Which country first gave women the vote?
Douglas, Saturday,
Which country was the first place in the world to give women the vote? Most people would answer England or maybe somewhere exotic like New Zealand. But the surprising answer is that the first country was... the Isle of Man.
Today, with countries like Afghanistan putting women's rights in danger, The BuffPo thought it would be interesting to take a look back a the earliest countries to give women this fundamental right, the right to vote. And the first place in the world to introduce universal suffrage was in fact this small island, 145 km off England's northwest coast.
After 1918, following the Suffragettes winning the historic vote in Westminster, it was soon forgotten that women (or at least householders) in the Isle of Man had been able to vote in elections to the House of Keys for 37 years - two generations! A year after the English vote, all women living there were given both the right to vote AND the right to stand for election.
Amazingly, women had an impressive amount of rights during the reign of the Kingdom of Mann in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In those days, the kingdom stretched from the Clyde estuary isles to the Hebrides archipelagos, from the Orkneys all the way to the Shetlands. Funnily enough, at the time that William the Conqueror and his French army invaded England, the women of this forgotten empire already enjoyed crucial rights. How did it come about that these far-flung islands had such different customs from the rest of Europe? Part of the answer is that the people of the Kingdom were descended from Norse invaders whose traditions involved the men sailing away for months rampaging and raiding, leaving the women not only at home but in full legal charge of estates.
Ancient keys buried with women record their status as owners of households and show how deep the roots of the high status of women in Scandinavia or other scattered Celtic nations are.
Ironically, however, today people remember the names of the English suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel (nicknamed "the Queen of the Mob") but hardly anyone knows of Bríet Bijarnhéöinsdóttir (Libra) who was an early Icelandic advocate for women's liberation and women's suffrage.
Yet the fact is that the apparently very novel Isle of Man laws of 1881 actually only restored to women customary rights, such as ownership of property, which they had enjoyed even in the time of the Kingdom of Mann and the isles in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
• In 1889, Lina Luplau founded the Danish association for universal suffrage, which eventually won the right to vote for women in Denmark in 1915.
• In Norway, Gina Krog founded her country's first association for universal suffrage in 1898 but actually won the vote for women two years before Denmark, in 1913.
• And the first women MPs elected anywhere in the world were elected in the 1907 Finnish general election.
• But, the first country in the world to give the vote to women was not Norway, Denmark, Finland or Iceland but... the Isle of Man.
Tags:
Backgrounder…