The first wave of feminism is remembered for the vote, but its campaigns were broader: the right of married women to own property and keep their wages, access to secondary schools and universities, entry to professions such as medicine and law, and reform of divorce and child custody laws. In Britain, Married Women's Property Acts in 1870 and 1882 let wives keep their own earnings and property, a slow retreat from coverture that campaigners had fought for over decades.

The vote around the world

The dates show how slow and uneven the change was.

• New Zealand, 1893: the first self-governing country to give women the vote in national elections, after petitions organized by Kate Sheppard.
• Australia, 1902: women won the federal vote, though most Aboriginal people, women and men, were excluded until 1962.
• Finland, 1906: the first European country to grant women the vote, and also the right to stand for parliament.
• Norway, 1913, and Denmark, 1915.
• United Kingdom, 1918: the vote for women over 30 who met property qualifications, then on equal terms with men in 1928.
• Germany, 1918, with women voting for the first time in January 1919.
• United States, 1920, through the Nineteenth Amendment.
• France, 1944, Italy and Japan, 1945, and India under its 1950 constitution.
• Switzerland, 1971, for federal elections; one canton held out until a court ruling in 1990.

The American story

After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barred denying the vote on account of race but said nothing about sex. The movement split over whether to support it. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed it, sometimes with racist arguments, while Lucy Stone and others supported it. The two wings reunited in 1890. Anthony was arrested for voting in 1872. Black women such as Ida B. Wells campaigned for suffrage while fighting racism inside the movement; in a 1913 suffrage parade in Washington she refused to march at the back and joined her state's delegation. The 1920 amendment did not end exclusion in practice: many Black women in the South, like Black men, were kept from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Suffragists and suffragettes

In Britain the movement had two main wings. The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett, used petitions, meetings and lobbying; its members were suffragists. The Women's Social and Political Union, founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, adopted the motto “Deeds, not words.” Its members, nicknamed suffragettes by a newspaper, turned to militant tactics: heckling, window smashing and, from 1912, arson attacks on empty buildings. Imprisoned suffragettes went on hunger strike and were force-fed. In 1913 Emily Wilding Davison died after stepping in front of the King's horse at the Derby. When war came in 1914, both wings largely suspended their campaigns, and women's war work strengthened their case.

The opponents

Anti-suffragists included many women. The novelist Mary Augusta Ward helped lead a Women's National Anti-Suffrage League founded in 1908. Their best arguments held that men and women had different but equally valuable spheres, that women already exercised influence through family, charity and local government, and that party politics would coarsen the home. Suffragists replied that laws shaped women's lives in every sphere, so women deserved a voice in making them.

Worked example: did militancy help?

Historians still debate whether the suffragettes' militant tactics helped or hurt the British campaign. Work through the arguments.

The case that militancy helped. Before 1903, the constitutional campaign had worked for decades with limited results; Parliament repeatedly talked the issue out. The suffragettes made women's suffrage impossible to ignore: newspapers covered every arrest, and the hunger strikes and force-feeding drew sympathy. Their courage showed that women would sacrifice for the vote, undercutting the claim that they did not really want it.

The case that it hurt. Arson and window smashing gave opponents a ready argument: women who behaved this way were unfit to vote. Some members of Parliament who had supported suffrage said they could not vote for it under threat. Meanwhile, the non-militant National Union kept growing and was far larger than the Women's Social and Political Union by 1914, suggesting that patient persuasion was building support.

The complicating factor. The vote finally came in 1918, after the war. Women's war work in munitions factories, hospitals and offices changed many minds, and Parliament was already redesigning the franchise for returning soldiers, many of whom had lacked the vote. Both wings had largely stopped campaigning during the war, so neither tactic can claim the final step alone.

Many historians conclude that the two wings worked in combination: militancy raised the issue's profile, and the constitutional wing offered a respectable path to say yes. Compare this with the debates about disruption and discipline in other movements, such as the US civil rights movement, where similar arguments recur.