Women’s Suffrage: A Twentieth Century Win

The twentieth century was a century plagued with war, aggression, and general political chaos. Millions of people around the world were violently killed or oppressed throughout this century, and hardships faced all at some point or another. But the twentieth century also enveloped some progressive and liberalizing events that changed life forever both around the world and throughout the United States. Women, specifically, gained rights in the twentieth century that had been denied them for centuries before. Suffrage had been the key issue in the global woman’s fight for equality, and the equality of citizenship that came with it. Now, in the twenty-first century, women across the world often get to take advantage of the rights their sisters of the previous century fought for.

From 1890 to 1990, 133 nations across the world gained women’s suffrage (Ramirez, Soysal, & Shanahan, 1997, p. 735). As equal citizens, women would be able to play a role in politics and help make decisions for the public, which includes the women themselves. Women across the globe gradually became more aware of these powers they were denied as society developed; improved technology allowed for greater communication, transportation, and geographical diffusion (Ramirez et al., 1997, p. 736). As people became better equipped to interact and exchange information more frequently, women were able to disperse their philosophies better and gain more support. Women could also more easily meet with each other and confer, setting the stage for the development of women’s rights groups. Women in the United States were encouraged by a developing international identity of women, spurred by the early women’s suffrage acquisitions in New Zealand, Australia, and Finland (Ramirez et al., 1997, p. 737). Nations that looked to the United States as the dominant leader of the world began to follow suit in the fight for women’s rights, and so the international dispersion of women’s rights gained footing (Ramirez et al., 1997, p. 736).

Beginning around 1940, the percent of countries with women’s suffrage began to converge with the percent of countries with men’s suffrage (Ramirez et al., 1997, p. 738). Three main factors seem to be responsible for this convergence, two of which are the derivative of increased technology levels: (1) greater communication allowed women in different countries to relate to each other the hardships and successes and goals of their social movements, encouraging one another to do the same, (2) improved household technology decreased the amount of time a woman needed to dedicate to household chores, diminishing the gap between female and male marginal productivities and (3) the decolonization that took place in the 1930s often resulted in independent nation-states which often granted suffrage rights to both men and women at the same time (Ramirez et al., 1997, p. 738). Thus, as women became more economically valuable relative to men in the twentieth century, they had greater negotiating powers to gain the rights they sought.

Though women of the twentieth century rights movements may have sacrificed a lot to fight for their beliefs, they paved the way for the free women of the twenty-first century. The worldwide scale of the women’s suffrage movement allowed for a successful battle, resulting in equal citizenship for men and women in over one hundred countries in one hundred years. Without this social movement of the twentieth century, United States women today may not have been able to take political office, acquire high-paying, high-powered jobs, have overtaken men in terms of success in higher education, and make choices for themselves independent of a man’s opinion. Indubitably women’s suffrage has paved the way for a progressive society and has enabled countless women to pursue careers, influence the government and economy, and contribute to the societies that kept them oppressed for so long.

Reference

Ramirez, F. O., Soysal, Y., & Shanahan, S. (1997). The changing logic of politicalcitizenship: Cross-national acquisition of women's suffrage rights, 1890 to 1990. American Sociological Review, 6(95), 735-745.