A surprising pattern marks the early victories. Women did not first win the vote in the great capitals of Europe or in the old cities of the American East, where the movement's most famous leaders lived. They won it in thinly settled places at the edges of the English-speaking world and of the Russian Empire: territories in the American West, a small island in the Irish Sea, the colonies of New Zealand and Australia, and the Grand Duchy of Finland. Explaining why tells us a good deal about how voting rights are actually won.

The American West

In December 1869 the legislature of Wyoming Territory passed a law giving women the vote, making it the first government in the United States to do so. Motives were mixed: some members believed in equal rights, some hoped the publicity would attract settlers to a territory with about six men for every woman, and some wanted to embarrass a governor from the other party. Utah Territory followed in 1870, partly because leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints expected women's votes to rebut claims that polygamy oppressed them. In 1887 Congress took the vote away from Utah's women in the Edmunds-Tucker Act, aimed at polygamy; they regained it when Utah became a state in 1896. In 1893 Colorado became the first state where male voters approved women's suffrage in a referendum. Idaho followed in 1896.

Temperance and the Pacific

In 1881 the Isle of Man gave the vote in its parliamentary elections to unmarried women and widows who owned property. The bigger breakthrough came in the Pacific. In New Zealand the leading organizer was Kate Sheppard, who worked through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, an American-born movement that had spread across the English-speaking world. Temperance workers wanted to restrict alcohol, which they blamed for poverty and violence against wives and children, and they concluded that only voting women could force legislators to act. This was the expediency argument at its most practical.

The Electoral Act became law on 19 September 1893, making New Zealand the first self-governing country in which all adult women could vote in national elections. It included Māori women as well as settler women. There was one large limit: New Zealand women could not stand for Parliament until 1919. The premier, Richard Seddon, opposed the bill and tried to kill it in the upper house, but two councillors switched their votes partly in protest at his tactics, and it passed.

The next year South Australia went further, giving women both the vote and the right to stand for Parliament, the first place to grant both. When the Australian colonies federated, the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 gave women the vote and the right to stand in federal elections. But the same Act excluded most Aboriginal people, men and women, unless they were already on a state roll. A milestone for one group was a new barrier for another.

Finland and Norway

Finland was then a self-governing Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. After a general strike in 1905 weakened the tsar's government, Finland replaced its old four-estate Diet with a single-chamber parliament elected by universal and equal suffrage. In 1906 Finland became the first country in Europe to give women the vote, and the first anywhere to grant all women both the vote and the right to stand at the same time. In the election of March 1907, nineteen women were elected, the first women members of a national parliament anywhere in the world. Norway followed with full suffrage in 1913, after granting a limited version in 1907.

Why the edges?

Historians point to several reasons. In new societies, electoral systems were being designed rather than inherited, so there were fewer entrenched traditions to overturn. Small legislatures could be persuaded by a few determined lobbyists. Settler governments wanted to look progressive and to attract families. And in Finland, the vote for women was part of a national movement against Russian rule, in which men and women had struck and marched together. The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who thinks rights are won only by the force of ideas: in nearly every early case, principle succeeded because it lined up with someone's practical interest.

Worked example: the monster petition

Sheppard's campaign shows how a small movement made itself impossible to ignore. Between 1891 and 1893 the suffragists organized three national petitions, each larger than the last. The 1893 petition carried nearly 32,000 signatures, at a time when New Zealand had only a few hundred thousand adults. Its sheets were glued together into a roll said to be about 270 meters long. When the MP Sir John Hall presented it to the House of Representatives, he unrolled it down the floor of the chamber until it struck the far wall.

The petition did more than count supporters. Opponents claimed women did not really want the vote. The roll answered that claim physically, in a form members could see and touch. It is a good model of how a campaign turns diffuse sympathy into visible, countable pressure.