In the decade after 1914 more women gained the vote than in all the years before. The First World War and the revolutions that followed tore up old constitutions, and new ones were written in a hurry. Yet the story outside the English-speaking world is not just one of copying. Each country had its own campaigners, its own fears and its own timing, and some of the longest delays came in old and stable democracies.

War and revolution

In Russia, after the tsar fell in March 1917, tens of thousands of women marched in Petrograd to demand the vote, and in July the Provisional Government granted it. Russia became the first great power to give women equal voting rights, and women voted in the Constituent Assembly election that November. In Germany the revolutionary government that took power as the empire collapsed announced universal suffrage for women and men in November 1918; in January 1919, 37 women were elected to the National Assembly. Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Sweden all moved in the same few years.

In Canada, Manitoba became the first province to enfranchise women in 1916, and most women gained the federal vote in 1918, though the province of Quebec held out until 1940. Ireland offers an odd sequence. In December 1918, in the first British election women could vote in, Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the House of Commons, but as a member of Sinn Féin she refused to take her seat. The first woman to sit was Nancy Astor in 1919. When the Irish Free State was founded, its constitution of 1922 gave women the vote at 21 on equal terms with men, six years before Britain did.

Latin America

Uruguay's constitution of 1917 opened the way to women's votes, and in 1927 the women of the small town of Cerro Chato voted in a local plebiscite, the first time women voted anywhere in Latin America. In Ecuador, the physician Matilde Hidalgo insisted on registering to vote in 1924, and the constitution of 1929 confirmed women's suffrage nationally. Brazil followed in 1932, after a long campaign led by the scientist Bertha Lutz. Argentina enfranchised women in 1947, with Eva Perón as the public face of the reform, and Mexico in 1953.

The clerical fear

In Catholic Europe, the main obstacle often came from the political left. Many republicans and anticlericals believed that women were more religious than men and would vote as their priests told them. In France the Chamber of Deputies passed women's suffrage bills several times between 1919 and 1936, but the Senate blocked them every time, largely for this reason. French women finally gained the vote by an ordinance of Charles de Gaulle's provisional government in April 1944, and first voted in 1945. Italy followed in 1945 and Belgium only in 1948.

Asia and Africa

In Japan, Ichikawa Fusae and others had campaigned since the 1920s. Women gained the vote in December 1945 under the American occupation, and in the election of April 1946 39 women were elected to the Diet. When India adopted its constitution in 1950, it gave all adults the vote at once, with no property or literacy test, so that in the elections of 1951 to 1952 millions of women, many of them unable to read, voted in a single step that had taken Britain generations. Across Africa and Asia, many newly independent states wrote equal suffrage into their founding constitutions. Egyptian women won the vote in 1956, after campaigns led by Doria Shafik.

The latecomers

Switzerland, one of the oldest democracies in Europe, gave women the federal vote only in 1971. Because major changes there require a referendum, men had to vote to share their own power, and in 1959 they had refused by about two to one. In 1971 they approved it by a similar margin. The last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, held out until 1990, when the Federal Supreme Court ordered it to admit women. In the Gulf, Kuwaiti women won the vote in 2005, and Saudi women voted for the first time in municipal elections in 2015.

Worked example: Spain, 1931

When Spain's Second Republic wrote a new constitution in 1931, its parliament had only three women members, and two of them clashed over women's votes. Clara Campoamor, a lawyer from the Radical Party, argued that a republic founded on equality could not exclude half its citizens and that rights could not wait until women voted the "right" way. Victoria Kent, a lawyer from the Radical Socialists and herself a firm supporter of women's equality, urged delay. She feared that women, many under strong church influence, would vote for parties hostile to the young republic.

Campoamor won, and women voted in 1933. The right won that election, and some blamed women, though divisions on the left mattered more. The debate captures a lasting dilemma for democrats. If you believe in the vote as a right, you cannot make it conditional on how people will use it. Campoamor's view is the one democracies eventually accepted.