Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: When did women gain the right to vote in England?
Finally in 1918, Parliament passed an act granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British universities. About 8.4 million women gained the vote.[22] In November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed, allowing women to be elected into the House of Commons.[22] By 1928 the consensus was that votes for women had been successful. With the Conservative Party in full control in 1928, it passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act that extended the voting franchise to all women over the age of 21, granting women the vote on the same terms as men,[23][24] although one Conservative opponent of the bill warned that it risked splitting the party for years to come.[25]
England was one of the first places in the world to grant voting rights to women citizens universally and regardless of marital status, which it did by passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act that gave voting rights to women aged 30 years and over who met a property qualification (equal voting rights with men was achieved a decade later under the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which permitted all women aged 21 and over to vote). Several centuries earlier, some of its colonies in North America, including New Jersey Colony by its constitution, had granted voting rights to women who could meet the same property requirements men had to meet; common laws of Coverture requiring a married woman's property to be held by her husband meant married women typically could not qualify.
The National Assembly in the Philippines announced the Plebiscite in 1937, which would decide whether or not women should gain the right to vote or not. Multiple women's movement started during 1910 which led to the plebiscite in 1937 where women voted for or against for women's suffrage rights. Filipino women worked hard to mobilize and fight for women's suffrage in the early 1900s and gained victory after 447,725 out of 500,000 votes affirmed to having women's right to vote.
Women's suffrage (colloquial: female suffrage, woman suffrage, or women's right to vote) is the right of women to vote in elections; a person who advocates the extension of suffrage, particularly to women, is called a suffragist. Limited voting rights were gained by women in Finland, Iceland, Sweden and some Australian colonies and western U.S. states in the late 19th century. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts to gain voting rights, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904, Berlin, Germany), and also worked for equal civil rights for women.
Qvam belonged to the minority in the Women Voting Rights Association that did not want to compromise about full voting rights as a human right. In 1898, they broke away from the mother association and formed the Countrywide Women Rights Association () where Qvam became leader. When women obtained a limited right to vote in municipal elections in 1901, the Countrywide Women Rights Association challenged women to get involved in party work and they recruited candidates to political parties, mainly to the Liberal Party.
Women actively participated in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905/06, which recognized all citizens as equal. The electoral law of 1906, however, denied women the right to vote. Women voted for the first time in the 1963 referendum on the White Revolution (reform introduced by Mohammad Reza Shah). The government did not allow women's participation in the 1963 vote, but they also did not deny them the right to set up their own ballots and vote. Women also voted in the September 1963 parliamentary elections. For the first time, six women were elected to parliament, and Shah appointed two other women to senate. The number of women deputies also increased in the following parliamentary elections. In 1978, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, 22 women were in the parliament. Women retained the right to vote after the Islamic Revolution and four were elected to parliament under the Islamic Republic. In the 2000 Majlis elections, 13 women were elected to parliament. In the 1960s and 1970s, Farrukhru Parsa was elected as minister of education and Mahnaz Afkhami as minister of state for women's affairs. The position of minister of state for women's affairs was abolished in 1978. Today, Iranian women are still working to gain more rights in the political sphere.
As the women's suffrage movement gained popularity through the nineteenth century, African-American women were increasingly
marginalized. African-American women dealt not only with the sexism of being withheld the vote but also the racism of white suffragists. The struggle for the vote did not end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In some Southern states, African-American women were unable to freely exercise their right to vote up until the 1960s. However, these difficulties did not deter African-American women in their effort to secure the vote.
In 1888, Britain's first nationwide coalition of groups advocating women's right to vote, the National Society for Women's Suffrage (NSWS), split after a majority of members decided to accept organisations affiliated with political parties. Angry at this decision, some of the group's leaders, including Lydia Becker and Millicent Fawcett, stormed out of the meeting and created an alternative organisation committed to the "old rules," called the Great College Street Society after the location of its headquarters. Pankhurst aligned herself with the "new rules" group, which became known as the Parliament Street Society (PSS). Some members of the PSS favoured a piecemeal approach to gaining the vote. Because it was often assumed that married women did not need the vote since their husbands "voted for them," some PSS members felt that the vote for single women and widows was a practical step along the path to full suffrage. When the reluctance within the PSS to advocate on behalf of married women became clear, Pankhurst and her husband helped organise another new group dedicated to voting rights for all women – married and unmarried.
