directions. (BTW, I'm knee-deep in fauna entries at present, but I'll try to remember to take a longer look at these topics at some stage, maybe help out here and there.) Tannin

I'm with Tim & Tannin on this. Egil, it's simple set theory. "All women can vote" and "no blacks can vote" means "black women can't vote". if you really want to find out whether it was women's suffrage, you'd have to check the actual laws that were passed and see how they worded it: "all white women", or just "all women" and let the apartheid laws take precedence -- Tarquin 15:34 May 5, 2003 (UTC) (PS -- I can see that it would be interesting to know which way it was done at the time -- how they unravelled / justified the inconsistencies!)

Which would make 3:1, doesn't it. With Tim's addition (finding why the exceptions is a rather interesting and enlightening exercise), that could work for me. -- Egil 16:09 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

I thought Kuwaiti women were given the right to vote and stand for office in 1999. Could somebody please verify this and edit accordingly?

Contents

1 South Africa 1930 2 Oman 3 Opening 4 Kuwait and more.

South Africa 1930

Contray to what's said above, here there was a gender divide maintained. At this time in the Cape province, black and coloured men who owned sufficient property qualified for the franchise. In 1930 only white women were enfranchised on the same basis as white men; black and coloured women who owned property did not get the vote on the same basis as black and coloured men. The reason was that the non-white voters tended to support the South African Party and the Nationalist Party government wanted to water this down by increasing the number of white voters on the role.

I think this is very clearly not a case of the franchise being completely non-gender specific and have marked it as such. However I'm not sure when the non-whites in the Cape were completely disenfranchised - which would effectively mark total gender equality in the franchise by default. Timrollpickering 21:11, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Coloureds says "the political rights of Coloureds varied by location and over time ...(they) lost their votes largely in the 1950s, with the last municipal votes being removed in 1972." The date may be complicated because it involved an entrenched clause and a Supreme Court dispute. --Henrygb 19:04, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oman

Wasn't suffrage to all granted in 2003? Dainamo

Opening

The international movement for women's suffrage, led by suffragists (commonly called suffragettes), was a social, economic and political reform movement aimed at extending the suffrage (i.e. the right to vote) to women, advocating equal suffrage (abolition of graded votes) rather than universal suffrage (abolition of discrimination due to, for instance, race), which was considered too radical. A catch phrase was "one man, one vote!"'

Surely "one man, one vote" refers to calls for universal suffrage (either for all men or for all) and the demands were actually for the gender distinction to be abolished - in the UK at least there wasn't universal male suffrage until 1918, with a strong property/rate franchise still in existance (and continuing for susbequent decades at local government level). Also would "one man, one vote" really have been used in calls for female enfranchisement?

I find the opening rather confusing, in the UK a distinction is made between suffragist and suffragette whilst here it implies there is no difference. The point about eual suffrage v. universal suffrage is probably more relevent for America than the UK, where I don't think it was such an issue. The catch phrase I'm completely lost about, I suspect again it's an American thing. If I get some time I'll try to reword this. -- Joolz 13:54, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Kuwait and more.

With the news of Kuwait allowing women to vote do you think we should / could put together a table of what countries gave women the vote when (and to what extent)? gren 21:08, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

To me, that sounds like a great idea! Be bold!

Atlant 23:23, 17 May 2005 (UTC)