Why did European women get their rights so late?
Answers
1920
Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.
Answer:
Some fifteen years ago, political theorist Carole Pateman deplored the fact that we still knew remarkably little about how women had won the vote in different parts of the world.1 This gap in knowledge regarding women’s constitutional history included Europe, where, with the exception of just a handful of countries, such as France or the UK, little comparative research had been done on this question with obvious implications for women’s status as citizens in constitutional democracies. This article sum marizes the lessons from a recent book describing how women accessed suffrage and came to inhabit the notion of citizenship in different European countries.2 A comparative look at the history of women’s right to vote across Europe helps us to understand what was at stake for women in the transition to modernity, and how modernity conceptualized women’s citizenship. It helps to give us a notion of how important women’s vote was for women and other actors, what factors stood in the way of women’s suffrage, and what other considerations and events made it possible in different countries at different points of time in history. It also allows us to retell the history of citizenship, as a rights-holding status, from a woman’s perspective, and to place women’s persistent under-representation in traditionally male domains of power in a historical context.