France confirmed the electoral system of the former Ottoman Mount Lebanon province in setting up a Representative Council for Greater Lebanon in 1922. Two stage elections, universal adult male suffrage, and multimember multi-communal constituencies continued the situation that prevailed in Mount Lebanon up to 1914. Women in Lebanon gained suffrage in 1952, only five years after men did in the new Republic (in the year 1947). The Lebanese constitution — specifically Article 7, proclaimed that "All Lebanese are equal under the law, enjoying equally civil and political rights, and performing duties and public responsibility without any discrimination among them." This however did not protect against gender discrimination and thus women were not equally protected. Women were refused the right to vote by early Lebanese government until they organized and began petitioning for equal rights. In 1952 the Women's Political Rights Agreement came about and guaranteed that women would be able to vote. Women gained the right to vote but with a limitation, they had to have an elementary education. Women had to have documents that could prove that they had received at least an elementary level education. This limitation was lifted five years later in 1957 without much discourse or a fight.
Women have been eligible to become premier since they first gained the right to vote, beginning in 1916 in Manitoba and extending to all jurisdictions when Quebec allowed women to vote in 1940 (the Northwest Territories did not allow women to vote until later, but it did not have premiers at the time). Women soon began to be appointed to cabinet positions, starting with Mary Ellen Smith in British Columbia in 1921, but it was not until decades later that women began to serve as leaders of a major party. Hilda Watson became the first woman to lead her party to victory in a general election in 1978. However, since Yukon did not have premiers at the time, and Watson did not win her riding, her successor became the first Government Leader of the Yukon. The first female premier was Rita Johnston in 1991 in British Columbia. Today, every Canadian jurisdiction has had at least one female premier except for Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
When Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Women Suffrage Association, their goal was to help women gain voting rights through reliance on the Constitution. Also, in 1869 Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). However, AWSA focused on gaining voting rights for women through the amendment process. Although these two organization were fighting for the same cause, it was not until 1890 that they merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). After the merger of the two organizations, the (NAWSA) waged a state-by-state campaign to obtain voting rights for women.
Brown was a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage in the Washington Territory, one of the first territories in which women gained the right to vote through full enfranchisement in 1883. Brown wrote many letters to the editor of the "Daily Journal" in Walla Walla about the paper’s representation of women’s newly acquired right to vote. In 1887, a year before the Washington Territorial Supreme Court revoked women’s right to vote, the paper asserted that the Union did not want to force women to vote, but that many women, once they could vote, only voted in the first ballot out of curiosity and thereafter ceased to vote as the novelty of voting dissipated. Brown challenged this interpretation, writing that the Union did not force men to vote, so why would they force women to do so? He argued that while the Union did not believe in forcing women to vote, it did believe in forcing women to abstain from voting, and that the Union would continue to reinforce and perpetuate the legal barriers that kept women from voting.
Although middle class urban women were well-organized supporters of suffrage, the rural areas of the South were hostile. The state legislatures ignored efforts to let women vote in local elections. Georgia not only refused to ratify the Federal 19th Amendment, but took pride in being the first to reject it. The Amendment passed nationally and Georgia women gained the right to vote in 1920. However, black women did not vote until federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced their constitutional rights.
In the years before World War I, women in Norway (1913) also won the right to vote, as did women in the remaining Australian states. Denmark granted women's suffrage in 1915. Near the end of the war, Canada, Russia, Germany, and Poland also recognized women's right to vote. The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote, Dutch women in 1919, and American women won the vote on 26 August 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment (the Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured voting rights for racial minorities). Irish women won the same voting rights as men in the Irish Free State constitution, 1922. In 1928, British women won suffrage on the same terms as men, that is, for persons 21 years old and older. Suffrage of Turkish women introduced in 1930 for local elections and in 1934 for national elections.
