词条 | woman suffrage |
释义 | woman suffrage the right of women by law to vote in national and local elections. Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and Republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women's voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States; but these countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913). In Sweden and the United States they had voting rights in some local elections. World War I and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections. These countries included Soviet Russia (1917); Canada (1918); Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (1919); the United States and Hungary (1920); Great Britain (1918 and 1928); Burma (now Myanmar; 1922); Ecuador (1929); South Africa (1930); Brazil, Uruguay, and Thailand (1932); Turkey and Cuba (1934); and the Philippines (1937). In a number of these countries, women were initially granted the right to vote in municipal or other local elections or perhaps in provincial elections; only later were they granted the vote in national elections. Immediately after World War II, France, Italy, Romania, Yugoslavia, and China had been added to the group. Full suffrage for women was introduced in India by the constitution in 1949; in Pakistan women received full voting rights in national elections in 1956. In another decade the total number of countries that had given women the right to vote had reached more than 100, partly because nearly all countries that gained independence after World War II guaranteed equal voting rights to men and women in their constitutions. By 1971 Switzerland allowed women to vote in federal and most cantonal elections, and in 1973 women were granted full voting rights in Syria. Women continue to be denied voting rights in many of the conservative Arab countries bordering the Persian Gulf. The United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.” Historically, the United Kingdom and the United States provide characteristic examples of the struggle for woman suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Great Britain (United Kingdom) woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft (Wollstonecraft, Mary) in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the 1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill (Mill, John Stuart) and his wife, Harriet. The first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865, and in 1867 Mill presented to Parliament this society's petition, which demanded the vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. The Reform Bill of 1867 contained no provision for woman suffrage, but meanwhile woman suffrage societies were forming in most of the major cities of Britain, and in the 1870s these organizations submitted to Parliament petitions demanding the franchise for women and containing a total of almost three million signatures. ![]() ![]() From the founding of the United States, women were almost universally excluded from voting. Only when women began to chafe at this restriction, however, was their exclusion made explicit. The movement for woman suffrage started in the early 19th century during the agitation against slavery. Women such as Lucretia Mott (Mott, Lucretia) showed a keen interest in the antislavery movement and proved to be admirable public speakers. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Stanton, Elizabeth Cady) joined the antislavery forces, she and Mott agreed that the rights of women, as well as those of slaves, needed redress. In July 1848 they issued a call for a convention to discuss the issue of women's rights; this convention met in Stanton's hometown, Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848, and issued a declaration that called for woman suffrage and for the right of women to educational and employment opportunities. (See Seneca Falls Convention.) It was followed in 1850 by the first national convention of the women's movement, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Lucy Stone (Stone, Lucy) and a group of prominent Eastern suffragists. Another convention, held in Syracuse, New York, in 1852, was the occasion of the first joint venture between Stanton and the dynamic suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony (Anthony, Susan B.); together these two figures led the American suffragist movement for the next 50 years. Other woman suffrage conventions were held as the movement gained its first mass strength, but at first no way of extending the vote to women was known except by amendments to the constitutions of the various states. Several attempts were made in this regard after the American Civil War (1861–65), but even though the Territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote in all elections in 1869, it soon became apparent that an amendment of the federal Constitution would be a preferable plan. Accordingly, the National Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869 with the declared object of securing the ballot for women by an amendment to the Constitution. Anthony and Stanton were the leaders of this organization, which held a convention every year for 50 years after its founding. In 1869 another organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, was founded by Lucy Stone with the aim of securing woman suffrage by obtaining amendments to that effect in the constitutions of the various states. In 1890 the two organizations united under the name National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked together for almost 30 years. ![]() World War I, and the major role played in it by women in various capacities, broke down most of the remaining opposition to woman suffrage in the United States. Amendments to the federal Constitution concerning woman suffrage had been introduced into Congress in 1878 and 1914, but the 1878 amendment had been overwhelmingly defeated, and the 1914 amendment had narrowly failed to gain even a simple majority of the votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate (a two-thirds majority vote in Congress was needed for the amendment to be sent to the state legislatures for ratification). By 1918, however, both major political parties were committed to woman suffrage, and the amendment was carried by the necessary two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate in January 1918 and June 1919, respectively. Vigorous campaigns were then waged to secure ratification of the amendment by two-thirds of the state legislatures, and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment. On August 26 the Nineteenth Amendment was proclaimed by the secretary of state as being part of the Constitution of the United States. Women in the United States were enfranchised on an equal basis with men. The text reads as follows: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. |
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