60 Fun Facts About Women's Suffrage

Which was the first self-governing country to grant women the vote at national level, in 1893?

New Zealand's premier, Richard Seddon, tried to sink the bill, but his meddling so angered two councillors that they switched sides and it passed by 20 votes to 18.

Which US territory gave women the vote and the right to stand for office in 1869?

Wyoming's all-male legislature wanted publicity and hoped the law would draw women to a territory where men outnumbered them about six to one. It kept the right on becoming a state in 1890.

Which Seneca Falls newspaper editor gave her name to the loose trousers worn by 1850s dress reformers?

Amelia Bloomer didn't invent bloomers: Elizabeth Smith Miller designed the outfit, and Bloomer's paper The Lily made it famous. In 1851 she also introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Which famous abolitionist spoke up at Seneca Falls to keep the demand for the vote in the Declaration of Sentiments?

Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both spoke in its defence, and the demand passed, the only one of the convention's resolutions not carried unanimously.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton modelled the Declaration of Sentiments, signed at Seneca Falls, on which famous document?

The Declaration of Independence. Stanton kept its phrasing but wrote that 'all men and women are created equal' and charged man, not a king, with tyranny; 68 women and 32 men signed it.

Where did Elizabeth Cady Stanton first meet Lucretia Mott?

The 1840 anti-slavery convention in London refused to seat Mott and the other women delegates, and Stanton later recalled that the two resolved that day to hold a women's rights convention back home.

Susan B. Anthony was arrested in 1872 in which city for the crime of voting?

Rochester, New York, was Anthony's home, where she talked election inspectors into registering her. Fined $100 at her trial, she refused to pay, and the case was carried no further.

Which Montanan became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment?

Jeannette Rankin had helped lead the campaign that won Montana women the vote in 1914. In Congress she voted against war with Germany in 1917 and cast the only vote against war with Japan in 1941.

Susan B. Anthony became the first real woman on a circulating US coin when her portrait appeared on what in 1979?

The dollar coin flopped because it was almost the size and colour of a quarter, so people kept confusing the two, and the Mint suspended production after 1981.

Why did Stanton and Anthony oppose the Fifteenth Amendment?

It enfranchised Black men but not women, and the quarrel over whether to back it anyway split the movement into two rival associations that did not reunite until 1890.

Which suffragist, leader of the wing that rivalled Stanton and Anthony's, kept her own surname after marrying in 1855?

Lucy Stone kept her name when she married Henry Blackwell as a protest against the laws that bound wives, and women who followed her example came to be called 'Lucy Stoners'.

Which formerly enslaved speaker gave the 1851 Ohio convention speech later titled "Ain't I a Woman?"?

Sojourner Truth probably never said the famous line: the version with that refrain was published 12 years later by Frances Gage, and the report printed weeks after the speech in Akron does not contain it.

Alice Paul staged a huge suffrage parade in Washington on 3 March 1913, the day before what event?

Woodrow Wilson's inauguration had filled the city with visitors, which is why Paul chose the date. Spectators mobbed the marchers until cavalry troops arrived to clear the avenue.

The Silent Sentinels' picket, begun in January 1917, was organised by Alice Paul and which militant suffrage organisation?

The National Woman's Party grew out of the group Paul and Lucy Burns formed after breaking with the mainstream movement. Its pickets stood outside the White House day after day, whatever the weather.

Which suffragist was nominated for US president in 1872, almost half a century before women could vote nationwide?

Victoria Woodhull ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket but spent election day in a jail cell, arrested over a scandal she had printed in her own newspaper.

Where were many suffrage pickets arrested in Washington in 1917 sent to serve their sentences?

The Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia took pickets jailed for 'obstructing traffic'. Faced with worm-ridden food, they demanded to be treated as political prisoners, and many went on hunger strike.

By what name is 14 November 1917 remembered, when prison guards beat the jailed White House pickets?

The Night of Terror left Lucy Burns with her hands shackled above her head until morning, and Dorothy Day, later famous as a Catholic activist, was among the women the guards threw into the cells.

Banners carried by White House pickets in 1917 provoked mob attacks by giving the president what mocking nickname?

Kaiser Wilson banners asked why the president pitied Germans who were not self-governed when 20 million American women were not either. With the country at war with the Kaiser, crowds tore them down.

At Washington's 1913 suffrage parade, where was Ida B. Wells told to march?

At the back, in a separate delegation, was the request, made for fear of offending Southern marchers. Wells refused, waited in the crowd and stepped into the Illinois ranks as they passed.

Which Chicago organisation did Ida B. Wells co-found in January 1913 to advance the vote for Black women?