Feminist ideas still began to spread, and some radical women became outspoken in promoting the cause of women's rights. Sophie Mereau launched the "Almanach für Frauen" (Women's Almanac) in 1784. Feminism as a movement began to gain ground toward the end of the 19th century, although it did not yet include a strong push to extend suffrage to German women. Some women who worked for women's rights were in fact opposed to extending the vote to women, a stance that became more widespread at the turn of the 20th century, when many Germans were concerned that granting women the vote would result in more votes for socialists.
Germany's unification process after 1871 was heavily dominated by men and gave priority to the "Fatherland" theme and related male issues, such as military prowess. Nevertheless, women became much better organized themselves. Middle class women enrolled in the "Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine", the Union of German Feminist Organizations (BDF). Founded in 1894, it grew to include 137 separate women's rights groups from 1907 until 1933, when the Nazi regime disbanded the organization.
By the mid 20th century, in some European countries, women still lacked some significant rights. Feminists in these countries continued to fight for voting rights. In Switzerland, women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971; but in the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden women obtained the right to vote on local issues only in 1991, when the canton was forced to do so by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. In Liechtenstein, women were given the right to vote by the women's suffrage referendum of 1984. Three prior referendums held in 1968, 1971 and 1973 had failed to secure women's right to vote.
Feminists continued to campaign for the reform of family laws which gave husbands control over their wives. Although by the 20th century coverture had been abolished in the UK and the US, in many continental European countries married women still had very few rights. For instance, in France married women did not receive the right to work without their husband's permission until 1965. Feminists have also worked to abolish the "marital exemption" in rape laws which precluded the prosecution of husbands for the rape of their wives. Earlier efforts by first-wave feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre, Victoria Woodhull and Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy to criminalize marital rape in the late 19th century had failed; this was only achieved a century later in most Western countries, but is still not achieved in many other parts of the world.
Qvam also became a member of the Women Voting Rights Association that was formed in Kristiania in 1895. The association's purpose was to advocate for full female voting rights, in both national and local elections. The association managed to get the Norwegian parliament to debate the case in 1890, but a proposal to give voting rights to women fell with 70 votes against and 44 for the proposal. In 1898, all men over 25 years obtained voting rights in municipal elections, while only men with a certain income could vote in the parliamentary election. Women still did not have any right to vote. A majority in the Women Voting Rights Association then decided to propose a limited voting right for women: that women should be able to vote in municipal elections at the same conditions as men could vote in national elections. This would give only rich women the right to vote, mainly in the cities.
Anti-suffragists, such as Josephine Dodge, argued that giving women the right to vote would overburden them and undermine their privileged status. They saw participation in the private sphere as essential to a woman's role and thought that giving them public duties would prevent them from fulfilling their primary responsibilities in the home. Anti-suffragists claimed that they represented the "silent majority" of America who did not want to enter the public sphere by gaining the right to vote. Being against women's suffrage didn't mean, however, that all Antis were against civic pursuits. Jeanette L. Gilder, a journalist, wrote "Give women everything she wants, but not the ballot. Open every field of learning, every avenue of industry to her, but keep her out of politics." Dodge encouraged women to become involved in "charitable, philanthropic and educational activities." It was also cited that women had made reforms such as raising the age of consent without the vote and that gaining this right was therefore unnecessary and could even be harmful to further reform movements. The thought was that women were able to influence the government because they were seen as politically neutral and non-partisan and giving them the right to vote would strip them of this unique position. In addition, because voting is "only a small part of government," they believed there was no need to vote in order to participate in politics. This particular line of reasoning, that women should stay out of politics, kept the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) from officially endorsing suffrage until 1914.
Unlike other European countries, women in France did not gain the right to vote after the war, but the CNFF gained influence and prestige.
In 1919 Avril de Sainte-Croix and the CNFF engaged in a campaign to convince the Allied leaders at the Versailles Peace Conference to address women and their problems in the charter of the new League of Nations, with partial success. The CNFF also worked to convince the French senators to pass the bill for women's suffrage.
Julie Siegfried's husband, Jules Siegfried, was a deputy and won passage of the right for women to vote in 1919, but the law was rejected by the Senate. 