The Alpha Suffrage Club canvassed Chicago's Black neighbourhoods after Illinois women won the vote in 1913, and the voters it mobilised helped make Oscar De Priest the city's first Black alderman.

Which state sent a courier by train to Washington in June 1919 so its ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was recorded first?

Wisconsin actually voted about an hour after Illinois, but David James, a suffragist's father, left at once with the papers and handed them in at the State Department first.

In the 1920 ratification fight nicknamed the War of the Roses, suffrage supporters wore a rose of which colour?

Yellow roses marked supporters and red roses opponents as both sides lobbied the lawmakers; the young legislator who cast the deciding yes was still wearing red when he did it.

Which state became the decisive 36th to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, on 18 August 1920?

Tennessee's House ratified with the barest constitutional majority, fifty of its ninety-nine members, after the Speaker switched to yes as a ploy to force another vote and handed suffragists the margin.

In the decisive 1920 state ratification vote, 24-year-old legislator Harry T. Burn switched to yes after receiving a note from whom?

His mother, Febb Burn, had written telling him to 'be a good boy' and vote for ratification. He carried her letter in his pocket and later said a mother's advice is always safest for a boy to follow.

Which annual US observance falls on 26 August, the date the Nineteenth Amendment was certified in 1920?

Women's Equality Day marks the certification, not the deciding state vote eight days earlier. Congress designated it in 1973 after Representative Bella Abzug championed the idea.

Who won the 1920 presidential election, the first held after the Nineteenth Amendment took effect?

Warren G. Harding won, but Charlotte Woodward Pierce, the only woman who signed the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration and lived to see the amendment, was ill on election day and is not known ever to have voted.

Which state was the last of those existing in 1920 to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, doing so only in 1984?

Mississippi's legislature had rejected the amendment in 1920, so its women first voted under a law their own state refused to endorse. The 1984 vote was symbolic, coming 64 years late.

Which organisation was founded in February 1920 to guide newly enfranchised women?

The League of Women Voters was launched at the suffrage association's Chicago convention to teach women to use the ballot, six months before the amendment was ratified.

Which NAWSA president unveiled the "Winning Plan" in 1916, pairing state campaigns with a drive for a federal amendment?

Carrie Chapman Catt had returned as president the year before. Her plan made a federal amendment the goal and treated every state campaign as a step toward it, and ratification followed four years later.

After 1920 Alice Paul devoted herself to which proposal, first sent to Congress in 1923 and nicknamed for Lucretia Mott?

The Equal Rights Amendment was revised and named by Paul at Seneca Falls in 1923, but Congress did not pass it until 1972, and only 35 of the 38 states needed had ratified it when the 1982 deadline ran out.

During her 1917 hunger strike in the District Jail, Alice Paul was moved to which part of the prison?

The psychiatric ward is where Paul was held after she stopped eating in protest at conditions in the jail, and where guards restrained her and force-fed her through a tube.

Which three-word phrase from Susan B. Anthony's final birthday speech in 1906 became a watchword of the movement?

Failure is impossible closed her remarks at her 86th birthday celebration in Washington. She died less than a month later, 14 years before the amendment she had worked for became law.

The Nineteenth Amendment says the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged "on account of" what?

Sex is the only ground the amendment names. The president came round to it only in 1918, then went to the Senate in person to urge its passage as a necessary war measure.

The word "suffragette" was coined in 1906 by a journalist writing for which newspaper?

The Daily Mail reporter meant the little '-ette' ending as a put-down, but the militants adopted the name and later used it as the title of their own newspaper.

What was the motto of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union, founded in 1903?

Deeds, not words marked Pankhurst's break with decades of polite petitioning: her members heckled ministers, chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and went to prison for it.

In the suffragette colour scheme designed by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in 1908, what did green stand for?

Hope was green's meaning and purity was white's. Supporters wore the colours as badges and jewellery, and London department stores such as Selfridges stocked them.

Millicent Fawcett led which law-abiding suffragist organisation, the largest in Britain?

The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies answered the militants in 1913 with a peaceful pilgrimage: its members walked to London from across the country and some 50,000 people rallied in Hyde Park.

In 2018 Millicent Fawcett became the first woman honoured with a statue in which London location?

Parliament Square held statues only of men until campaigner Caroline Criado Perez noticed and started a petition. The Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing was then chosen to make Fawcett's bronze.

The 1913 "Cat and Mouse Act" allowed British authorities to do what with hunger-striking suffragettes?

Free them to recover, then rearrest them: the government, afraid of hunger strikers dying as martyrs, let weakened prisoners out and hauled them back, like a cat toying with a mouse.

At the 1913 Epsom Derby, Emily Davison stepped onto the track in front of a horse owned by whom?

King George V's horse Anmer struck her and she died four days later. Whether she meant to die or only to fix a suffragette scarf to the bridle is still argued.

Where did Emily Davison hide overnight on census night in 1911?

A cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, off the crypt chapel, hid her through the night, so the 1911 census recorded a woman with no vote as present in the House of Commons.

Which London prison held Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Davison and many other jailed suffragettes?

Holloway is where Marion Wallace Dunlop began the first suffragette hunger strike in 1909 and was released after 91 hours. Others copied her, and the authorities answered with force-feeding.

Emmeline Pankhurst died in June 1928, only weeks before which change became law?

Votes for women at 21, the same terms as men, became law on 2 July 1928, eighteen days after she died. It added about five million voters and made women a majority of the electorate.

British women over 30 first won the vote in the final year of which war?

The First World War was still being fought when the act passed in February 1918. It enfranchised more than eight million women, those over 30 who met a property test, and that December they voted in a general election for the first time.

In her final years Emmeline Pankhurst was selected as a parliamentary candidate for which party?

The Conservatives adopted her as a candidate in London's East End, a long way from the Independent Labour Party she had once joined. She died before the election could be held.

After a 1913 family rift, Emmeline Pankhurst gave which daughter £20 and a ticket and insisted she emigrate to Australia?

Adela helped found the Communist Party of Australia, later turned against it and joined the far-right Australia First Movement. She and her mother were never reconciled.

In March 1914 suffragette Mary Richardson slashed which Velázquez painting in the National Gallery?

The Rokeby Venus took seven cuts before she was seized. She called it a protest at the Government's treatment of Mrs Pankhurst, arrested the day before, and the canvas was later restored and put back on display.

Which fighting skill did Edith Garrud teach the suffragettes who guarded their leaders from the police?

Jiu-jitsu turns an attacker's force against him, which suited the tiny Garrud. Punch drew her facing a row of policemen as 'the suffragette that knew jiu-jitsu'.

Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 in which English city?

Manchester was also where she founded the WSPU, inviting a few women to her house in Nelson Street in 1903. The house is now the Pankhurst Centre, a museum of the campaign.

Which Virginia-born politician became the first woman to take her seat in Britain's House of Commons, in 1919?

Nancy Astor had taken no part in the suffrage campaign. The first woman actually elected, Constance Markievicz of Sinn Féin, had won a seat in 1918 but refused to take it.

Which country became the first in Europe to give women the vote, in 1906?

Finland, then a Grand Duchy under the Russian tsar, also let women stand for office, and its first election under the new law, in 1907, returned 19 women, the first female members of any parliament.

Which of these countries was the last to give women the vote, holding out until 1944?

France's deputies voted for it again and again between the wars, but the Senate never let the bills through. De Gaulle's French Committee of National Liberation finally granted it by ordinance in April 1944.

Which European country did not let women vote in national elections until 1971?

Switzerland's male voters rejected the idea two to one in 1959 before approving it in 1971, and the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden kept women out of local votes until a court forced it to yield in 1990.

Which tiny European state was the last on the continent to let women vote in national elections, in 1984?

Liechtenstein's men had said no in 1971 and 1973, and in 1984 they said yes by just 119 votes, 2,370 to 2,251.

In 2015, women in which country voted for the first time, in municipal elections?

Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah had ordered the change, and women stood as candidates too, but they still had to be driven to the polls: the kingdom then barred women from taking the wheel.

Which colony in 1894 gave women both the vote and the right to stand for its parliament?

South Australia gave women the right to stand almost by accident: an opponent moved to let them sit in parliament, expecting that to sink the bill, and it passed anyway.

In which Disney musical does a mother sing the anthem "Sister Suffragette"?

Mary Poppins has Glynis Johns as Mrs Banks, an ardent suffragette too busy with the cause to see that her children, passed from one nanny to another, are unhappy.

Which philosopher and Liberal MP urged the Commons in 1867 to give women the vote on the same terms as men?

John Stuart Mill had been elected two years earlier openly backing votes for women. His amendment was voted down, he lost his seat in 1868 and he published The Subjection of Women the year after.

Which US state allowed property-owning women to vote from 1776 until 1807?

New Jersey's 1776 constitution gave the vote to 'all inhabitants' worth fifty pounds, so single women with property could and did vote, until an 1807 law limited the ballot to white men who paid taxes.

Which self-governing British island gave women property owners the vote in 1881, decades ahead of the United Kingdom?

The Isle of Man's parliament, Tynwald, opened its elections to women who owned property, which in practice meant the unmarried and widowed, because the law still left out married women.