Julie Siegfried was decorated with the Knight's cross of the Legion of Honor by Alexandre Millerand.
Chile has been considered one of the most socially conservative countries in Latin America. This has been exemplified by women's struggle to gain freedom in terms of voting. The Chilean government esteems Catholicism, which puts women in a patriarchal, domesticated setting, and has been used as reasoning for restricting women's rights. Even though the first woman (Domitila Silva Y Lepe) voted in 1875, voting was still considered a barrier well into the 1900s to women's rights in Chile. By 1922, Graciela Mandujano and other women founded the Partido Cívico Femenino (Women's Civic Party) which focused on women getting the right to vote. Women formally gained the right to vote in 1949. During that time, women and men voted in separate polling stations due to an effort to provide women with less influence on their preferences. Women also tended to vote more conservatively than men, demonstrating the influence of religion on voting preferences. Although most organizations dissolved after suffrage was granted, Partido Femenino Chileno (Chilean Women's Party), founded by Marié de la Cruz in 1946, continued to grow and work for more women's rights throughout the years. Chilean women's influence on politics has been demonstrated through multiple occasions during presidential elections - for example, had women not voted in the 1958 election, Salvador Allende would have won. During Chile's dictatorship (1973-1990), developments in regards to women's rights stalled comparatively. This did not stop some feminist groups from speaking out, however, as exemplified by the women's march of 1971 against Salvador Allende. This march had long-lasting effects, particularly by establishing women's role in politics, and turning the day of the march into National Women's Day. Post dictatorship, women paradoxically also seemed to lose their voice politically. With a more recent surge in feminism in Chile, the first female leader, Michelle Bachelet, became the 34th president in 2006-2010. While not immediately re-electable for the next election, she was appointed the first executive director of United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). On March 11, 2014, she became the 36th president, beginning her second term.
The Women's Franchise League of Indiana Headquarters were located at 605 Trust Building, Terre Haute, Indiana. Under her presidency, the participation in the organization grew so rapidly that only four counties in Indiana did not have any kind of representation of the league. Benbridge's leadership lead to many new members and expanded the organization. Benbridge worked as president to consolidat the gains women had made when receiving the right to vote and encouraging them to continue to use their right to vote to further progress. Benbridge, along with the other league presidents, did not receive a salary for her hard work and efforts.
This election was the first held since women in Queensland gained the right to vote, although indigenous women did not gain the right until 1962.
The government under King Abdullah was considered reformist. It opened the country's first co-educational university, appointed the first female cabinet member, and passed laws against domestic violence. Women did not gain the right to vote in 2005, but the king supported a woman's right to drive and vote. Critics say the reform was far too slow, and often more symbolic than substantive. Activists, such as Wajeha Al-Huwaider, compare the condition of Saudi women to slavery.
When the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) was founded in 1953, Isaacs was one of the founding members of the Women's Branch of the PLP. Because women's roles were limited to fundraising, she turned her attention to the suffrage movement and focused on gaining the right to vote. Socio-economic barriers to women created disadvantages in education, employment, family support, inheritance and political activism. Isaacs and other feminists worked within women's organizations both locally and internationally to lobby for the right to vote. In the late 1950s the PLP platform included women's suffrage, as they were in favor of majority rule government. In 1958, Isaacs was one of the women who founded and served on the executive committee of the National Council of Women. By 1960, the suffrage movement had gained ground with the United Bahamian Party as well and in 1962, Bahamian women won the right to vote. In 1969, Isaacs was appointed as a Senator for the PLP, second woman Senator of the Bahamas, after Doris Sands Johnson who had been appointed in 1967.
On the political front, her lifelong interest in economic and social conditions began in 1907 when she was one of the founders of the women's suffrage association "Landsforbundet for Kvinders Valgret", editing their journal "Kvindevalgret" (Women's Right to Vote) from 1908 to 1912. When women received the right to vote in municipal elections, in 1909 she was elected to the Citizens Representation for the Social Liberal Party. She proved to be a talented speaker, winning more votes than normal when she gained more votes than normal for the Social Liberal Party in Gentofte in 1918 when women were first permitted to stand for the Folketing.